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Sundance: Back to his roots in Seoul and in '80s teen comedies

Growing up in Huntingdon Valley in the 1980s, Benson Lee loved the teen comedies of that spirited time, especially John Hughes classics like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles. The music, the style, the "youthful attitude" - those films were, he says, "such a great escape for me."

"Seoul Searching," Sundance Film Festival 2015. (Image on film poster)
"Seoul Searching," Sundance Film Festival 2015. (Image on film poster)Read more

PARK CITY, Utah - Growing up in Huntingdon Valley in the 1980s, Benson Lee loved the teen comedies of that spirited time, especially John Hughes classics like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles. The music, the style, the "youthful attitude" - those films were, he says, "such a great escape for me."

There was just one problem. Lee, a second-generation Korean American, "hated the depiction of Asian characters," like Sixteen Candles' Long Duk Dong, a buffoonish exchange student whose appearances were introduced with ringing gongs. "Any teen movie from that era gravely stereotypes Asian people," Lee says. "That was the biggest downer for me."

With Seoul Searching, which he wrote and directed and will premiere Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, Lee aspires to right that wrong. A semiautobiographical comedy set in 1986 - and made to look as if it had been shot then - it pivots on a summer program in South Korea for emigrants' children who grew up estranged from their heritage. Dubbed a "Bibimbap Breakfast Club" by Variety's Justin Chang, the film is stocked with teen-movie types - a sullen punk with daddy issues (played by the Twilight franchise's Justin Chon), a Madonna wannabe (Jessica Van), a humorless and unforgiving administrator (Cha In-Pyo) - who gradually show themselves to be more than they appear.

Lee is 45 and nearly three decades out of Abington High School, where "you could count on one hand" the number of Asian American students, he recalls. As in Seoul Searching, his parents enrolled him in a summer program in South Korea, government-sponsored, to reconnect him with his roots. They weren't deterred when he showed less than zero interest. "They sent me kicking and screaming," he says. "I wanted to go to the Jersey Shore."

Now, however, he considers it "the best summer of my life" and a transformative experience.

"I had all these issues that I wasn't really aware of," says Lee, whose family later moved to California. "I started realizing that my roommates, who were all from different parts of the world, had very similar issues with their parents, and it had to do with the fact that our parents were from the old country and we were fully adapted. . . .

"Being bicultural is an identity in and of itself," he says. "Once I was able to accept that, I was able to get rid of a lot of . . . confusion in my life."

In Seoul Searching, the characters' varied backgrounds are perplexing even to the camp's instructors. Moving in baby steps with one student (Rosalina Leigh), a teacher suggests she write her first name in Korean, but not even he can figure out how to render "Kris" in Hangul. He fares no better with her last name: Schultz.

Lee shot his film in South Korea. Given his desire to represent the diversity of the Korean diaspora, it also was essential to find actors who matched his characters' backgrounds. But a Korean German? A Korean Mexican? That was a tall order, especially on an indie-film budget, and Lee ended up sending out a casting call over social media. (Google the characters' names, and you can still find audition videos all over YouTube.) The process was arduous, he says, but asking actors to do accents or play something they weren't "was never an option."

This isn't the first trip to Sundance for Lee, who majored in marketing at the University of Hawaii, only to chase a career in writing and filmmaking. In 1998, his movie Miss Monday won a special jury prize here for its lead actress. In 2007, he made the successful break-dance documentary Planet B-Boy, which he adapted in 2013 into the way-way-less-successful 3D studio (Sony) dance movie Battle of the Year, starring Josh Holloway and Chris Brown.

Afterward, Lee found himself back on the indie side of the street with Seoul Searching, a movie he initially tried to make right after Miss Monday. Financiers, he says, were confused about the film's potential audience. "The first thing they'd ask me was, 'Is it an American film or is it a Korean film?' "

The money eventually came from China, where "they really liked the idea of a Korean film that was in English and was geared to young people," Lee says. And the people who didn't understand who Seoul Searching was for before the film was made? "They get it now."

Seoul Searching's premiere comes after Sundance's opening-weekend hype has cooled and its multimillion-dollar bidding frenzies among studios for distribution deals has subsided. Lee is still seeking a distributor.

However the film is received here, it already has had a profound effect on its maker. While doing research for the script, Lee moved to South Korea - and stayed. There is plenty of work for him, he says. He's writing another feature and working on a documentary called One Korea 3D, about a peace concert that took place in North and South on the same day.

"My command of Korean is not very good," Lee concedes. "But I realized at this point it would be good to work on my language skills and reconnect with my heritage again. It's kind of like the second phase of Seoul Searching."