Yoon Dan-bi’s Toronto and San Sebastian Film ‘The World Before’ Gives Its Camera a Soul and Its Island a Voice

Seven years after “Moving On,” Korean filmmaker Yoon Dan-bi returns with “The World Before,” a coming-of-age film about desire and first love.

Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s Toronto Film Festival Platform world premiere, Yoon discusses how capturing the authenticity of change worked its way at every stage of the production.

“I want to make films about things that can’t be described in one sentence,” says Yoon. “In my previous movie I wanted to capture nostalgia, here I wanted to capture the restlessness, that fever you experience when innocence turns into desire.”

The coming-of-age story follows 17-year-old Jin and her unexpected reunion with childhood friend Du-jae, who returns for his grandmother’s funeral on a remote Korean island. For Yoon, narrating the chapter that marks the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood required focusing on her character’s inner turmoil, but also very much on their physicality.

“As well as emotion, I’m very keen on observing people’s movement,” she explains. “When the feeling of desire is born, how does it affect movement? How do they let their guard down when they love, hug each other, unexpectedly hold hands? I wanted to portray that desire in a very realistic way, without being overtly sexual.”

That attention changed drastically how she used the camera. While ‘Moving On’’s stationary and observational lens blurred the line so well between reality and fiction that many commented it felt it was a documentary, Yoon tried another technique in “The World Before.”

“The camera moves around a lot as if it had its own soul,” says Yoon. “I wanted to move it unexpectedly to create a rhythm. For example, there’s a scene on the beach with Jin and Du-jae where you see the light coming in, then the sun goes behind the clouds and comes out again. It was all natural light when we were shooting,” she pauses to laugh. “My crew told me this effect can be done in post production, but I tend not to believe them and I prefer to wait.”

Yoon is grateful to her crew, who she says had a hard time rescheduling shoots, staged across two islands during the hot, humid months of the Korean summer, when a typhoon came around. They also had to carry all the equipment without cars as Soan-do, one of the islands located in Wando County off the southern coast, had no bridge connecting to the mainland. “We wanted rain scenes,” she adds, “but it didn’t rain that summer.” 

Still, Yoon loves the aesthetics of this period which she describes as the season of growing up. Lulled by the chant of cicadas, the island’s bright stillness offers the perfect contrast to the movement Yoon chases – light inching on naked skin and leaves blowing in the wind. 

“Soando feels very much like how the countryside used to be in Korea,” Yoon notes. “The main labor there is fishing abalone and seaweed, they’re pretty much self sufficient. The villagers offered help and invited us for food, which helped the actors to adapt to island life quickly. But looking back, I realized I went with a sort of prejudice, I thought everyone would want to escape but it turns out they all wanted to stay there.”

The correction found its way into the character: “Jin likes living on the island and doesn’t even consider leaving,” Yoon says. Other surprises made it into the film as well – a local grandmother was cast for the opening scene after the villagers pronounced her the best singer among them ; an improvised moment between the young leads watching ants by the roadside, became one of the movie’s authentic snippets of life. But those additions are only possible because the script is written to accommodate them.

“I tend to revise my script a lot while shooting, and I write it with that process in mind,” Yoon says. “That’s why I prefer to film in chronological order so I can really connect to the following scene. Of course, it doesn’t always work as I intend to,” she laughs.

Another ingredient of her movie’s authenticity is her casting process. She found the central pair, Sim Su-bin (“Teach You a Lesson,” “Filing for Love”) in the role of Jin, and first timer Kim Eo-jin as Du-jae through auditions. Both are relatively unfamiliar faces, even to Korean audiences, so Yoon built the surrounding ensemble to help them carry the film. “I was worried that if the older actors were too famous, they’d take the focus away from them, so I needed to balance this,” she says.

Once shooting began, she made a point to let her young leads embody the material. “As in my previous film, an emerging actor was playing the protagonist, so if the actor prefers to do a scene in a different way than I envisioned, I try to adapt,” Yoon explains. “I encourage the actors to find the intimacy that feels right for them. I know how they talk and behave, I don’t want them to stick to the script but use their own words.”

Only the second Korean film selected for the section after Yoon Ga-eun’s “The World of Love” last year, “The World Before” will be headed to the San Sebastian Film Festival‘s New Directors competition later this month.