Leading Korean sales company Finecut has landed international sales rights to July Jung’s Dora ahead of its world premiere in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.
Set over a summer at a seaside village in South Korea, it centres on a young woman who suffers both physically and mentally. She begins to recover after finding love but as relationships form so do conflicts.
The film is a South Korea-France-Luxembourg co-production and Finecut handles sales outside of French-speaking Europe, Africa, and Luxembourg.
The drama stars actress and former K-pop idol Kim Do-yeon as Dora alongside Japan’s Sakura Ando in her debut Korean film. Ando has previously attended Cannes with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster in 2023 and Palme d’Or-winner Shoplifters in 2018. She has won five Japanese Academy awards for 100 Yen Love, Shoplifters, A Man, Godzilla Minus One and Monster.
It marks the third feature by Jung after A Girl At My Door, which played in Un Certain Regard in 2014, and Next Sohee, which won several international festival awards after premiering in Cannes Critics’ Week in 2022. Finecut also represented Next Sohee.
Dora is produced by France’s The French Connection, South Korea’s RedPeter Films and Luxembourg’s Les Films Fauves. RedPeter Films is known as the producer of Yeon Sang-ho’s Train To Busan and Peninsula, both of which were selected for Cannes in 2016 and 2020 respectively.
Announcing the Directors’ Fortnight lineup, artistic director Julien Rejl said of Dora: “It’s a very free and contemporary adaptation of Dora’s case study by Freud in 1900. It’s a very famous case but transposed here to contemporary Korea.
“It’s set over a summer during which the young Dora with her family and friends come to get rest but she’s about to become a trigger of all the passions of this microcosm. This issue of desire and the desire for a young woman is at the core of the film. It’s depicted in a way that you rarely get to see in Korean films.”
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