Past Lives

Past Lives

Nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the 96th Academy Awards, Past Lives is a profoundly moving meditation on love, destiny, and the lives we leave behind. The debut feature from writer-director Celine Song, the film traces the delicate threads of connection that bind us across time, distance, and circumstance.

The story follows Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), childhood friends in Seoul whose paths diverge when Nora’s family emigrates to Canada. Two decades later, they reunite for a brief, emotional encounter in New York—each haunted by the question of what might have been. Their reunion unfolds quietly and tenderly, illuminating the bittersweet space between romantic longing and acceptance, between who we were and who we’ve become.

Song’s direction is graceful and understated, blending the intimacy of memory with the ache of modern disconnection. The performances by Lee and Yoo are exquisite in their restraint, while John Magaro brings warmth and nuance as Nora’s husband, caught between understanding and heartbreak.

Visually poetic and emotionally devastating, Past Lives explores the Korean concept of “inyeon”—the invisible ties that link souls across lifetimes. It’s a film about love not as possession, but as recognition; about how the people who shape us remain with us, even as we move beyond them.

Quiet, aching, and beautifully observed, Past Lives stands as one of the defining works of contemporary cinema—a story of love suspended between memory and fate.

Screening With:

Feeling the Apocalypse

Student Short Showcase

A psychotherapist struggling with climate anxiety explores what it means to live in a dying world.

7 mins
Canada, 2022
Dir. Chen Sing Yap
Language: English

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