Nora is aware that she shares a name with the heroine of a classic play. She is a playwright in New York’s cultural circles, and has challenging, frank conversations with her husband Arthur on a daily basis. She soon gets back in touch with her childhood friend Hae Sung — they last saw each other when Nora and her family were still living in South Korea. Twenty years later, the two spend hours video-calling and corresponding: does Nora miss her native culture or her long-lost friend?

It is difficult to believe that this is Korean-American playwright and theatre director Celine Song’s first film. Past Lives has won acclaim in Sundance, Berlin and elsewhere, and is now confidently walking into Oscar season while having made Greta Lee (The Morning Show) into an indie film star. A film full of personal details and twists that brings viewers back into the power of memory and the possibilities that different trajectories in life can bring — like an overwhelming wave of warm feelings and passions, they sweep away, question, and criticise wherever it is that you happen to be at the moment. Song throws a playful challenge to her viewers: is a past that hasn’t settled its debts, a past we have carefully convinced ourselves of, more valuable than those things which are uncertain in the present?