Metamorphosis of Korean French adoptee Laure Badufle, co-writer and inspiration for 'Return to Seoul'

Laure Badufle in Paris / Photo by Behzad Soroush

By Jia H. Jung

"Return to Seoul" opens in theaters across Korea on May 3, showing in the country for the first time since the Busan International Film Festival last October.

The vibey French-German-Belgian drama, directed by Cambodian French filmmaker Davy Chou with executive production by Seoul-based international company MereCinema, follows a South Korean-born French adoptee named Frederique "Freddie" Benoit. The protagonist's eight-year-long quest for belonging plays out over a series of returns to Korea starting when she is 25.

The atmospheric film ― packing a powerful acting debut by Korean French visual artist Park Ji-Min as Freddie, alongside nuanced performances by Korean literary artist Guka Han, veteran actor Oh Kwang-rok and celebrity actress Kim Sun-young ― stunned audiences at its premiere last May at the 75th Cannes Film Festival in France.

The feature has continued collecting accolades in North America, Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia, attesting to the universal nerve it hits with raw portrayals of displacement, reckoning and transformation.

The multinational crew of "Return to Seoul" / Photo by HA Min-Ho

Amid this heady reception, Korean French adoptee Laure Badufle, the film's co-writer and real-life inspiration, is making the rounds in the global adoptee community with live and virtual screenings with deep discussions about identity, storytelling and voice.

It has taken a lifetime for the 38-year-old yogini, artist, slow fashion designer and professional certified life coach to take back her existence after being relinquished as an infant by her biological parents.

Born in 1984 in Saechon, South Gyeongsang Province, Badufle was one of approximately 11,000 adoptees sent to France over the decades following the Korean War.

She recalls a happy childhood in the French countryside with her adoptive parents. With little exposure to Asian people or culture, she believed that she was white. Though informed about her history at a young age, she avoided exploring her Korean heritage, even after the adoption of a younger sister from Korea during her preadolescence.

In 2004, Badufle entered the renowned ESSEC Business School and met Chou, a wild-haired French-born student of Cambodian ethnicity who was already passionate about filmmaking, defying the more practical track his parents had encouraged him to follow.

Like Badufle, Chou had grown up as the odd Asian out in French surroundings, raised by parents who had fled Cambodia just prior to the Khmer Rouge genocide in 1975, and rarely talked about what he left behind. Chou grew up without much knowledge or curiosity about his background until 2008, when faced with a graduation requirement for six months of study abroad.

He went to Cambodia, spurning assumptions that he was returning to his roots. Meanwhile, Badufle wanted to go to South America. But when peers asked why she was not visiting her birth country instead, the 23-year-old enrolled in an exchange program with Seoul National University.

Before her trip, she contacted Holt International Post Adoption Services in Korea through an organization in France and acquired information about both her biological parents. Once in Korea, she asked guesthouse workers to help arrange her first meeting with her father.

Meanwhile, in Cambodia, Chou stayed with extended family briefly before finding his own accommodations and mixing with the local creative community. He and Badufle did not compare notes at the time, but understood that they were on parallel journeys.

"I think for a long time, we found ourselves a bit, not twins, but alter egos, or a bit like two different sides of the same coin," Chou told The Korea Times.

After graduating from ESSEC, Badufle stayed in Seoul as an economic attachee of the French treasury and finally met her birth mother toward the end of her contract. "I felt like a baby," Badufle said, in a recently re-aired Adapted™ Podcast episode detailing her first interactions with both parents.

Badufle lost all contact with her mother later on ― the devastating disconnection is replicated in the film when Freddie receives a bounced email while trekking alone in Romania.

Back in France, Badufle began working in technology transfers for a multibillion-euro missile design and production group. While not the most humanitarian role, the position enabled her to roam the world and return to South Korea every few months.

In 2011, she learned that Chou was headed to Busan to screen his film "Golden Slumbers," a documentary about the golden age of Cambodia cinema from 1960 to 1975 that was extinguished by the Khmer Rouge. She coordinated her schedule to meet him there.

Laure Badufle and Davy Chou visit Seoul's Myeong-dong in 2011, on a trip to Korea that inspired the film "Return to Seoul." / Courtesy of Laure Badufle

Just as Freddie does in the movie, Badufle took her friend down to Jinju while she visited her biological father over chicken soup and unspoken words. Chou, profoundly affected by the meeting, tucked the experience away and began spending more time living in Cambodia. In 2014, he co-founded Anti-Archive, a company producing films created by local Cambodians and collaborative international talent.

Around this time, Badufle had exited an abusive relationship and was undergoing several other personal challenges. Desperate to heal, she underwent an ayahuasca ritual with traditional Peruvian shamans and saw herself surrounded by her Korean ancestors. She did not yet know how to fulfill the vision.

Then, in London, she discovered Kundalini yoga. The dynamic, ritualistic practice made her feel as if she were re-mothering her baby self, assuring herself that she deserved to exist. She began shedding the feeling of inherent badness that came with early abandonment.

The Kundalini community bestowed Badufle with the name RAJAVTAR, signifying beauty, grace and service in physical existence. The feeling of being supported by something bigger than herself drew attention to her lack of satisfaction with her career.

In 2017, Badufle was on the job in Abu Dhabi when a police car ran a light and crashed into her taxi. The collision left the then 33-year-old with intestinal perforations and lumbar spine fractures. She spent the next months in litigation, bedridden from reparative surgeries. She was unsure whether she would walk again.

It was then that she received a call from Chou, who was at a crossroads himself. He asked Badufle what she thought about making a film about her story. She sent him reflections condensed from years of journals and records ― 30 pages for Laure Badufle and 30 pages for Park Areum, her birth name. She also sent him numerous photos. Together, they visited Badufle's biological father and family again. Chou spent the next three years writing a script.

Chou met lead actress Park Ji-min through artist Erwan Ha Kyoon Larcher, a Korean French adoptee and friend of a mutual friend. Park, an artist specializing in paintings, sculptures and installations, was neither an actress nor an adoptee. However, she had immigrated to France from Korea at age 9 and understood the extreme, paradoxical, even violent emotional outcomes of maintaining plural identities.

Park Ji-min and Davy Chou laugh behind the scenes while shooting "Return to Seoul." Courtesy of Marion Bernard

Park did not meet with Badufle while making the film. First, she dismantled the vestiges of the male gaze she detected in the script and then focused on expressing subtle and explosive emotions on command during a mid-pandemic filming schedule which allowed 29 days in Seoul and two in Romania.

Badufle kept a distance from the creative process ― she had already entrusted Chou with everything about her life in an act of catharsis, knowing the film would become something all its own. After years of proudly isolating in her identity struggles, she was also busy connecting with adoptee resources such as Racines Coreennes, G.O.A.'L. and La Voix des Adoptes.

Park Ji-min as Freddie in "Return to Seoul" / Courtesy of Atnine Film

By the end of 2021, Badufle had launched her bilingual adoption mastermind program of life coaching and therapy sessions specially designed to heal and empower adoptees.

"I first searched for my answers out of the world with power and money and weapons and war, and then I found a better answer in yoga and social work and health," she concludes.

Seeing "Return to Seoul" after this transformation was surreal. The constant resistance Freddie's character captured in the part of Badufle's old self that was full of anger. There was less treatment of the warm, empathetic caring aspects of her nature even during her struggles. The film brought to the surface a past that she had molted, emerging tender.

Guka Han, Park Ji-min and Oh Kwang-rok in "Return to Seoul" / Courtesy of Atnine Film

Chou said, "All the film is an enterprise of sharing with the audience a different type of journey-to-the-roots story, which is beside the expected one and the cliche one that we are used to consuming."

His own returns to Cambodia changed his life and even seeped into Freddie's character. Nevertheless, he remains averse to reducing Laure's, his or any adoptee's or diasporic person's journey as a finding of one's roots. To do so might make onlookers think they can predict a happy ending for of somebody's existential quest. Chou could not have predicted the path he has taken or the impact of this film. He continues living by the philosophy that the unknown is what drives action and discovery.

In regard to his own identity, Chou can no longer state that he is French just because he was born in France. Neither can he claim to be Cambodian. After promoting the film in Korea with his life partner and their 7-month-old first child, the family has returned to Cambodia. Beyond that, he doesn't presume to know what's next.

Badufle is still seeking funding to go to Seoul for a screening and virtual conversation scheduled for the IKAA International Gathering of over 700 adoptees this July. She is also determined to send her art to the event's venue, COEX in Gangnam, in the event that she cannot go there herself.

Her watercolor and mixed media exhibition, "#TOMYIMAGINARYTWIN," imagines life as it could have been had she remained in Korea. An online form invites other adoptees to share their own imaginings ― Badufle will represent each contributor with a painting of Korean shoes that includes their birth dates and names.

Badufle's eyes flicker when asked if she hopes her biological mother will reach out to her after seeing the film or her work with adoptees. Her French parents, who have seen the movie, continue to worry that no good will come from digging ceaselessly into the past. But approaching the past through art and healing is what helped Badufle take her place in the world. Now, she strives to guide others do the same for themselves.

"I'm connecting to this big diaspora of people, you know, first, second, third generation, and it's a huge community all over the world," she said. "It's full of beautiful people, very creative, very intelligent, and that's not the past for me ― this is really the present and the future."

Badufle looks forward to her impending dual citizenship in Korea as well as France through the Nationality Law Revision of 2010 that lets overseas Korean adoptees get their passports and names back without surrendering their other citizenships. The passport acknowledging her original identity will bear the name Park Areum, the indigenous Korean word for beauty.

Jia H. Jung is a multimedia journalist. She is an alumna of Columbia Journalism School in New York City and a post-graduate fellow of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. She is also writing a book about her late father, a street child of the Korean War era.