Choi Hyunyoung Returns to Busan with Subway Disaster Drama

Choi Hyunyoung, director of "Memories of a Dead End," brings her new subway disaster drama "All's Well That Ends Well" to the Busan Asian Project Market, held within the Busan International Film Festival's Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM).

The film centers on Jung-hyun, a gifted high school dancer forced to abandon ballet because her family is poor. She is quietly falling for a classmate named Min-ho and still dreams of dancing again when a subway catastrophe tears her life apart. Accounts of her bravery move the country. Money and compensation flood in, and her family suddenly finds itself in the spotlight.

But the tragedy conceals something nobody knows. The falsehoods about Jung-hyun keep growing. Her relatives, the press and others pulled into the case each shape their own account to suit what they want and believe. The mystery of the missing girl steers them all toward an end none of them sees coming.

Why did Choi return to this story?

After "Memories of a Dead End," Choi went through a number of personal changes, including a life-threatening reaction to medication. The experience left her asking which story she would choose if she had just one film left in her.

Her answer took her back to herself at 14, standing at the site of the tragedy — a story she had shut away for more than 20 years.

"For me, making this film feels less like simply choosing my next project and more like finally finding a way to tell a story I have carried with me for a very long time," Choi says.

She has long been drawn to what lingers once a major event has passed, and how it keeps shaping lives, relationships and decisions. "So this is not really a film about the disaster itself. It is about what comes afterward: how people survive, how they live with what has happened, and how society chooses to see them," she says.

Choi wants to avoid handing viewers neat conclusions. Instead, she hopes they will picture themselves as a survivor, a relative, a reporter or a bystander and ask, "What would I have done?" and "How do we look at people after tragedy?"

How far along is the project?

The screenplay is in its fourth draft. The project already has development support from the Korean Film Council (KOFIC). Choi says conversations about financing, co-production and casting are beginning, and she wants the film's creative and financial frameworks to grow in tandem.

Producers Jeon Jiseong and Kwon Mizy go back years with Choi: Jeon since university and Kwon as producer of her first feature. The script exceeded their expectations, they say.

"What struck us was not only the premise itself, but the way the story unfolds and the questions she is trying to explore through it," the producers say.

In Busan, the pair hope to line up co-producers, financiers and sales partners to take the film beyond Korea and move it toward a firm production and financing plan, with pre-production to follow once those pieces fall into place.

"We are particularly interested in partners who respond to the project creatively as well as financially, and who see its potential to travel internationally while preserving the cultural and historical specificity of the story," they say.

Choi, who has lived in the U.K. for the past few years, has also been writing several scripts that could be set up as Korea-U.K.-Japan co-productions. If Busan delivers the right partners, "All's Well That Ends Well" could become the first of a slate built across three countries.