‘Triangle of Sadness’ Producer Backs Park Syeyoung’s ‘Satellite of Love’

Philippe Bober, the producer of Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or winners “Triangle of Sadness” and “The Square,” is backing South Korean filmmaker Park Syeyoung's fourth feature, “Satellite of Love,” at the Busan International Film Festival's Asian Project Market.

The project pitches a woman who has spent ten years shut inside a room at a rural love motel, waiting for the man who left her — only to discover that the motel has been staging her love life all along. Park previously directed “The Fin.”

The Asian Project Market runs within the festival's Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM).

What is the story?

The motel sits among reed beds and woods, its rooms echoing with lovers every night. When her lover walks out, the woman insists he come back in 10 years, to the day and the hour. He says no. She stays put regardless, never leaving the room and cycling through the same chores — eating, washing up, laundering the sheets — while guests check in and out around her.

A decade on, a man turns up saying he is the one who left. She doesn't know his face, but he keeps at it, and slowly they fall in love. Then the cracks show. Their conversations start to loop. When he pleads with her to run away with him, the motel's managers take him away.

The truth: the motel exists to keep the woman's feelings alive and replay them. Men brought in from outside are coached to act out romances with her again and again, performing love, regret and guilt while their tears are gathered. Once she knows this, she goes back to her routine and turns her eyes to the door, waiting again for someone to come back.

Park frames the film as an investigation of memory itself. “I hope to convey the way in which our memories are so volatile and how the present can keep altering what has happened in the past,” he says. “How nothing is definite and every memory is subject to change.”

Who is behind it?

Coproduction Office's Philippe Bober and creative producer Sylvain Cruiziat produce. The company has worked with Park on “The Masked Monster” and “The Fin,” which played Locarno in 2024 and 2025, respectively, and on “Who Stole My Cross?,” his third feature, now in post-production.

The producers rank Park as a singular voice in present-day Korean cinema. “Satellite of Love” will be their fourth film together. “We are thrilled to continue supporting Syeyoung on his path as an auteur, and to accompany him on this next chapter,” they say.

How does it fit his career shift?

Park's first two features followed groups of characters from the outside, without digging into their inner wants. “Who Stole My Cross?” centers on a single figure. That shift pushed him further, and he wants “Satellite of Love” to be driven entirely by its character. The script is in development.

At the APM, the team wants to meet potential Asian co-production partners and financiers and to put Park's next film in front of the industry early.

Beyond “Satellite of Love,” Park is writing several commercial features he hopes to shoot in Korea alongside more personal projects he will make independently. “I will make films till I die, and I want to explore a range of financing approaches along the way,” he says.