Moon Choi, the star of Sundance prize-winner “Bedford Park,” has joined the competition jury at the Busan International Film Festival while preparing to adapt an award-winning French play for the stage and, eventually, the screen.
Choi, known in South Korea as Choi Hee-seo, sits on a seven-member panel led by Chinese director Zhang Yimou. Bi Gan, Kei Ishikawa, July Jung, Tran Thi Bich Ngoc and Samal Yeslyamova complete the jury. The festival runs through Oct. 15. At the jury’s press conference on Oct. 7, Choi described the job as a learning experience she accepts with its weight.
The role marks a homecoming. Busan named her Actress of the Year in 2018 for “Our Body,” and her turn in “Anarchist from the Colony” swept Korea’s new actress prizes. Two films earned her 14 awards in a single year. She told Variety she later stored the trophies out of sight because displaying them made her feel she had to justify the praise. Now, she said, “I don’t have the pressure that I need to prove anything.”
“Bedford Park,” Stephanie Ahn’s debut feature, won the Special Jury Award for Debut Feature at Sundance in January. Sony Pictures Classics bought worldwide rights, and the film plays in Busan’s Flash Forward section. Choi plays Audrey, a Korean American physical therapist in New Jersey who forms a bond with Eli, the man who was driving when her mother was hurt. Son Suk-ku plays Eli. Financing took years. Choi, an executive producer, pitched rewriting Eli as a Korean American adoptee for Son, who brought in Hyundai Motor Company for its first investment in an independent feature.
Next, Choi will lead a Korean stage adaptation of “Une histoire d’amour,” by French writer-director Alexis Michalik, which follows a lesbian couple’s attempt to have a child. The play won a Molière in 2020, and Michalik has since filmed it. Choi will perform it in Seoul next year and has his blessing to option a screen version she imagines set in Brooklyn. She plans to write the script and has not decided if she will direct, produce or act. She estimates it could take a decade.
She is also hunting for an English-language role. Having signed with Gersh and Cognition six months ago, she calls herself a newcomer in Hollywood.
