We all fall in love with places we have never lived in. Five young Koreans come to Austria to study music and dance, each carrying their own version of the country. Then they arrive.
For many Koreans, Austria exists long before they ever set foot there. It exists in Mozart, in the New Year’s Concert, in opera houses and ballrooms, in Salzburg and the Alps, in Sisi, in waltzes, in The Sound of Music. An Austria shaped by music, cinema, tourism and imagination. An Austria that is real — and completely unreal. Because the Austria you visit for three days is not the Austria you live in.
Just as K-dramas can create an idea of Korean romance that feels entirely true to someone watching from the other side of the world, even though Koreans themselves know that life does not work like that.
Five young Koreans arrive in Vienna to study. Slowly they discover the Austria behind the picture: the beautiful one, the difficult one, the funny one, the lonely one. The one with the mountains and Mozart — and the one with the night buses, the paperwork, the tiny apartments, the awkward silences and the people who have no idea what your bow means.
The surprise is not that Austria is different from what they imagined. The surprise is that both versions are true.
And while they discover Austria, Austria begins to discover them. The clichés work in both directions. For the Austrians they meet, Korea is K-pop, K-dramas, Seoul, flawless skin, technology and discipline. Both sides arrive carrying stories. The series begins when those stories collide with real people.
At first they think the hardest part will be the language. It isn’t. The real problems are invisible. A bow that means respect in Korea means nothing in Vienna. Silence can be politeness — or anger. A direct answer can be honesty — or rudeness. A favour can be friendship — or an obligation. A call from family can be love — or pressure.
And falling in love makes all of it worse, because cultural difference hurts most when you care about someone. One wants freedom, the other wants loyalty. One thinks giving space means love; the other hears rejection. Nobody is wrong. Nobody is entirely right.
Across six episodes they move from strangers to friends, from friends to something closer, and finally to the question every one of them has been avoiding: who am I when nobody else gets to decide?
They arrive separately and become friends almost by accident. Then they fall in love, compete, disappoint each other, protect each other and hurt each other. Discovering another culture is easy. Discovering another person is much harder.
Music is what brought them here, but it is not the beautiful backdrop to the story. It is where they fight, where they compete, where they fail, where they are judged — and where they learn the one thing language cannot teach them: how to listen.
Five different voices do not become one voice. They become music because they remain different. That is what Austria teaches them, and perhaps what they teach Austria in return.
More than thirty years ago a Korean music student married into our family. She is not an isolated case. Vienna’s Korean community includes a good number of musicians who stayed and started families here — not a coincidence but a pattern, running for decades, that almost nobody tells stories about.
The RitzlFilm office is around the corner from the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, the largest music university in the world, where some three thousand students from more than seventy countries study. Korean and Chinese are what we hear on the street outside.
This series did not come out of a market analysis. It came out of the window.