Understanding the success of "Past Lives"

Starting from mid-February, Past Lives, the debut film by South Korean director and screenwriter Celine Song, will arrive in Italian cinemas. Despite being a debut film, it has garnered significant attention, winning several awards and receiving numerous nominations at major international film festivals, including Berlinale, Sundance, Golden Globe, and Oscar, where it is in the running for Best Film and Best Original Screenplay – two highly relevant categories where a debut work is rare. Even Christopher Nolan, who is nominated for an Oscar with Oppenheimer, has said that Past Lives is among his favorite recent films. The film also tops the charts of the best films of 2023, including those of Time, IndieWire, and the New York Times. The latter writes that the film «grabs you by the heart and won’t let go», describing it as «brilliant and moving,» and praising the performances of the lead actors. The film tells the story of Nora and Hae Sung, childhood friends deeply connected but forced to separate when Nora's family, from South Korea, decides to move to Canada. About twenty years later, the two meet again in New York for a few days, where they will confront each other about fate, the love that could have blossomed between them, and life choices. The film reconstructs part of the director's own experiences but did not emerge out of nowhere: it is a film closely tied to South Korea, which for historical, social, political, and cultural reasons now boasts one of the liveliest cinematic scenes in the world. Behind it is A24, considered among production companies the equivalent of Supreme in fashion.

Celine Song and South Korean Cinema

If until the 1990s South Korean cinema was generally underappreciated and almost entirely unknown, in the last twenty years, it has managed to establish itself – first within national borders, then in the Asian continent, and finally on a global scale. Today, South Korea – with just over 50 million inhabitants and an area one-third the size of Italy – is among the world's leading film markets. In this context, the turning point for the country came in 2020, with the Oscar win of Parasite, the first non-English film to receive the award for “Best Picture.” In trying to explain the reasons for the success of South Korean cinema, director Bong Joon-ho himself had said: «I think Korea produces a lot of great artists because we are a very emotionally dynamic people». Even Celine Song (although she is a naturalized Canadian and has been residing in the United States for some time) is deeply connected to South Korean cinema and culture. Her father, Song Neung-han, is a director who lived through the so-called “hallyu,” which was a kind of Korean New Wave – a movement of economic and cultural revival that allowed the country to become one of the epicenters of pop culture worldwide, not just in the film industry. Celine Song, besides being a director and screenwriter, is also a playwright: her first play, Endlings, which debuted in 2019, also draws from South Korean culture – it tells the story of three elderly Korean women and a Korean-Canadian writer living in New York.

A24's Work in Past Lives

A24, despite being effectively an independent production company, relatively small and young, has become very well-known in recent years, thanks to a series of successful film and television productions. Even before Past Lives, the company had managed to select and produce original and daring works, such as The Lobster, Midsommar, Ex Machina, or Lady Bird. Part of its success is also due to the targeted and innovative marketing and branding strategies with which A24 has been able to sell its products, as well as itself. The production company now boasts a catalog of over 100 films, and in less than five years, it has gone from being a small entity with very few employees to winning, in 2017, an Oscar in the historically most important category of the Academy Awards, Best Picture, thanks to Moonlight – something that even Netflix has not yet achieved. The company is now so revered that sometimes people talk about “A24 films” – although they are often very different from each other – in the same way one might refer to the films of a highly esteemed and recognizable director.