This year has seen two very different films exploring different sides of the South Korean adoption industry, first Kore-ada’s BROKER and now RETURN TO SEOUL. Davy Chou’s film throws up questions of mismatched culture and heritage as the Korean-born, French-raised Freddie (Park Ji-min in an astonishing debut) returns on a whim to the country where her parents gave her away 25 years earlier and attempts to track them down with the help of her endlessly patient friend Tena (Guka Han, who imbues the simple question “why are you so sad?” with the rawest of emotion). We subsequently drop in on the sometimes abrasive but always compelling Freddie and the ups and downs of her life over the next decade. After the initial strained meeting with Freddie’s biological father (Oh Kwang-rok), the film constantly wrong-foots you and goes in some unexpected directions but is always in service of its contradictory, complicated lead character. SSP