Ever since he was a boy, kogonada has wondered what it would feel like to not exist. After Yang, the writer-director-editor’s second feature, explores this preoccupation directly. Set in a serene sci-fi future (one with a fantastic global nightly dance-off), it charts a small family’s struggle to process the loss of their android companion. Greeting a new world without the lifelike appliance, whom they’d come to love and value, each family member grieves him in their own way.

As in Columbus, his 2017 debut, After Yang finds kogonada entwining life’s transience with architecture that quietly endures. The family’s overcast, open-concept home reflects their malaise, even as a tree grows at its center.

A South Korean-born, American-raised Linklater and other filmmaking greats, kogonada has more recently emerged as a formidable, philosophically minded aesthete in his own right. And yet, as a nine-year-old growing up in the Midwest, without the language of cinema at his disposal, he re that questions of presence and absence—the notion he’ll one day be swallowed up by nothingness—kept him awake at night.

“I was on the floor of my room, thinking about what it felt like before I was born, and then realizing, ‘Oh, there was no feeling involved in that,’” recalls the filmmaker. “And, really, it was devastating. I being in tears and talking to my dad, and he just said, ‘Go play,’ but I could never escape this recognition that there was a time when I didn’t exist—and, inevitably, that there is going to be another time when I don’t exist.”

This existential tension—between ephemerality and permanence, void and volume—governs both of the feature films kogonada has made to date. Columbus mapped its characters’ exploration of their rich inner lives against the vast exteriors of one Indiana town, an unlikely oasis for modernist architecture. After Yang, meanwhile, sees through the eyes of both Jake (Colin Farrell), an emotionally withdrawn tea-shop owner, and Yang (Justin H. Min), a robot whose recorded memories reveal a more soulful depth than Jake had understood.

“As much as it’s sci-fi and there’s some technology, it’s not those questions I’m asking,” says kogonada. “It goes back to something human. Once you’re on, whether you’re a tech or a human, and you know that off is an option, how do you contend? How do you find meaning there?”

Indeed, despite its futuristic elements, kogonada describes After Yang as primarily a domestic drama. Searching Yang’s memory banks, which appear as shimmering constellations, Jake becomes aware of emotional distances between himself, his wife Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), and their adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja)—and certainly between himself and Yang, who had grown to be something like a son.

It’s been five years since Columbus premiered to critical attention at the Sundance Film Festival, announcing kogonada’s arrival as a feature filmmaker after his years of closely examining the work of others. (The elusive director’s assumed name pays stylized tribute to Yasujirō Ozu’s frequent screenwriter Kôgo Noda.)

In searching for a path forward after Columbus, kogonada came across ‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’, a sliver of a short story by Alexander Weinstein, after being turned on to the author’s 2016 collection Children of the New World by producer Theresa Park. Taken with the story’s ideas of artificial intelligence and impermanence, he set about adapting it.

A24 soon came aboard to produce, with Farrell g on to star. At some point along the way, between the initial formation of such high-profile partnerships and the film’s Cannes premiere last year, kogonada realized what a significant leap for his career—and what an evolution in his life—After Yang represented.

He has mixed feelings about this but generally accepts that any newfound prominence will simply require him to renegotiate his relationship with his chosen medium, as he’s often done throughout his career.

Of first discovering film all those years ago, kogonada recalls, “You have such enthusiasm, and you feel like it’s the answer to something.” François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows was one movie that awakened him to the power of cinema. Ozu’s Good Morning remains a lodestar for his work.

Kogonada poured all the potentiality he felt at that time into Columbus; Haley Lu Richardson’s character in that film, he says, was just beginning the search for meaning that he believes to be at the root of existence.

After Yang, on the other hand, explores a more somber acceptance: of absence that manifests all at once, before one can prepare for it. The film’s sense of mourning resonates with kogonada on multiple levels—including professionally, in of his current relationship with film.

“There comes this inevitable time—maybe you become a critic, and it becomes a job—when [film] just loses some element,” he explains. “That feeling is something that I still wrestle with. I love film. I’m in this moment where I get to make it, which is dumbfounding to me. How do I keep my relationship with this thing that I love and that has so much meaning in my life?”

As kogonada speaks, a black cat slinks along the top of the shelf behind him, past a dedicated Ozu section that includes Criterion editions of Shochiku box set. The cat curls up in front of Criterion’s Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films 1954–1975. A lighter-colored tabby, meanwhile, stalks across the back of his sofa, brushing up against the filmmaker.

Currently, kogonada has two dogs and two cats, who generally keep to separate sections of the house. “I always used to just identify with dogs,” he says. “But, man, these last few years, I’ve really learned to appreciate what cats offer.”

He tries not to play favorites, but the cats make no such effort. One in particular rarely leaves his side. “For my birthday, my wife and boys put on a shirt this cat that I just call my best friend,” he reveals. “He’s with me all the time and, whenever I’m working, he finds a place in my lap.”

All of this is new for kogonada. “I never thought I would be a cat person,” he its. “I am so much a cat person now.”

This is not the only recent development he mentions. Kogonada has become savvier with social media during the pandemic and especially enjoys Letterboxd. “I sneak on there all the time,” he enthuses. “As a cinephile, I love the conversation of cinema and films. And in the age where things are streaming and it’s all gotten a little fragmented, I do think that Letterboxd has become a hub, and a real place for me to hear what the conversation is.”

Before Columbus, the filmmaker had been famed for his work as an archival critic. Elegant and incisive, his video essays celebrated visual storytelling, saluting the fearful symmetry of Kubrick’s one-point perspective and the spirituality of Bresson’s preoccupation with hand gestures.

One essay, ‘Ozu // ageways’, was appended with this insight: “The films of Ozu are filled with people walking through alleys and hallways: the in-between spaces of modern life. This is where Ozu resides. In the transitory. It’s what he values as a filmmaker. Alleys are not an opportunity for suspense but for age.”

For kogonada, Ozu is a source of particular inspiration. Their films both explore the related Japanese concepts of mono no aware (an awareness of, and sensitivity towards, impermanence) and mu (the idea of nothingness as presence), whose single character is inscribed on Ozu’s grave. Carefully composed dramas of domestic tranquility, Ozu’s films contemplate the seismic emotions roiling beneath the surface of everyday life.

“[He’s] really deep in my being,” says kogonada. Like Columbus before it, After Yang is informed by many of Ozu’s most famous techniques, from low, static camera angles (as if to suggest being seated on a tatami mat) to cutaway shots of scenery that express feeling through the ‘faces’ of objects or landscapes rather than those of human beings (these are often referred to as “pillow shots”).

“Typically, in the tradition of Japanese art, you show a cherry blossom—or, in America, you show a tree that has fall leaves on it—to convey the absence or the temporality of life,” says the filmmaker.

“If you deal with presence and absence, the thing about architecture is it shapes absence,” says kogonada. “It shapes space. Without it, those spaces are invisible. They’re always there, but we can’t feel them.”

At this point, kogonada mentions Columbus, and the gap it studies in the brick façade of Edward Charles Bassett’s Columbus City Hall, where two cantilevered walls extend toward each other without meeting. “That space in between has always existed, before those buildings came up, but you could never see,” he explains. “Architecture can frame absence in such a way that these things become visible; I think that’s always true, whether one is making a film about it or not.”

Architecturally smaller-scale than Columbus, After Yang is a film of richly constructed interior worlds. Save for a few bucolic outdoor scenes glimpsed in Yang’s memories, all its production-designed settings carry an air of solemn domesticity and ennui, from the driverless eco-fusion cars whose reflective windows show nature and cityscape ing by in a translucent stream, to the unattended technology museum where exhibits are partially illuminated and only half-understood.

Yang’s family home is a sanctum of exposed wood and open space. Sliding glass walls and low-lit hallways add to the atmosphere of curated bliss. Kogonada had such a specific vision for the house that the production considered building it, but he already knew that Eichler homes—synonymous with a mid-century style aligned with modernism—could supply the elegant, indoor-outdoor design that he envisioned. Only three were built outside California. As luck would have it, one was on the market in upstate New York; the production reached out.

“This particular house was pretty abandoned,” recalls kogonada. “They had nothing. It was just white paint and concrete floors.” Producers paid for the homeowners to put in white-oak floors, remove a wall between the kitchen and dining room, and undertake additional landscaping work. The filmmaker’s intent wasn’t just to beautify the Eichler, but to open it up, to convey emotional gulfs separating his characters and the flow of time around them.

“When the characters talk about tea, they talk about capturing a moment in time,” he says. “All these other things [in After Yang] are countering a world of distraction. Often, it’s art. Often, it’s paying a certain kind of attention, whether to architecture or tea or a person.”

Plants thrive in After Yang, crowding the sides of a bench where Jake and Mika sit; behind them, the silhouette of a white tree is stenciled onto brick. “As much as we show this sometimes dystopian vision of the future, I don’t even know if those are sustainable,” says kogonada. “There’s no green. If it’s all concrete, and everything’s a city, I don’t know if there’s an actual environment. I wanted to consider a future in which we need to have trees, and we need to have plants, in order to sustain ourselves here.”

In another Ozu-inspired touch, the filmmaker stages video chats between Jake and Kyra by filming the characters head-on, never showing any of the screens that separate them. “In many ways, technology in my life can be a real distraction in keeping me from this thing that I sometimes want to not think about, which is the ing of time,” he says. “I wanted tech that felt invisible. We talked about it from the beginning.”

“When I look in the mirror, I know I’m fully Asian, but I also know that I’ve digested a certain kind of culture, a certain kind of whiteness as well,” kogonada explains. “I wonder what part of that is authentically me and what is something that I have internalized in a way that is an artifice.”

In this way, kogonada can relate to Yang’s dislocation, which haunts the android and seems to drive his relationship with a mysterious young woman (Haley Lu Richardson). Jake eventually unearths a memory of the pair at a concert, where an unseen singer (voiced by Mitski) performs ‘Glide’, from Shunji Iwai’s cult film All About Lily Chou-Chou. “The mood of that film haunted me when I saw it,” says kogonada. “I’ve never gotten over it. I think it resides in me.”

A film about an enigmatic pop star and her disaffected listeners, Lily Chou-Chou reverberates with melancholic yearning—for community but also self-knowledge. “We all want a sense of belonging, whatever that might be,” kogonada says. “I think there are constructive ways to wrestle with it.” Making movies like After Yang works in this way for the director, but he also remarks that his home life has lately been even more illuminating.

“I don’t think any cinema has compared to having children suddenly, and recognizing that I’m seeing time unfold,” he says. “My own parents aging, me aging, my pets, trees: all of that is just a constant reminder.” For kogonada, seeking answers to life’s questions is the essence of existing, and he is growing less afraid of what he might find. After Yang signifies both his commitment to the search and an appreciation of what he’s uncovered already.

“When I was younger, I did feel like truth was out there, that I was supposed to climb a mountain and find some guru,” he reflects. “But there was a real moment when I realized, ‘Oh, no, god, truth is all around me.’ It’s right in front of my face. The real thing is seeing it. The real thing is whatever is in that space between.”