CELINE SONG’S PAST LIVES, ABOUT A WOMAN RECONNECTING WITH HER CHILDHOOD SWEETHEART, HAS BEEN ELICITING TEARS AT FILM FESTIVALS. MAKING IT PROVED JUST AS EMOTIONAL

WORDS AL HORNER

It was in a bar called Please Don’t Tell that Celine Song devised a story she simply had to. The year was 2018 — May, the Korean-Canadian filmmaker thinks, but can’t say for certain. What she does know is the place was “a bit of a speakeasy” — acocktail establishment hidden in the back of an East Village hot-dog diner, accessible through a door disguised as a phone booth. Inside the booth, you dial “one” on a receiver, and a hostess opens a secret hatch that you walk through to be seated. Inside, “I found myself sitting between my husband and my childhood sweetheart, translating for these two guys, not just in language, but also in culture,” Song reminisces.

“It felt so strange,” she adds — to one side of her, the partner with whom she’d built a life with in New York, the American playwright, Justin Kuritzkes; and on the other, this ghost from yesterday. Song grew up in South Korea, before her family emigrated to Ontario, Canada, when she was 12. She hadn’t seen this man since.

When this long-lost friend — an engineer, in town on holiday — last met Song, she was someone else, literally and figuratively. She was a child then. Someone yet to flourish into a respected playwright on New York’s experimental-theatre scene, with a passion for cinema that would soon make her leap into film. She even had a different name in those days: Ha Young. When Song’s family emigrated to North America to begin their new lives, her parents allowed her to pick a new name that might help her to assimilate. A Celine Dion CD was lying around, and the rest was history.

As she reunited with this first crush, translating small talk between this man and her husband, Song recalls being struck by the “amazing miracle” of how, if these two men “didn’t know me, they wouldn’t know each other at all, because their worlds just do not collide. It felt powerful”. It also felt poignant. As an immigrant, “you often think that, in some ways, you’re not whole. That you have these two parts of you that cannot reconcile”, she explains. There’s the person you were then, and the person you are now. And that night in Please Don’t Tell, Song found herself between a reminder of each. “It was a perfect encapsulation of what it’s like.”