Director's debut draws on a life-changing moment

Ounie Lecomte has a sad tale to tell in her debut film, A Brand New Life. So sad, in fact, that it is hard to believe that it is based on her own experiences as a child, when she was abandoned by her family and left at an orphanage in South Korea. Almost 35 years later, she felt compelled to make a film concerning the day that changed her life. A Brand New Life, which is set in South Korea in 1975, screened this year at Cannes and is also being shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, which begins tomorrow. The film tells the story of the nine-year-old Jin Hee, whose seemingly happy childhood is thrown into turmoil when her father leaves her in an orphanage. The young girl expects her father to return but soon realises that she is going to be adopted by a western family.

However, although many aspects of this story are true, the 43-year-old director wants to make it clear that the story is not a completely factual portrayal of her life. "The desire to make the film came from my own experience and because I realised that deep in my heart that the experience of being adopted as a child was always with me," she says. "I didn't want it to be completely autobiographical. Rather I wanted the film to be a way of communicating emotions, especially about the universal subject of mourning."

She gives the example that in the film it is the father who takes Jin Hee to the orphanage, whereas in reality it was her grandmother who made that journey with her. But she adds: "The essence and image that I had in my head was that it was my father, who I was close to, who left me. So the truth of the emotion meant that the fact that it was my grandmother who took me didn't matter, I always felt abandoned by my father."

The film never explains why Jin Hee was left at the orphanage, and the reasons behind her abandonment remain a mystery to Lecomte, who argues that the act is ultimately unexplainable. "Why?" she repeats. "I realise that this haunting question is always there. But in the end, the film doesn't explain why and doesn't even try to pose the question. The reason why this is so is because there is not an explanation of the abandonment, because there is no possible answer. We could give social and economic reasons, but this response is very unsatisfactory for someone who has been abandoned. There are many, many poor families who have brought up their children so socio-economics do not provide a satisfactory answer."

Another big moment came when she moved to France. She felt like her links with her family were being broken. She explains: "I was nine years old when I arrived in Paris. I must say that the first period of my life there was very exciting and I was curious about everything. The first challenge for me was actually being able to speak in French. However, as fast as I learnt French I also forgot completely the Korean language and so it was quite strange because of the effort needed to adapt to being in France had the downside that at the time it erased all my links with Korea."

She still does not speak in her mother tongue, despite having gone to Korea on a number of occasions and shooting her debut film there. It is obviously a subject that stirs many emotions for the director, which raises the question of why she would want to put it on screen and spend months talking to journalists about her experiences. She explains that it was a sense of frustration rather than a need for catharsis that drove her behind the camera. "To make a film, it was something that I loved doing," she says. "There is always this question: why do you want to be a director? But for me it's not a question of being rather a question of doing. I've always liked the practicalities of making cinema, writing a screenplay, adapting it to the screen. The difference here is that maybe I succeeded in communicating something that I wasn't able to communicate before. I found that often when I was talking about what had happened, I was explaining my situation very badly. I was not telling an accurate story. With words there is always an emotion that is lacking and words don't fully express what I went through. This is maybe why it was easier to go through this process in the film, because the images help complete the picture. When you remember the early part of your life, you don't remember the words; you just remember things in terms of emotions and perceptions."

Now in her forties, Lecomte is embarking on yet another brand-new life, this time as a talented filmmaker that it would pay to keep an eye out for.