Celine Song’s next act

At the end of 2022, Celine Song was weeks away from debuting her first feature at the Sundance Film Festival. By the end of 2023, she was one of the most talked about directors of the year. 

Past Lives was received with rapturous praise at its premiere on its way to becoming an indie breakout hit. At the following Sundance, Song received the festival’s Vanguard Award for “the art of storytelling and creative independence.” By then, she had also collected well over a dozen accolades from film critic associations across North America. 

Not long after, she won an award for Outstanding Directing for a first feature from the Directors Guild of America and Best Director at the Independent Spirit Awards – not to mention Academy Award nominations for Original Screenplay and Best Picture.

Not bad for your first film. 

But Song wasn’t exactly a rookie. She had already mastered her craft as a playwright with off-Broadway works such as Endlings – a finalist for the 2020 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize – and an imaginative twist on Chekov’s The Seagull, staged using the popular game Sims 4 streamed on Twitch amidst the Fall 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. 

Before setting course as a professional writer, Song, ArtsSci’10, first honed her skills as an undergrad at Queen’s, where she majored in psychology and minored in philosophy but quickly found herself pulled in a different direction altogether.

“I thought I was going to be a clinical psychologist when I first went to Queen’s,” says Song. “Philosophy was a personal interest and over the four years I found myself drawn more towards that side, and then I just decided to become a writer.”

It wasn’t exactly a surprise for Song to take such a seemingly sharp turn. Creativity runs in her family. Before emigrating from South Korea to Markham, Ont., her father had a career as a filmmaker and her mother was an illustrator and graphic designer.

“I knew writing would be a big part of my life in some way.” 

She even saw the path of becoming a psychologist as a stepping stone toward writing – a testament to her commitment to developing fully realized characters. 

“That was the very long-term approach to that career,” explains Song, who found herself accelerating that approach after “falling in love” with the work of Bertolt Brecht in a German literature course taught by Dr. Bill Reeves just before his retirement. 

“That same year, coincidentally, one of the main stage shows was by Brecht. One of his smaller plays, Drums in the Night. I remember going to see that play and I just really fell in love with theatre there. After that, I went to see everything. I was at Our Town the year after. I would go see every show. Some of the friends that I became close to were drama students. I ended up meeting all the actors and I got to know them. Most of my friends were in philosophy, I related to them more than people in psychology who were more scientifically minded.”

Song also recalls Dr. Reeves giving her a copy of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, one of many favourite memories from her time at Queen’s, where she credits several profs for inspiration and nudging her toward more artistic pursuits. “They were very foundational for me. As a person and an artist. Dr. Paul Fairfield taught existentialism and postmodernism and introduced me to philosophers like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gabriel Marcel.”

Just as pivotal for Song were extracurricular activities on campus.

“I spent a lot of time at the Grey House … because it was a very important radical leftist community spot and hub. At the time, it was one of the only spaces on campus that had a Pride flag up. That’s where I met most of my friends. I was part of a poetry group called Mindfire that gathered there. It was very much a sanctuary.”

Song also founded an atheist club at Queen’s and served as its first president. “We held meetings at the Grad Club and that was really fun. Talking about philosophy with atheist club members at Grad Club or reading each other’s poetry at the Grey House [at Mindfire]. Those were the best memories.” 

It wasn’t long after Song began attending plays in Kingston that she was writing for the stage herself. 

“I was a part of the Vogt Festival. They would do a full play on the main stage and then in between those there would be like three or four short plays each semester at the black-box theatre.”

One such play was Sound Utterly Serious, written by Song and co-directed with Jennie Appleby, staged in 2009 and praised as an “innovative gem” for its biting take on “technological alienation” by The Queen’s Journal (a publication in which Song also had her own byline from time to time). Song used text from one of the first iPhone tutorials as part of the dialogue for the play’s main character, a suited man “bathed in white light” pitching the device’s virtues to the rest of the more colourfully costumed and lit cast.

The plays she wrote at Queen’s became her ticket to Columbia University where she would earn an MFA in Playwrighting in 2014. “Grad schools did not expect applicants to already have full-length plays,” explains Song. “That’s what got me in.”

Song applied to a few schools and pursued programs in both playwriting and screenwriting but was ultimately swayed by a Columbia prof who insisted she come to New York. Looking back, it was the right choice for both practical and artistic reasons.

“My way into storytelling is as a writer. There are different ways to become a filmmaker or theatre artist. One of the great things about theatre is that the writer is the auteur of a play. You can immediately operate as the author whereas in film, at the end of the day the primary creator is the director. Starting from scratch in film would have been a lot more difficult for me. Theatre was a clearer path for me to become a dramatist right away.”

Fast forward a decade and after a successful career in theatre, Song seems poised for a very promising career in filmmaking. Her next feature, Materialists – which stars Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal – is in post-production and she already has another project in mind for her third film.

Somewhere between autobiography and fiction, Past Lives tells the story of Nora, a young woman who, after emigrating from South Korea and settling in New York with her husband, encounters a childhood friend and potential past love. Nora must reckon with the split nature of her identity and reconcile her past with her present.

Moving across two decades and two countries, it was the story of Past Lives that finally beckoned Song to shift from theatre to cinema, where Song could freely traverse time and space while ensuring that the audience is fully immersed in those different times and spaces and experiences them intimately.

“Theatre is a medium where time and space is already very figurative and malleable. In a play, all it takes for someone to go from being in Korea to the U.S. is a lighting change. It was important for the film to contain how different Seoul and New York are, for example, or how different a woman nearing 40 is versus a 12-year-old girl. The story is about the contradiction of both of those places and both of those times in one's life coexisting, so it needed a cinematic way of telling it.”

Sidestepping anything resembling a typical love triangle, Past Lives focuses more on what this man from Nora’s past represents. The antagonist is immaterial. 

“Time and space is really a character in the film – I would even say the villain of the film,” she says. “When people ask me who the villain of the film is I usually say the Pacific Ocean and 24 years.”

It shouldn’t require a spoiler alert to say that the protagonist, as with Song, remains happily married with her husband. In real life, that man is Justin Kuritzkes, a successful playwright and screenwriter, who wrote two acclaimed films directed by Luca Guadagnino in 2024, Challengers and Queer.

“It changes everything. It changes your career and your life as an artist,” says Song, reflecting on her breakthrough. But the best thing to come from her recent success is clear: “What matters to me is that I get to keep making things. That's the most exciting thing.” 

What the critics say 

Celine Song’s film debut, Past Lives, was a hit with audiences and critics. Acclaimed for its poignant storytelling, rich character exploration, and visual elegance, Song’s work established her as a major new voice in filmmaking.

“This is the filmmaking debut of the Korean-Canadian-American playwright Celine Song (“Endlings”), who also wrote the script … Song draws you into her characters’ worlds seamlessly.” – New York Times 

“(Song) is happy to take you on that journey with her, which is exactly what she did with audiences for her feature debut, Past Lives. A simple premise richly rendered, Past Lives has become the year’s hottest directorial debut and a bona fide critical darling, earning awards buzz for Song and star Lee.” – Hollywood Reporter 

“Now Song has one more piece of identity to work with: Oscar-nominated filmmaker. Coming relatively late to the game, she shows an instinctive touch for the form and a sense of visual grammar you would expect from someone who’s been doing this for years.” – Los Angeles Times 

“Sometimes a film comes along that has all the reviewers raving. Since Past Lives premiered at Sundance at the beginning of the year, it’s been topping critics’ polls at festivals such as Berlin, and now it’s finally hitting the UK. I’m happy to say that it does not disappoint — it may be a slow-burner with no easy answers, but that’s one of its many strengths.” – Rolling Stone