Kim Do-yeon Breaks Down at BIFF Over the Audition Answer That Changed Everything

At the press conference for Dora at the 31st Busan International Film Festival on the 9th, Kim Do-yeon wept while recounting a moment from her first audition that, she said, permanently changed how she understood the character she would spend months inhabiting. It is the kind of detail that tends to surface at BIFF press events, but the directness of it was striking.

The film, directed by Jeong Juri and her third feature, loosely inverts the premise of Freud's famous case study of a young woman dismissed as hysterical. Where Freud's analysis ends in failure and his patient is recorded as a deceiver, Jeong's Dora is reimagined as someone capable of healing herself. The film follows a family that retreats to a summer seaside villa, where eighteen-year-old Dora, who suffers from a severe and fluctuating skin condition, encounters love for the first time and finds her world slowly destabilized. Kim Do-yeon plays Dora opposite Japanese actor Ando Sakura, with Song Sae-byeok, Choi Won-young, Ok Ja-yeon, and Han Hyun-min rounding out the cast.

The audition that reframed everything

At the press event, held at the Busan Cinema Center in Haeundae, Kim Do-yeon described receiving an excerpt of the script during her first audition without any surrounding context. The scene in question involved a doctor's visit, and the question of whether Dora was being truthful or evasive was genuinely ambiguous on the page. She asked director Jeong directly: "Is Dora lying right now?"

Jeong's answer was four words in effect: Dora always tells the truth.

"My head went a little numb and I felt a real shock," Kim Do-yeon said, her voice faltering as she recalled the moment. She paused briefly before continuing. "I immediately thought, that must be why Dora is so lonely and so exhausted. Even I, playing Dora in the audition, from inside her perspective, was wondering whether she was lying. So what must it have felt like to actually be her?"

That question, she said, became the core of her preparation. The work was less about technique than about fundamentally shifting her own way of thinking. "Watching Dora from the outside and truly knowing her inner state are completely different," she explained. "Training myself to make that shift was the most necessary and the hardest thing I did."

A text she grew to love

Kim Do-yeon noted that her first read of the script left her feeling distant from the character. Dora's choices, she said, felt foreign to her own instincts. But working through the script sentence by sentence with Jeong gradually closed that gap. "Each line felt beautiful as I understood it," she said. "The process of understanding made me happy."

Production brought its own particular texture. The cinematographer came from France, Ando Sakura from Japan, and Kim Do-yeon described the set as an environment where she was constantly learning. "I've never been this absorbed in something," she said, calling it one of the more valuable experiences of her career to date. Ando, she added, was a steadying presence throughout shooting: "I leaned on her a lot."

On the more demanding scenes, including those involving nudity, Kim Do-yeon said her understanding of Dora made the decision straightforward. "Even though it was my first time doing that kind of scene, when I read the script, I accepted it naturally." She credited director Jeong with creating the conditions for that trust, describing a working relationship in which Jeong consistently checked in on her emotional state.

Dora's journey to Busan

Dora had its world premiere at the Directors' Fortnight section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival before being officially selected for BIFF's Gala Presentation. For Kim Do-yeon, who said this was her first time attending BIFF, the festival brings a particular set of nerves: the film's first public screening and its first audience Q&A are both imminent. "I'm nervous," she said plainly, "but I'm happy to be on this journey."

This is also her first title role, a significant threshold for any actor, and especially for one who described the process as requiring her to rebuild her assumptions about how a person thinks, speaks, and means what they say. A domestic release is being targeted for next year.

The 31st Busan International Film Festival, which this year became the first edition to be elevated to FIAPF A-list status and also the first to open on a Tuesday, runs through the 15th at venues around the Busan Cinema Center. A total of 315 films from 59 countries are screening across official and community programs.