Koya Kamura: “I wanted ‘Winter in Sokcho’ to be a very sensory film”

Published on December 17, 2024 at 5:12 p.m. / Modified on December 17, 2024 at 9:55 p.m.

5 mins. reading

“He arrived lost in a wool coat. His suitcase at his feet, he took off his cap.” So it starts Winter in Sokchothe first novel by Elisa Shua Dusapin, this Franco-Korean author who grew up in Porrentruy, published in 2016 by the Geneva-based Zoé editions. Put in the present tense, this sentence could perfectly be an instruction introducing a dialogue into a scenario. And here it is, unsurprisingly, Winter in Sokcho is today – after a first adaptation for the theater – a film. The man in the wool coat, a Norman designer who comes to seek inspiration from the depths of South Korea, is played by Roschdy Zem, whom director Koya Kamura, who is making his first feature film here, wanted to be close to, in his gestures and his interiority, of the character he played in Roubaix, a light (2019), by Arnaud Desplechin.

Opposite him, Bella Kim, a model who debuts on screen and reveals a beautiful intensity tinged with fragility, is Soo-ha, a young woman working in the small family inn where Kerrand ends up – she is the narrator of the novel, in which she has no name. Even if in the film the story no longer belongs to her, Koya Kamura has perfectly succeeded in her work of adaptation in anchoring her fascination with Kerrand, who will connect her with the French origins of her father, whom she did not know. .

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