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Director Koya Kamura has adapted the novel "Hiver à Sokcho" ("Winter in Sokcho") into a movie. With his first feature film, the Franco-Japanese director has succeeded in creating a quiet work that gives the audience plenty of space. (archive picture)
Image: Keystone
"Winter in Sokcho" from 2016 is the first novel by Elisa Shua Dusapin. Director Koya Kamura has dedicated his first feature film "Hiver à Sokcho" to this debut. A conversation about a floatingly beautiful film that is now being released in cinemas in German-speaking Switzerland.
Sokcho is a beach and harbor town on the east coast of South Korea, close to the border with North Korea. Both the novel and the movie are set there. The young student Soo-Ha works in a cheap dosshouse. She feels obliged to stay with her mother, a fishmonger, and at the same time feels a stranger in this place. All she knows about her father is that he is French.
A French guest, the comic author Yan Kerrand, in search of new subjects, arouses mixed feelings in her. Does she see him as a father figure or a possible lover? The novel leaves the answer up to the reader. Nor does it decide how the protagonist's search for her path will end. The atmospherically strong scenes and images leave room for possible stories.
It is precisely this openness, the merely hinted-at relationships or desires of the characters, that Franco-Japanese director Koya Kamura adopts in his film with the original French title of the novel. Adapting the book to film is a delicate undertaking, said Kamura in an interview with the Keystone-SDA news agency. Then, when the imagination of the readers or the author collides with that of the director. "That was my biggest worry."
Author Elisa Shua Dusapin did not contribute to the screenplay. But she did agree to the note "based on the novel". "When I saw the film for the first time, I was kind of shocked because I had the feeling that my intimacy was being put on display on a big screen," she said shortly before the film was released in French-speaking Switzerland in December 2024. It was both difficult and a relief to watch the movie. She praised "the sensitivity of the director and the film team".
For Kamura, who studied film in Paris and later worked for Walt Disney, for example, work on his first feature film began when his producer gave him the novel "Hiver à Sokcho" to read. At first, he read it out of politeness. However, he quickly realized that the novel posed the same questions "that I myself had as a Franco-Japanese".
What appealed to him was "the absent father and this young woman who found her way without him". For Kamura, the figure of the French illustrator Yan Kerrand is also a kind of missing person. "He comes out of nowhere and nothing is known about him."
In his film, the director wanted to focus on what the main character Soo-Ha projects onto the illustrator Kerrand. "That's why I wanted Kerran to be like a blank slate." The role was then taken on by the French actor with Moroccan roots, Roschdy Zem. Kamura refers to the film "In the Shadow of Roubaix" (2019) by Arnaud Depleschin; Zem played a character there who was "very similar in many ways" to the one Kamura had imagined for Kerran.
Finding an actress for the role of Soo-Ha proved to be difficult. "I was looking for a young woman of 25 who spoke fluent Korean and very good French. I wanted her to be very tall. There aren't many of them and none of them were actresses. Bella Kim, who works as a model and grew up in Sokcho, had never acted in front of a camera before this movie," Kamuara said.
The result is a quiet film that revolves around intimacy and demarcation, belonging and forlornness - and at the same time dispenses with any ambiguity. With these characteristics, the film is very close to the original novel.
The novel "Winter in Sokcho" was also awarded several prizes in France and Switzerland. And in 2021, the English translation won the prestigious US National Book Award for translated literature.
29.01.2026, 10:01
