A woman who has spent a decade shut inside a room at a rural love motel, waiting for the man who left her, discovers that the motel has been staging her love life all along in “Satellite of Love,” the fourth feature from South Korean filmmaker Park Syeyoung (“The Fin”).
The project is part of the Asian Project Market, which runs within the Busan International Film Festival’s Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM).
The motel sits among reed beds and woods, its rooms echoing with lovers every night. When her lover walks out, the woman insists he come back in 10 years, to the day and the hour. He says no. She stays put regardless, never leaving the room and cycling through the same chores – eating, washing up, laundering the sheets – while guests check in and out around her.
A decade on, a man turns up saying he is the one who left. She doesn’t know his face, but he keeps at it, and slowly they fall in love. Then the cracks show. Their conversations start to loop. When he pleads with her to run away with him, the motel’s managers take him away.
The truth is that the motel exists to keep the woman’s feelings alive and replay them. Men brought in from outside are coached to act out romances with her again and again, performing love, regret and guilt while their tears are gathered. Once she knows this, she goes back to her routine and turns her eyes to the door, waiting again for someone to come back.
“I hope to convey the way in which our memories are so volatile and how the present can keep altering what has happened in the past,” Park says. “How nothing is definite and every memory is subject to change.”
Park has been working on his third feature, “Who Stole My Cross?,” which is now in post-production. His first two features followed groups of characters from the outside, without digging into their inner wants, while “Who Stole My Cross?” centers on a single figure. That shift pushed him further, and he wants “Satellite of Love” to be driven entirely by its character. The script is in development.
The film is produced by Coproduction Office’s Philippe Bober and creative producer Sylvain Cruiziat. The company has worked with Park on “The Masked Monster” and “The Fin,” which played Locarno in 2024 and 2025, respectively, and on “Who Stole My Cross?” Bober, who founded the company, produced Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winners “Triangle of Sadness” and “The Square.”
The producers rank Park as a singular voice in present-day Korean cinema. “Satellite of Love” will be their fourth film together. “We are thrilled to continue supporting Syeyoung on his path as an auteur, and to accompany him on this next chapter,” they say.
At the APM, the team wants to meet potential Asian co-production partners and financiers and to put Park’s next film in front of the industry early.
Beyond “Satellite of Love,” Park is writing several commercial features he hopes to shoot in Korea alongside more personal projects he will make independently. “I will make films till I die, and I want to explore a range of financing approaches along the way,” he says.