Moon Choi attends the “Bedford Park” premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at the Library Center Theatre on January 24, 2026, in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)
By Gina McIntyre
It might have been awfully chilly outside, but there was only warmth inside the Library Center Theatre on January 24 as writer-director and co-editor Stephanie Ahn took the stage following the Festival premiere of her new film, Bedford Park. As moviegoers greeted her with a standing ovation, it was clear that they had fallen for the tender portrait of a tentative romance that slowly blossoms between two troubled Korean American adults.
In the film, Moon Choi stars as physical therapist Audrey who moves back home to care for her mother after a car accident. The family dynamic is fraught — her father is an alcoholic; her mother wants her unmarried daughter to have a more traditional life as a wife and mother. When Audrey is tasked with sorting out the bill for repairs from the crash, she meets the rude and combative other driver, Eli (Son Sukku). A former championship wrestler, he works as a security guard to put himself through school, barely earning enough to get by.
Following their initial confrontation, surprising circumstances keep them in one another’s orbit, and they find themselves falling into an unconventional sort of friendship. In time, a mutual attraction based on empathy and understanding begins to take hold, yet Ahn never allows Bedford Park to veer into staid romantic movie conventions. As their relationship deepens, they each must grapple with the emotional scars of the past as they attempt to forge a path toward healing.
For Ahn, the film, screening in the Festival’s U.S. Dramatic Competition, has been a passion project for the better part of the last decade. The origin, she says, grew out of the “fact that I just didn’t feel like there were Asian American stories out there that resonated with me, stories that tapped into the nuances and the details and the complexities that I felt in my life and I know that other people like me felt,” she says at a Q&A following the premiere screening.
“The struggle I had with having my own passions that really drove me … while being rooted in the tradition of family loyalty was something that was very real to me,” Ahn continues. “It was something that I just didn’t see being told out there. So, I waited and waited, and it got to the point where I realized I just had to tell this story myself.”
The final decision to embark on making the film had to do with becoming a parent, she says. “It wasn’t until I had my daughter that I really got the courage to do it,” Ahn says. “It made me think a lot about what I carried through my family, traumas or the past, and whether I was going to [pass] that down to my daughter or not. I became very conscious of how I was going to stop those patterns or bring forward some of the beautiful things that did come from my family. That really inspired me to start writing.”
Roughly seven years ago, she began working with a casting director to begin a worldwide search for the right actor to portray Audrey and discovered Seoul-based actor Moon Choi. After auditioning on tape, Choi flew to the U.S. to meet with Ahn and was instantly cast in the role; together, the actor and the filmmaker made a short, 2023’s Accident, that was a precursor to Bedford Park. “She and I have been Zooming for seven years, rehearsing,” Ahn says. “She put her heart and soul into it. She worked so hard.”
Choi also helped Son Sukku win the role of Eli, who was originally written as a white man. “Moon had talked about her very good friend Son Sukku,” Ahn says. “The idea of this becoming an Asian man was introduced to me. At first I was very resistant. But I met him over Zoom and it was just like, Oh my god. This is Eli. He just exuded all the things that I wanted. It was instantaneous. That day I sat down and rewrote my character to be Korean American.”
Still, despite a shared cultural heritage, the two characters grew up in wildly varying circumstances, which very much impacts their personal trajectories and their expectations about what choices they’re allowed to make in life. “I wanted to show an Asian American character that wasn’t stereotypical,” Ahn says of Eli. “I wanted him to have a very different experience than Audrey, and I wanted their somehow very different experiences to come together and be a common experience.”
Like Choi, Sukku is based in South Korea, but he agreed to meet with Ahn about the character based solely on Choi’s recommendation. “Moon and I, we go way back, we’ve been friends for 20 years,” Sukku says. “Since early in my career, my whole thing is basically whatever Moon tells me to do, I do. … I don’t even second-guess it. When she asks me to do something, I know that it’s always for my own benefit. I saw the short film that she made with Stephanie. … Then I had a Zoom with Stephanie. I was glad that she liked me enough to cast me.”
Although Bedford Park marks the first time the two actors have starred in an American film, Choi says that the drama’s larger themes — about identity, loyalty, responsibility, independence, and love — are deeply relatable. “We’re not 100 percent Korean American … but we could resonate [with the script] because we do have many friends [who are],” Choi says. “My cousins are Korean American. The sense of disorientation doesn’t just happen to immigrants. I feel like this question of Who am I and where do I belong? — it’s a universal theme. I hope it resonates with an international audience.”
