Hae Sup Sin on Ban Dal, missing mothers, and embracing a life between two countries as a “200% person.”
At the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival‘s Future Frames: Generation NEXT of European Cinema, the Swiss-Korean director talks about Ban Dal (Half Moon), the dark history of Korean adoption behind it, and why he no longer sees his identity as something to apologise for.
There’s a particular image that Hae Sup Sin can’t shake, even a decade on. A television documentary, watched almost in passing, about a Korean child adopted into a Swiss family. The biological mother tracks her down. The cameras are rolling when they meet. The child is six. And somewhere in that room is a Swiss mother who knows, with total certainty, that she is not the biological parent, and yet is being asked, in real time, to share a title she thought was hers alone.
“That image stuck with me for a very long time,” says Sin as we catch up after his Future Frames premiere at the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. It’s the seed of Ban Dal, his film about an adopted Korean son caught between two mothers who are only beginning to understand what motherhood means.
The title does double duty. Ban Dal, meaning “half moon” in Korean, is about absence – what the Swiss mother cannot give her son, not through any failure of love, but because there’s a particular something the Korean mother left behind that she simply doesn’t have access to. On the other hand, it’s about arithmetic. Two women, one son, and the slow, uneasy realisation that their roles as mothers were always going to have to be shared rather than owned outright. “It’s like a half moon in the sense that they have to share their roles,” he adds. “The film is less interested in resolving that tension than in sitting inside it.”
It would be easy to assume the film is autobiographical. It isn’t, Sin is quick to clarify, but it sits close enough to real history that the line barely matters. Korean adoption to the West (Switzerland very much included) has a history that is only now being properly reckoned with: falsified paperwork, children who were, by some accounts, effectively trafficked for adoption fees in the 1980s, and a generation of adoptees still pushing Seoul for an official reckoning. It’s a subject Sin knows from more than research. Korean by birth and Swiss by upbringing, he grew up in Zurich as the only Korean face in his town and found in the adoptee community a strange, specific kinship: people who’d been shaped by the same collision of East and West, even if their paths there were different.
That double belonging used to feel, in his words, like a liability. “I was very visible. I was very different from the others,” he says of his childhood, a difference that, for a long time, cost him confidence rather than giving him any. Filmmaking is what flipped the equation. Somewhere in learning to tell stories, Sin says he stopped treating his background as something to manage and started treating it as material, the very thing that could let him build a bridge between cultures rather than feel stranded between them. These days he describes himself, only half-joking, as a “200% person” – not half Korean and half Swiss, but entirely both at once. It’s a neat solution to an identity math problem that took him decades to work out.
Karlovy Vary’s Future Frames, the European Film Promotion initiative that brings together ten emerging directors from across the continent, gave that duality a room full of people to test itself against. Hae Sup talks about the programme the way most Future Frames alumni eventually do: workshops; one-on-one mentoring sessions, in his case with Greek director Christos Nikou; and, more than any of it, an unlikely cohort of ten strangers who clicked almost immediately. What stayed with him most, though, was the audience. Karlovy Vary crowds, he says, showed up receptive and asked sharp questions, the kind of exchange that made the festival feel less like a formality and more like a genuine conversation between the film and the people watching it.
Ban Dal (Half Moon) was shot over three nights in a restaurant in Hanam, just outside Seoul, a location choice that also reflects the film’s construction as a chamber piece, largely confined to a single setting, with the son’s departure from the scene functioning as the hinge that lets the three women in his life finally be alone together. He is disarmingly honest about one plot device in particular: the mother needling her single son about why he isn’t dating yet. It’s a cliché, he admits without defensiveness, but a true one and useful, both as the practical excuse to get his character out of the room and as the film’s one deliberately comic beat amid heavier material.
He’s already looking past this one. His next feature, Some Korean Summer, is a rural love story between a 24-year-old Swiss woman and a Korean man, and Sin frames it as a chance to examine how cultural difference works both ways, as friction but also as something that can genuinely change a person. He is aware he is not the first to mine this territory; he name-checks the recent Indo-Korean Netflix production Made in Korea, which he hasn’t yet seen but wants to, and reads the current wave of such stories against a Korea that’s rapidly recalibrating its relationship with the outside world, a once tightly homogenous culture now exporting itself globally through K-drama, music, and food, while quietly importing the labour and the foreignness it once kept at arm’s length. Films like his, he hopes, are part of what nudges that opening along.
The 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival runs from July 3 to 11, 2026.
