New York; March 6, 2024 — In January, Celine Song, director and writer of A24’s Past Lives sat down with New York Times best selling author Jeff Yang for a conversation about Asian diasporic identity and her work. 

Past Lives opened to overwhelmingly high praise at its Sundance premiere. Vox described the movie as “gentle, funny, and achingly gorgeous.” The Hollywood Reporter called it “a decades-spanning romance that makes you catch your breath.” Celine Song’s directorial debut is now nominated for both Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the upcoming 2024 Academy Awards.

“For most of Hollywood’s existance, Asian Americans have been ghosts at a cinematic feast,” said Yang, author of The Golden Screen: Movies That Made Asian America, as he opened the conversation. “And for those of us who grew up in these decades, these representations normalized the treatment of Asians with causual mockery, unwarranted suspicion, social exclusion, and subordination."

Past Lives is what Yang descibes as a “good one”,  part of the growing number of films that uplift the stories of Asian-Americans and unpack the nuances of diasporic identity on the big screen. Past Lives follows Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, who reconnect decades after Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea. In conversation with Yang, Song noted that her inspiration from the film “came from a pretty autobiographical place.” 

The central question that Song wants audiences to engage with in Past Lives is who Nora and Hae Sung are to each other. The answer to this, she says, can be understood through the Korean term inyeon (인연), which means something akin to providence or fate. 

“I speak Korean and inyeon is a Korean concept to me, but I know it is an Eastern concept, an Asian concept. I know that there is a word for it in India, a word for it in Thailand,” said Song. “It implies that we knew each other in our past lives. If we are going to know each other again in the future too. Just because we are in the same room.”

Song knew early on that she wanted a fully bilingual script for Past Lives, though the screen writing platform she used at the time didn’t support languages other than English. She credits Parasite for paving the way for Western acceptance of Asian language films. At the time of Parasite’s release, Song felt that subtitles were a “huge barrier” and she wasn’t sure that there was an audience for a properly bilingual film. She noted that Covid-19 seemed to make audiences more subtitle friendly, which in turn has made room for films like fellow bilingual Oscar nominee Anatomy of a Fall. 

Despite Past Lives’ focus on the Korean diaspora, Song noted that there is something that people can connect with even if they haven’t had a bicultural experience. 

“I feel like even if you don’t have an immigration story that is quite like this, you can feel connected to it just because we all have to live through vast amounts of time and space,” said Song. “In many ways we’re all immigrants from the past to the present and, eventually, the future.”