About Past Lives
Two childhood friends from Seoul are reunited in New York twenty years after one of them emigrated. Across one quiet, compressed week the film traces what becomes of a connection that never had the chance to ripen, and asks whether choices made at twelve can keep echoing through every decade afterward. Director Celine Song builds her debut around long, patient takes, deliberately undramatic conversations, and a final scene whose silence has been compared to the closing minutes of Lost in Translation. The result is a meditation on inyun — the Korean idea that the people who pass through your life were always going to.
Released in 2023 and running a tight 1h 45m, Past Lives sits firmly in the drama tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated PG-13 and presented in Korean, with English subtitles at participating venues. Read a contemporary review — useful before you book a ticket.
Director: Celine Song
Celine Song belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Past Lives is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Celine Song currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow the festival circuit notes from the criticism outlets linked at the bottom of this page.
Cast
The principal cast — Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception. Cast notes and credits are useful for tracking through other adjacent indie work.
Where to watch Past Lives
Currently playing in 12 US cities across our directory. The deepest scheduling is in:
- Miami Beach, FL — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Boise, ID — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Salt Lake City, UT — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Memphis, TN — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Sonoma, CA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Santa Cruz, CA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Park City, UT — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Elk Grove Village, IL — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Austin, TX — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Ridgecrest, CA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Leesburg, VA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Brunswick, ME — booked at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory, or browse the next seven days of showtimes for last-minute additions.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Past Lives is a clean fit for that model: a 1h 45m drama work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas listed in the schedule above are the venues currently doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Drama genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition. Programmer notes are sometimes the fastest way to triangulate which other films share a sensibility.