Past Lives

Plots: Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrested apart after Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea. Twenty years later, they are reunited for one fateful week as they confront notions of love and destiny. In Korea, Na Young, a girl and Hae Sung, a boy are school mates and good friends. They often walk back home together after school. Na Young moves to Canada and then to New York with her parents. Hae Sung continues living in Korea, does his engineering course, goes through a short spell of military service and then takes up a job. Both keep in touch periodically through video chats where they talk of their past and general stuff. Meanwhile in New York, Na has changed her name to Nora, made a name as a playwright and is happily married to Arthur, an American. Hae is keen to meet Nora and visits her in New York where he spends some time with her and Arthur. What has the future in store for Nora and Hae in their relationship? Three early thirty-somethings, in order an Asian male, an Asian female, and a Caucasian male are sitting together at a bar, the two Asians who seem to be more engrossed with each other leaving the Caucasian on the outside. What is subsequently told is the story of the two Asians and how they got to this point. They are childhood best friends Hae Sung and Nora Moon, who, when at age twelve, were each other’s first love in South Korea, they speculating that they would get married in the future. Their time together would change with Nora’s family emigrating to Canada leading to them losing touch with each other until the onset of the Internet age when they would reconnect over cyberspace. This meeting at the bar in New York City, where Nora now lives, would be their first face to face in twenty years with their lives taking different paths in the intervening time including each having other significant others with the Caucasian being Nora’s Jewish husband Arthur. The three will have to reconcile the thoughts of Hae Sung and Nora’s twelve year old selves and how the build up of those thoughts over twenty years will affect their current realities.