“You see them in TV dramas, you hear [about] them from people around you, or in the media. Without context, telling these stories in a film could seem forced. Because this is a commercial film, I tried to focus on how to make it entertaining.”

A professional footballer whose career was derailed after he assaulted a journalist, Hong-dae agrees to coach a team of homeless players in an effort to win back public approval. He is at first indifferent to helping the team; later, as he learns about their lives, he becomes protective of them.

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“The film isn’t about Hong-dae. It’s about homeless people,” Lee insists. “We brought Hong-dae in to make the film more entertaining, because homelessness isn’t exactly the most entertaining subject, right?

“The battle I faced was in not making caricatures of the real players. There had to be some compromises here and there. All I can say is I don’t think this was received that well commercially [after being released in Korea in April].”

The Covid-19 pandemic played a huge factor in the film’s production. Lee had originally planned to shoot the tournament scenes in Colombia, but had to use Budapest, in Hungary, instead.

“They were the most important scenes, and we shot them under the worst conditions,” he says. “It was so cold you could see the players’ breaths, which we had to CGI out later.”

Working under a tight budget, Lee had to rehearse all the games in South Korea. Because the Homeless World Cup operates with a smaller pitch, he could use only two cameras; a larger crew might have caused safety issues.

“We had to shoot the games exactly the same as we rehearsed,” he says. “We weren’t able to make even little changes here and there. I think that was the hardest part for me, to not change things. To let things happen the way we rehearsed them, just because we were running behind schedule.”

Lee was subdued during our talk, perhaps marshalling energy for his premiere that evening. The NYAFF chose Dream as its centrepiece film, an honour he seems to have misgivings about.

“It’s not my job to be satisfied with each and every project that I do,” he says. “If you don’t know the context of this story, you might perceive it as too typical. Audiences aren’t obligated to provide themselves with that context before they see it. But without that information, they might think this is just another homeless story.

“That’s something I still think about – whether the way I’m telling or delivering the story could have been different. That does give me pause.”

Some of the film’s harshest material deals with the organisations and companies who try to take advantage of the homeless players, such as sponsors, who gain publicity by promising to help, only to quietly withdraw their pledges later. When a team official asks a bank officer for a donation, he answers, “Why would we do that?”

Everyone surrounding the team is out for something, whether or not it helps the homeless. Even the documentary filmmakers look for “plot twists” to help their script. When Hong-dae questions her tactics, So-min replies, “Do you think we’d get this story organically in two months?”

“I want to say my intent wasn’t to criticise anyone outright,” Lee says. “What we depicted in the film, that’s actual reality. That’s how people act. It’s just a fact of life. I guess as a filmmaker I tried to introduce these stories as they were, and are. It’s up to the viewers what to make of them.”

The director screened Dream for the players and the original documentary filmmakers, and was gratified when they told him the movie felt true to their own experiences.

“There were some tears in the audience,” he says.

That may be because Lee took the time to explore how the homeless lived off the pitch.

“Going into this film, my intentions were that I didn’t want one particular character to stand out in the narrative,” he says. “Balancing that out between all the characters, that was definitely something I had in mind.”

What Lee does in Dream is find ways to individualise the players and develop them beyond stereotypes. He credits the cast with doing this, but it’s really his sensitivity and empathy that bring them to life.

“To give you an analogy, I would say that the homeless players in this film, they’re people who have been sort of temporarily herded out of the fences of society,” he says.

“A character like Hong-dae is someone who’s there on the field with them, but he’s standing right inside the fence. That gives him the proximity to really see them and be with them.

“I feel that what homeless people want is to lead ordinary lives. Because of that, I actually don’t think there is a stark distinction between people like you and me, ordinary people living ordinary lives, and the people who yearn to live ordinary lives.

“That’s what I wanted to depict, that there is not much that stands in between us.”

Dream starts streaming on Netflix on July 25.

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