For several years after the biggest run of her career, Moon Choi, known in Korea as Choi Hee-seo, kept her trophies out of sight.
Choi is now back in Busan in a different role, sitting on the seven-member jury for the festival’s competition section, which is only in its second year. Zhang Yimou presides over a panel that also includes Bi Gan, Kei Ishikawa, July Jung, Vietnamese producer Tran Thi Bich Ngoc and Kazakh actor Samal Yeslyamova. “Bedford Park” is also in town, screening in the Flash Forward section.
“I don’t have the pressure that I need to prove anything to anybody,” Choi says of returning as a juror. “I’m kind of feeling like a student trying to learn from all these films that I’m going to be watching alongside amazing people like Zhang Yimou and Bi Gan.”
Written and directed by Stephanie Ahn, “Bedford Park” follows Audrey (Choi), a Korean American physical therapist in New Jersey caught between her immigrant parents’ expectations and her own life. After her mother is hurt in a car accident, Audrey forms an unlikely bond with Eli (Son Suk-ku), the former wrestler who was behind the wheel. The film world premiered in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic competition in January and won the Special Jury Award for Debut Feature. Sony Pictures Classics picked up worldwide rights during the festival, and the film has since played Toronto’s Discovery program.
“It seemed like wherever I went, I didn’t belong anywhere because when I came back to Seoul from Japan or the U.S., people would view me as that girl from Japan, that girl from the U.S.,” Choi says. “Although I’m not a Korean American immigrant, I thought that I could resonate with that.”
The film took years to finance. Choi was unknown in the U.S., Ahn was a first-time director coming from editing, and Eli was originally written as a white character, with names like Tom Hardy and Jake Gyllenhaal floated as a dream. COVID shut everything down. Four years in, the team shot a 15-minute short as a proof of concept for financiers.
“They were kind enough and generous enough for me to be able to focus on acting on set,” Choi says. Post-production brought three-hour Zoom calls over cuts and music cues. “That was, I think, when I felt like, ‘Oh, this is what producing feels like.’”
Watching the finished film at Sundance, she says, felt like “giving birth to something so valuable,” a sentiment Son shared.
Choi recalls a conversation with Jeon in New York, where the pair recently closed the final leg of Simon Stone’s staging of “The Cherry Orchard.” The production premiered in Seoul in 2024 with Jeon and “Squid Game” actor Park Hae-soo, then toured Hong Kong, Singapore and Adelaide before landing at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in September.
“She just held my hands, and she said, ‘Moon … I’m so happy for you, and just know that you are greater than what you think you are,’” Choi says.
“Should I direct it, produce it? I’m not sure,” Choi says. What she does know is that she wants to write the screenplay herself, which she says “would kind of give me an idea if I want to produce it, or act in it, or direct it.”
At home, she sees Korean cinema in recovery but leaning hard on genre, particularly horror, a pattern she also noticed in Los Angeles meetings. Park Chan-wook and Lee Chang-dong have delivered new films in back-to-back years, and she points to Na Hong-Jin and Byun Sung-hyun among those who followed them. But she wants more filmmakers her own age, in their late 30s or early 40s, and singles out Son, who runs his own production company and is writing his first feature.
She feels a responsibility there too, she says, “because I produce now as well, I can probably be the forefront of that, because it’s generation, right? Who do we have after Lee Chang-dong and Park Chan-wook?”
For now, Choi is on the festival circuit with “Bedford Park” and hunting for an English-language role. She signed with Gersh and management company Cognition six months ago and has been auditioning and sending self-tapes since.
“I am a total newcomer in Hollywood,” she says.
And the screen version of “Une histoire d’amour”? “I don’t know, it’s going to take 10 years, maybe.”
