One of the greatest fears of childhood is being abandoned by your parents and left to face the world alone. In A Brand New Life, winner of Best Asian Film Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival, French director Ounie Lecomte recalls her childhood in South Korea with this sensitively rendered and touching story of a young girl who was left by her father in an all-girls Catholic orphanage to be placed for adoption. Set in Seoul in 1975, nine-year-old Jin-hee, superbly performed by Kim Sae-rom, does not suspect anything out of the ordinary after spending a day with her father (Sol Kyung-gu) buying new clothes, going out to dinner, and taking a ride together on his bicycle.When Jin-hee is suddenly dropped off the next day at an orphanage just after her father bought her a cake that she picked out, she is bewildered but believes that her father will return to bring her home. Left to adjust to a strange new environment, however, she is full of anger. Though she is treated well by the nuns and the other children, she refuses to comply with the rules and resists the requests of sister Bomo (Park Myeong-shin), the woman who runs the orphanage. Refusing to speak, eat or change clothes, Jin-hee pleads with the director Koo (Oh Man-seok) to allow her to call her father but he is unable to find him. Planning to escape, she spends the night outside in the cold.When she decides to return, she begins to reluctantly accept that her father will not return and that she will sooner or later be placed for adoption, perhaps with a family from another country. Fortunately, she finds a friend in 11-year-old Sook-hee (Park Do-yeon), a bright and outgoing girl who has learned to say the right things to prospective parents, but often causes trouble with the nuns. The two girls practice English together, play card games, sneak extra pieces of cake for each other, and care for a sick bird. Sook-hee tells her that she has started to have her period but she must keep it a secret. They talk about another girl Yeshin (Ko Ah-sung) who is depressed by a letter she receives from a boy (Mun Hack-jin) that she has a crush on.Even though she is able to bond with Sook-hee, Jin-hee remains distressed about the lies her father told her, taking out her frustration by destroying Christmas dolls given to children as gifts, and refusing to answer questions at a meeting with perspective parents. A Brand New Life involves the heart but refuses to pull out all the dramatic stops to ratchet up the tears. Though its theme is downbeat, it is not a depressing film because the children are shown as having amazing strength and resilience. When each girl leaves with a new family and the remaining children sing "Auld Lang Syne," they are not just saying goodbye and lamenting the old times, but designing a brand new life for their friend and voicing hope as well for their own future.

Winner of the Best Asian Film Award at last year's Tokyo International Film Festival, and screened out of competition at Cannes this year, writer-director Ounie Lecomte's debut feature film is a semi-autobiographical tale of a young South Korean girl who got abandoned by her single dad to an orphanage where she yearns a life of normalcy, still harbouring hopes that she'll be reunited with the only family she knows.One can imagine just how much reference from Lecomte's own life got written into the film. Being unable to speak Korean and has French as a first language herself, Lecomte's tale follows the adventures of Jinhee (Kim Sae Ron), a precocious little girl who ends up in France which probably accounted for the director's own language skills or the lack thereof in her native tongue, and throughout the story you'll find it pretty heart-wrenching especially when Jinhee tries to resist blending into the scheme of things in the orphanage, knowing that to go with the flow will mean to surrender all memory of her loved one and life as she knew, to making herself appealing for a new foster family to pick her up for adoption.Thus beneath the exterior sweetness lies strong feelings of resentment and anger even, being unable to fathom how her dad can give her up so that she can supposedly lead a better life in a foster home in the mid 70s Korea, and likely one to be overseas given the kind of folks who drop by the orphanage to look for children to adopt. The story's episodic in nature as the orphanage serves as a temporary holding point in her life in between a giant leap of change, and flits between how Jinhee finds every opportunity to resist change, and how each time she embraces a little change through friendships forged, her heart gets broken all over again.And having one's heart broken too many times probably doesn't bode well for a proper, balanced development, given that her trust with loved ones and friends got betrayed in the highest order. The gem and revelation of the film is the tour de force performance by Kim Sae Ron as Jinhee, who almost single-handedly lifts the film from start to finish giving an unbelievably strong performance for her age, dealing with the range of positive and negative emotions like a seasoned veteran.You can't help but to fall in love with the little girl, and share in her despair at being abandoned, and weep a little with her when promises made become shattered. Casting Sae Ron is a stroke of brilliance, as the actress' performance was key to make or break this film, and thankfully, she was the miracle to breathe life into what was a straightforward story dealing with human emotions, nevermind the bleak landscape that spelt doom and gloom. This performance alone is well worth getting a ticket to the film.

...yet I was left wanting for more. I didn't get to know much about Jinhee, why she was there, what happened to her family, and the like. Yet in real life, as this movie was based on, we often don't get the answers we seek or that would make sense of our situation. One reviewer said it wasn't a tearjerker but a heart tugger, and I tend to agree. The roles were beautifully played the child cast and a few cameos were nice by two of Korea's leading male actors who played Jinhee's father and a sympathetic doctor.The sad thing is, Koreans still dump unwanted children into orphanages to this day, a lot of whom are the product of out-of-wedlock relationships. It's horrible to have the children suffer for the mistakes of adults.

Life can appear very strange, when no-one is there to explain it. Especially when you're a child and you have plenty of questions. This is a big question which started the day when a father, with no explanations left his daughter at an orphanage. A Brand New Life takes its spectator to childhood - to a time when we asked many things and perhaps got no answers and no explanations why things happen exactly this way. Film is through and through seen from the eyes of a child, but brought to it's richness with the help of a wonderful script and skillful camera, allowing its spectator to put aside for a while his adult point of view and just observe, and try to understand. This is the story of a little girl, Jinhee, played marvelously by Mademoiselle Sae Ron Kim. She poses questions, but there never comes an honest answer why her life has turned out like this.A Brand New Life achieves a perfect harmony, one element underlines the other one. The long takes allow the spectator to grasp, how long the time in orphanage seemed for Jinhee, the relatively small amounts of dialogs depicts the introvert child, whose emotions break out through some furious actions. The gray tone palette which en-tours the setting of the orphanage shows very understandable the sadness of this place.Film touches not only an auto-biographical story, but the sad truth of life – we all know that there are thousands of places like this around the world. And there are thousands of children who, perhaps, have mastered this tragicomic show for the visitors, the potential new families.In conclusion I'd like to say that this is a very daring film, knowing that this was a true story and a true childhood, perhaps lived through second by second as we see it on the screen. I must say that it's a brave choice to put a story like this on the screen. But its greatest value is the absence of a pathos and absence of a depiction the children as a victims of the cruelty of life. A Brand New Life is hope and search for the answers through and through it.