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A Bad Date, a Neighbour and the Comfort of Connection: 'To Us' Comes to NewCinema/Shorts+
Sometimes the smallest encounters are the ones that stay with us.
In To Us, a new Australian short from Korean-Australian filmmaker Jeno Kim, a disappointing date night leaves a woman searching for a little comfort. She finds it, unexpectedly, in her neighbour.
Running just seven and a half minutes, To Us is a compact, intimate story about disappointment, loneliness and those fleeting moments of human connection that can make an otherwise terrible night feel a little less terrible. Described as “part mid-life crisis, part mundane wallowing,” the film now comes to Whush as part of the NewCinema/Shorts+ showcase.
There are no grand stakes here. No dramatic catastrophe. Just a woman, a bad night, and another human being willing to be there.
And behind that deceptively simple premise is a real encounter that filmmaker Jeno Kim never forgot.
The Passenger Who Started It All
In 2019, years before making To Us, Kim was working as an Uber driver.
One night, a woman he remembers as being perhaps in her forties or fifties got into his car. From the circumstances, Kim sensed she was returning from some kind of dinner date.
Then, during the journey home, she began to cry.
“I could tell that it was the end of a dinner date of sorts,” Kim recalls. “As I was driving her home she actually burst into tears next to me, which broke my heart a little, and I tried to console her a bit.”
That brief encounter became the seed for To Us.
It is the sort of incident that could easily disappear into everyday life: two strangers share a car for a few minutes, something unexpectedly vulnerable happens, they reach their destination, and their lives continue in separate directions.
But for Kim, it remained.
Years later, that memory would find its way into fiction.
Mid-Life Crisis Meets Mundane Wallowing
There is something appealingly unglamorous about the way To Us describes itself.
“Part mid-life crisis, part mundane wallowing” suggests a film more interested in the emotional mess between major life events than the events themselves.
A bad date can be funny when retold the next morning. In the moment, it can feel crushing. It can expose insecurities, loneliness, ageing, expectations and the uncomfortable distance between the life somebody imagined and the one they appear to be living.
To Us finds its territory somewhere inside that space.
But Kim isn't particularly interested in telling audiences exactly what it all means.
In fact, he'd rather not.
“I enjoy making art that is in some ways ambiguous and open-ended,” he says, “and try not to force any sort of message or agenda.”
For Kim, leaving that space around a story matters. Instead of instructing viewers what to think or feel, he wants them to bring something of themselves to the characters.
“I always hope that people are able to see a little bit of themselves in the characters and story,” he says, “and also that the film makes them feel something, anything at all.”
Filmmaking Without Restraint — Budget Excepted
Kim describes filmmaking not simply as a profession, but as his “sacred creative practice and vocation.”
It is a revealing choice of words for a filmmaker who says he intends to continue making films regardless of their scale or financial return.
His writing combines imagination with lived experience, and Kim deliberately seeks a life beyond filmmaking from which those stories can emerge. His varied working background and curiosity about different people, places and industries repeatedly put him in worlds outside his own — including, of course, behind the wheel of an Uber.
That openness to chance encounters feels particularly important to To Us. The film's existence can ultimately be traced back to a stranger getting into a car on a difficult night and another stranger noticing that she was hurting.
Kim's own background similarly moves between different creative worlds. Based in Sydney on Dharug land, the Korean-Australian actor and filmmaker is a recipient of The Tarkovski Grant and has received a Los Angeles Producer's Night nomination.
His directorial debut, Ride, was selected by festivals including the Hong Kong Arthouse Film Festival, Bruges International Film Festival and Amsterdam Independent Film Festival, and later received global distribution through 7 Palms Entertainment.
As a performer, Kim has worked on projects produced by SBS, ABC, Legs On The Wall Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company.
With To Us, however, the scale is deliberately small.
Sometimes seven minutes is enough.
Finding Solace in Someone Else
To Us has already screened at the West End Film Festival (WEFF) in Brisbane, and now joins NewCinema/Shorts+ on Whush.
Its premise may be modest, but that is precisely where its potential power lies.
Cinema often searches for extraordinary circumstances in which people reveal themselves. To Us starts from the opposite direction. It looks towards the ordinary: a date that goes badly, the journey home, the wallowing afterwards, a neighbour and a conversation.
Life doesn't always provide a dramatic resolution. Sometimes nobody arrives with the right answer. Sometimes whatever is hurting still hurts in the morning.
But occasionally someone sits beside you for a while.
Perhaps that is enough.
To Us (Australia, 2025), directed by Jeno Kim, runs 7 minutes 32 seconds and will stream on Whush as part of the NewCinema/Shorts+ showcase.
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