Special Screening: “A Brand New Life” by Ounie Lecomte

Director Ounie Lecomte is presenting her debut film A Brand New Life Out of Competition, and it is eligible for the Caméra d’Or. Born in Seoul in 1966, Ounie Lecomte left Korea at the age of 9 and moved to France. Following her studies in fashion design, she worked on a number of films: as an actress with Olivier Assayas (Paris s’éveille) or as a costume designer, notably for Sophie Fillières. In 2006, elle enrolled at the Fémis Screenwriting Workshop where she started to write A Brand New Life .
She tells the story through the eyes of 9-year Jinhee, who was placed in an orphanage by her father. She finally accepts her fate and is forced to hope and wait for her possible adoption…

"A Brand New Life owes its inspiration to the year from 1975 to 1976, which I spent in the Saint Paul orphanage in Seoul with the Catholic nuns,” explains the young director. “Although it was difficult to erase the autobiographical part, my intention was not to build a simple reconstruction of it. On the contrary, I tried to transfer to the present, the emotions of a little girl facing these extraordinary incidents: abandonment and adoption. The year at the orphanage is the time and place of an intervening period between two lives: a life in which she didn’t have to learn how to let go and then a life in which she will learn how to desire. Right or wrong, I thought that only cinema, by its force of incarnation, could interpret this."