Ounie Lecomte

Ounie Lecomte (born 1966) is a South Korean-born French film director, writer and actress. Her semi-autobiographical debut film won her a best director award at the 40th International Film Festival of India.

Life
Lecomte was born in Seoul on 17 November 1966. Her parents' marriage ended in divorce and this was not socially accepted. At the age of nine her family abandoned her. Between 1975 and 1975 she was in the Saint Paul orphanage in Seoul although she was not an orphan. She was offered for adoption, and she was adopted by a couple in France. This was not too unusual as South Korea had 160,000 legal international adoptions which was more than any other country in the 1990s. Her new parents were a pastor and his wife who lived in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Although she was by then ten she was placed in a nursery in order that she could learn French.

She studied fashion design, and she designed costumes for films. She gained her first major role when she appeared in the 1991 film about a family, Paris Awakens, which was directed by Olivier Assayas.

She wrote a filmscript based upon her own life which she started during a film writing course in 2006. Lee Chang-dong became the film's producer. It was about her early life and the trauma of her adoption. Lecomte found that she had forgotten how to speak in Korean fluently and although she tried, she could not easily regain the skill.

Her film was released in South Korea in 2009 and in 2010 it was released in France. It was shown at the Cannes Film Festival and she was awarded the Best Director's award for that film A Brand New Life, at the 40th International Film Festival of India (IFFI-2009), at Panaji, Goa in December 2009.

In 2015 she directed the film Looking for Her. The film was again related to her own life in that it deals with the issues surrounding adoption. It looks at contact with the birth parents and the rights of those involved and issues of race and it was considered more ambitious than her first film.