The agency is restricted by law from revealing details of her parents, but are allowed to send them up to three telegrams per year notifying interest from adoptees.
On learning that her mother has not responded to all three telegrams, Freddie returns to her biological father's family for a three-night stay.
Her father repeatedly makes drunken calls to her and sends her text messages in Korean regretting giving her up and promising a new life in South Korea.
At a surprise birthday party thrown for her, she reveals to a co-worker who is also an adoptee that her mother has finally responded to several follow-up telegrams to say she is not interested in meeting her.
Freddie learns that her biological mother has responded positively to another telegram from Hammond, sent by a sympathetic employee in violation of policy.
Director Davy Chou got the idea for the film from a similar experience with his friend, also a Korean French woman, Laure Badufle, in her 20s adopted from South Korean biological parents, who traveled with him to South Korea during the filming of his 2011 documentary Golden Slumbers to meet her biological father and grandmother for the first time.
Not knowledgeable in Korean culture or the experience of adoption at first, he researched these elements by talking to his friend and other adoptees as well as reading books, identifying some similarities with his own life as the son of immigrants from Cambodia who had left the country before the Khmer Rouge took over.
He further developed her characterization through conversations with Park, which "challenged some of his notions as a male director and helped him understand how a young French woman might respond to aspects of Korea's highly patriarchal society.
The website's consensus reads: "Sensitively attuned to its protagonist's quest, Return to Seoul uses one woman's story to explore universal truths about the human condition.
"[19] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 87 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".