Anthony Shim, the Canadian Korean director behind Toronto festival hit “Riceboy Sleeps,” is attached as writer and director of a film adaptation of “Offerings” an acclaimed Korean coming-of-age novel. Anonymous Content and Anthology Studios are to produce.
“Offerings” tells the story of Dae, a young Korean American investment banker who finds himself back in his native Seoul as part of an international team brought in to rescue the country from sovereign default during the 1990s Asian Financial Crisi. As he and his fellow bankers work with Korean officials to execute a sovereign bond offering, his own father is living on borrowed time in the U.S. When Dae’s closest friend, a scion of one of Korea’s biggest chaebol, asks his help in a business sale which would salvage the conglomerate but also uphold a tradition of corruption, Dae finds himself in personal crisis, and has to face the true cost of prioritizing his personal ambitions over his family’s legacy.
The book was written by Michael Kim (aka Kim Byung Ju), co-founder of leading private equity firm MBK Partners, which has $26 billion under management. He wrote “Offerings” over a period of 20 years partially based on his own experience of the IMF crisis, now lives in Seoul and is working on his second novel.
David Levine and Chadwick Prichard will produce the feature on behalf of Anonymous Content alongside Jay Choi and Soon Ho Song on behalf of Anthology. “Offerings” will shoot in Seoul and the U.S. in the fall of 2024.
Films by and about the Korean diaspora are a major component of the Busan International Film Festival this year.
“’Offerings’ is both a portrait of a divided country and an intimate journey of one man’s self-rediscovery, and Anthony Shim is the perfect filmmaker to bring this story of fractured identity to the screen,” said Anonymous and Anthology in a joint statement.
“From reading the very first chapter of ‘Offerings,’ I knew this was going to be my next film,” said Shim. “So many aspects of this project felt serendipitous, and it seemed impossible for me to get these characters out of my mind.”
Shim’s “Riceboy Sleeps” won the Platform Section prize at the Toronto festival last year and tells the story of a Korean immigrant single mother raising her teenage son in Canada. Shim was born in Seoul and moved to Vancouver as a child. He now lives between Canada and Korea.
Anthology Studios is the Korean company behind “Cobweb,” the Kim Jee-woo film that premiered in Cannes and recently began its commercial theatrical career in Korea. The company is currently filming Kim’s “The Second Sister” as a series.
Anonymous (“The Revenant,” “True Detective”) recently released Netflix series “The Stranger” starring Joel Edgerton, “Swan Song” on Apple TV+, “Worth” for Netflix and “Stillwater” for Focus Features. Its upcoming documentary features include an untitled China-based “Mistress Dispeller” film.
