Had things gone a little differently, local filmmaker Liann Kaye would likely be out promoting her first feature-length film right now. 2023’s rash of Hollywood strikes derailed that project, but Kaye found silver lining in the form of Seoul Switch, a short film she made in four days last summer. This week, after a slew of film festival screenings in the United States and Asia, Seoul Switch will make its European debut in Cannes, France, one of the preeminent film cities in the world. Ahead of that milestone, The Ticker sits down with Kaye to recap her whirlwind journey so far.

Seoul Switch tells the story of an insecure Korean-American teenager who travels to Korea and meets a famous K-pop star who just happens to look just like him. In a plot reminiscent of both The Prince and the Pauper and The Parent Trap, the pair decide to swap lives. Clocking in at just 13 minutes, the short ends just as the titular “switch” takes place. It’s a proof-of-concept for a feature-length script Kaye hopes to bring to the screen in the next year or two.

Kaye didn’t expect to end up here. Though she graduated from University of Michigan’s film program in 2011, her initial plan didn’t involve pursuing narrative filmmaking.

“Both my parents are from Singapore, and when they got divorced, my mom brought us to Hawaii to live the American dream,” Kaye tells The Ticker. “I always tell everyone that my sister disappointed my parents first by becoming a rock star and not going into nursing or lawyering, or any of the rest of the predicted Asian-American paths. I had always been creative too, but I didn't want to cause more stress on the family. So, I decided to get video adjacent-jobs, rather than start making films.”

Kaye’s sister Charlene, who goes by the all-caps stage name KAYE, has released several albums and EPs and played with the likes of Coldplay, Carole King, Darren Criss, and Maggie Rogers. Liann, meanwhile, shied away from the spotlight, working behind-the-scenes jobs for the Global Citizen Festival and the Blue Man Group, and even directing her sister’s music videos. In 2019, she decided to “actually put something out that’s my words and my idea” for a change.

Seoul Switch wasn’t the first step along that path. First, Kaye made The Blessing, a mini-series “about a timid midwestern boy who wants to propose to his girlfriend but has to go through her immigrant, Chinese mother first.” Then, she wrote her first feature-length script, called Electable, about an Asian-American teenager who “becomes the mastermind behind her crush’s high school presidential campaign” – before realizing she’d be the superior candidate.

The Electable script garnered significant buzz, including praise from screenwriters like Kristen Smith (Legally Blonde, 10 Things I Hate About You) and Sofia Alvarez (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before) and high marks from The Black List, a platform that highlights the best in unproduced screenplays.

Soon, Hollywood came calling.

“That one had Kevin Hart's production company attached, and Lance Bass [of NSYNC fame] was going to play the principal,” Kaye says of Electable. “And then the writer’s strike happened, the industry contracted, and diverse stories, especially, took a hit. I realized my first feature wasn’t going to get made after all, and I had to pivot.”

The good news for Kaye, at least given the circumstances, was that she wasn’t a member of the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA), which stayed on strike from May through September last year. In other words, she was free to work, so long as she could mount a project without hiring any writers from the WGA – or any actors from the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), which commenced its own strike last July.

The key was Kevin Woo, a former member of the South Korean boy band U-KISS. Woo had the music industry experience to play Moon, the K-pop star Kaye had imagined for Seoul Switch; but was also American-born and fluent in English – perfect attributes for embodying DJ, the film’s awkward Korean-American teen. Best of all, Kaye says, Woo was branching out into acting – she sent him the Seoul Switch script after seeing him in the Broadway musical KPOP – but wasn’t yet a member of SAG.

With Woo on board, Kaye called in every favor she could to get Seoul Switch made. The biggest hurdle? Getting her hands on a state-of-the-art robotic camera rig called the Bolt, which allowed her to shoot Woo while he was Moon, and then replicate the exact same camera movements when he’d re-record the scene as DJ. The tech allowed for such seamless splicing of the footage that Kaye says many audience members “don’t realize it’s the same person playing both roles.”

Those audiences, increasingly, are scattered all over the world. Kaye showed an early cut of Seoul Switch at the Alluvion last fall, but the film had its official premiere in March at the DisOrient Asian American Film Festival in Eugene, Oregon, where it also won Best Narrative Short. Since then, it’s screened at more than a dozen film festivals, from New York to Los Angeles, all the way to festivals in Korea and Japan. Highlights so far include Best Actor and Best Editing awards from the Hollywood Shortsfest in Los Angeles; a spot in the Geena Davis-curated Bentonville Film Festival in Arkansas; and an Academy Award-qualifying screening at the Hawaii International Film Festival.

The next stop is Europe, where Seoul Switch will make its debut on Friday, November 8 as part of the Cannes Indie Shorts Awards.

As Seoul Switch’s festival run draws to a close, though, Kaye has her sights set on 2025, when she hopes to get to work on the feature-length version.

“I’ve been reading 43 Ways to Finance Your Indie Film,” she says. “I think I've come to realize that no one is going to give me a break unless I do even more of the work myself. So, it’s going to be an indie push. I’m actively fundraising, and I’m going to make the movie myself. Then I’ll do the film festival circuit again. And then, hopefully, I’ll sell it.”

Pictured: Woo (left) and Kaye (center) on the set of Seoul Switch. Photo credit: Matt Infante.