In October 2024 at the Austin Film Festival, Oscar-nominated writer and director Celine Song talked about the difference between being an amateur writer and a professional writer. She believes that being an amateur writer means “writing for what makes me happy, what makes me thrilled.” On the other hand, a professional writer is not just someone who is paid to write:
“The truth is, I think being a professional artist is to think of art as a way to communicate with your audience … to make sure that they’re not left in the dark, and that they’re also able to believe and be immersed in [the story].”
Put succinctly, the amateur writer writes for themselves and the professional writer writes for an audience; how does Celine Song navigate the tension between these two modes of the craft? Indeed, a tension exists, because neither mode of creating cancels the other out. Writing, particularly for film, often interlaces the personal with the universal, as well as with norms in the industry.
Celine Song is no rookie. When she wrote the screenplay for her 2023 debut feature film, Past Lives, she had already been a professional playwright for ten years. Yet she says that the amateur writer still lives in her. It lives because “I have to believe the thing that I’m working on.”
What keeps a writer writing is never just the prospect of having one’s work be read by people, but also the personal thrill and fulfillment that comes from the act itself. Song achieves a brilliant balance between these two objectives of writing by interweaving personal stories with universal themes. In writing and filmmaking, she challenges the boundaries of making art with an attitude of curiosity and a faithfulness to her craft.
Celine Song explores themes of love, place, and identity in her films, Past Lives and Materialists, the latter of which was released in summer 2025. A distinct characteristic of Song’s films is that her lived experiences play a foundational role in the storytelling. Her debut feature, Past Lives, is semi-autobiographical, featuring a female protagonist who migrated from Seoul, South Korea, to Toronto, Canada at a young age with her family.
The film opens with Nora sitting at a bar between Arthur, her American husband and Haesung, her Korean childhood sweetheart. Behind the camera, two off-screen voices guess at who these three people are to each other. A slow zoom-in on Nora ends with her looking directly at the camera.
This scene mirrors a situation in the Korean-Canadian filmmaker’s life when her childhood boyfriend was visiting her and her husband in New York City, and she had to translate for the two men, neither of whom spoke the other’s language. Eventually, Song met eyes with a stranger across the room who was evidently wondering about this trio’s dynamic.
That pivotal night, Song realised that her identity as an immigrant bridged her past and present lives. She turned that personal revelation into a widely acclaimed story. Past Lives would win her various awards in the film scene, including the Vanguard Award for “the art of storytelling and creative independence” at the Sundance Film Festival, where the film was first screened.
One could argue that the reason Song’s films have garnered global attention is because the writer-director’s works emanate a fascination and curiosity about life which, in this day and age, we could all use a bit more of. In her films, Song is interested in what she deems “mysteries.”
For Past Lives, that was in-yun, a term used to describe the providence or fate that ties two people together and operates across lifetimes. The concept has existed in Korean culture for thousands of years, but no one has truly been able to define it.
In the movie, Nora says, “If two people get married, they say it’s because there have been 8,000 layers of in-yun over 8,000 lifetimes.” How do you trace 8,000 layers of fate over 8,000 lifetimes? You cannot, and that is why in-yun remains a mystery.
While this mystery originates from Korean Buddhism, it operates in Past Lives as something that can be felt beyond Korea. As Nora grows up and crosses geographical and cultural borders, the film ultimately explores a universal experience: the way that people move through time and space. In Song’s words:
“Maybe you don’t know what it’s like to immigrate across the Pacific Ocean, but you do know what it’s like to be not 16 and to think ‘Man, I used to be 16. I’m never gonna be 16 again.’”
Song trusted that the story of Nora, Haesung, and Arthur was something many people would relate to, and she was right.
In the ending, Nora and Haesung exchange goodbyes on a quiet, dimly lit street in New York City. Haesung gets on an Uber and rides off to the airport. A slow pan of the camera follows Nora walking home. In contrast to the silence in the previous scene, now, a swelling piano score builds in the background, immersing the viewer in Nora’s stirring emotions despite her steady walking pace.
In line with the score’s crescendo, Nora finally bursts into tears when she meets her husband in front of their apartment building and enters his embrace. Much more than a grief for young love, what Nora feels is also a grief for Seoul, her hometown; a grief for a past version of herself that she knows is long gone. These emotions resonate universally, because in growing up and travelling places, we have all unwillingly left certain things behind.
Song’s debut film weaves personal memories with ubiquitous themes of place, identity, and nostalgia. As with any semi-autobiographical work, it is basically impossible to parse out which elements of the story are taken from Song’s own life and which were editorial choices made to facilitate our experience of the film; trying to make that distinction is not the point anyway, because the point is that a professional writer can indeed still write for themselves.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Celine Song describes Past Lives as “a special movie because it’s my first movie and it’s so personal, but it also taught me that I’m a filmmaker, and to me that discovery is what makes me the happiest.”
Here, Song reiterates the objectives of the amateur writer: the thrill and happiness of creating something that fosters self-discovery. These things remain important to the writer-director besides the critical reception of her art. Song has carried that fascination about writing and filmmaking onto her second film.
If her debut film was dipping its feet into the waters of romance, Materialists is a deep dive. In this modern day romcom, the protagonist is a matchmaker named Lucy. That profession might sound outlandish, but matchmaking is as real as other contemporary dating trends like speed-dating and dating apps. In fact, the day job that Celine Song had for a brief six months during her twenties was exactly that.
While setting clients up, Song learned a lot about different people’s perspectives on love and has since regarded love as enticing and “entirely mysterious,” because at the end of the day, it is not something that can be boiled down to numbers.
Song believes that “we’re all very baffled by it.” Lucy in Materialists embodies the bafflement of navigating love in a society that increasingly equates material wealth to personal fulfillment — a society worryingly similar to our own. This cold and calculative character speaks of love like a business transaction. To Lucy, dating has everything to do with the value that a partner can bring to the table.
At a wedding for one of her successful matches, her client gets cold feet and confesses to Lucy that the only reason she said yes to her fiance is because it makes her sister jealous. In a calm voice, Lucy tells her that that just means “he makes you feel valuable,” and Lucy’s response does the job. Her client goes through with the wedding.
Lucy has convinced her client that marrying to boost one’s ego is what love can look like, yet she herself is forced to confront that self-preserving, tactical notion of love when she meets Harry. A wealthy financier, tall and conventionally attractive, Harry checks all the boxes in Lucy’s own list, but does being with him truly satisfy her; or does she choose John, her ex-boyfriend who cannot promise her financial stability but puts his love and loyalty for her on the table?
Without spoiling the ending, let us just say that not everyone was happy with Song’s sophomore film. Some critics believed that the chemistry between the lead actors fell short, making the love between the ending pair not very believable. Various comments on social media platforms also called Materialists “broke man propaganda.”
Song adamantly defends her film against that backlash in an interview with Refinery29. She critiques the classism of calling John a “broke man” and deeming someone unworthy of love because of their economic status:
“The whole movie is about fighting the way that capitalism is trying to colonize our hearts and colonize love.”
Song’s response reflects that she is acutely aware of the problematic ways of thinking in our society, and that she has an unwavering faith in the art that she makes. This is another example of how she balances writing for herself and for an audience. Materialists is extremely relevant to modern day society: the film plays out a twisted notion of love for an audience that is way too familiar with it.
Resisting the capitalist tendency to think of romantic relationships in terms of material wealth, Song forces us to confront the big mystery of love — which, against our obsession with the tangibles, is the intangible that persists and continues to baffle us:
“It is the one domain in human life where the only answer is that you have to let yourself be a complete fool and not very smart at all … and just say ‘I don’t know. That’s just how I feel.’”
How do you top an award-winning debut feature like Past Lives? It would have been easy for Celine Song to recycle characteristics from her first film, maybe continue down the lane of the emotional drama genre. Instead, Song crafts a romcom that differs in tone and is daring in subject matter but remains consistent in two things: a willingness to tackle the mysteries of life and a faithfulness to a film’s vision.
.png){kind=small}
