Two years after making his feature directorial debut on the beloved indie “Columbus,” video-essayist-turned-filmmaker Kogonada has finally lined up his followup feature. Deadline reports that the South Korean-born creator will next tackle a big screen adaption of the Alexander Weinstein-penned short story “Saying Goodbye to Yang.” The filmmaker will both write and direct the film, which will be released with the slightly tweaked title “After Yang.”
Colin Farrell will star in the film, which will be released by boutique studio A24, which previously released the Farrell-starring features “The Lobster” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” both directed by “The Favourite” filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos. Per Deadline, the film “follows a father and daughter as they try to save the life of their robotic family member.”
The story was originally published in Weinstein’s short short collection “Children of the New World,” a speculative fiction offering first published in the fall of 2016. The film will be produced by both Cinereach and Per Capita Productions, as the latter’s Theresa Park has been credited with pulling the project together, from buying the story last summer and picking the “Columbus” helmer to direct it.
Kogonda, best known for his video essays about movies, made the jump to feature filmmaking in 2016 with his John Cho- and Haley Lu Richardson-starring “Columbus,” which debuted at Sundance in 2017 and then went on to a small, self-distributed release in August of that same year.
When he appeared on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast in 2017, he spoke at length about the influences that have guided his career, which should give continued insight into his evolving filmmaking process. “I think one of the reasons I walked away [from academia] was for me it was sort of killing the thing that I loved,” said Kogonada. “I just want to make something that is trying to pursue the same type of form that [Yasujiro Ozu] was pursuing, but trying to think about it in our present moment.”