Seven years after “Moving On,” Korean filmmaker Yoon Dan-bi returns with “The World Before,” a coming-of-age film about desire and first love. Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s Toronto Film Festival Platform world premiere, Yoon discusses how capturing the authenticity of change worked its way at every stage of the production. For Yoon, narrating the chapter that marks the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood required focusing on her character’s inner turmoil, but also very much on their physicality.
How do they let their guard down when they love, hug each other, unexpectedly hold hands? I wanted to portray that desire in a very realistic way, without being overtly sexual.” That attention changed drastically how she used the camera. While ‘Moving On’’s stationary and observational lens blurred the line so well between reality and fiction that many commented it felt it was a documentary, Yoon tried another technique in “The World Before.” “The camera moves around a lot as if it had its own soul,” says Yoon.
For example, there’s a scene on the beach with Jin and Du-jae where you see the light coming in, then the sun goes behind the clouds and comes out again. It was all natural light when we were shooting,” she pauses to laugh. They also had to carry all the equipment without cars as Soan-do, one of the islands located in Wando County off the southern coast, had no bridge connecting to the mainland.
Lulled by the chant of cicadas, the island’s bright stillness offers the perfect contrast to the movement Yoon chases – light inching on naked skin and leaves blowing in the wind. The villagers offered help and invited us for food, which helped the actors to adapt to island life quickly. But looking back, I realized I went with a sort of prejudice, I thought everyone would want to escape but it turns out they all wanted to stay there.” The correction found its way into the character: “Jin likes living on the island and doesn’t even consider leaving,” Yoon says.
Other surprises made it into the film as well – a local grandmother was cast for the opening scene after the villagers pronounced her the best singer among them ; an improvised moment between the young leads watching ants by the roadside, became one of the movie’s authentic snippets of life. But those additions are only possible because the script is written to accommodate them. Of course, it doesn’t always work as I intend to,” she laughs.
Another ingredient of her movie’s authenticity is her casting process. She found the central pair, Sim Su-bin (“Teach You a Lesson,” “Filing for Love”) in the role of Jin, and first timer Kim Eo-jin as Du-jae through auditions. Both are relatively unfamiliar faces, even to Korean audiences, so Yoon built the surrounding ensemble to help them carry the film.
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