Side by Side: Out of a South Korean Orphanage and Into the World

"An international journey through 9 stories of abandonment, relinquishment, orphanages, and inter-country adoption.

2018

38 mins

What happens when the lives of children are re-set by adoption, sent to grow up in new countries and families of a different race, language, and culture? Nine Korean adoptees reveal a stark and often emotionally fraught journey representing decades of inter-country adoption.

Synopsis

What happens when the lives of children are re-set by adoption, sent to grow up in new countries and families of a different race, language, and culture? To find out, the Side by Side project spent 10 years filming 100 Korean adoptees, now living in 7 countries around the world—an unprecedented effort to deeply understand 65+ years of inter-country adoption out of South Korea.

This short film presents the stories of 9 Korean-born, inter-country adoptees, and is composed entirely of intensely intimate, first-person narratives, filmed in Seattle, Chicago, Boston, New York City, Paris, Stockholm, Amsterdam, and Melbourne—stories of a baby violently thrown from a car at an orphanage front door, being given away to a total stranger in a train station, the identity issues of feeling like a “Martian,” the complexities of being gay and a Korean-American adoptee, reuniting with birth parents and trying to make sense of relationships with mothers and fathers they’ve never known.

Director Commentary

This short documentary film is radically unconventional, composed almost entirely of nine Korean adoptees filmed on a stark, white background. Four languages. Open captions throughout. The expected elements of the craft of filmmaking—visual storytelling, locations, b-roll—all absent.

What remains are the intimate and deeply private memories, knowledge, and stories of nine subjects, made possible by the filmmaker’s own origin story as an abandoned infant in post-war South Korea, and his adoption to the U.S. These nine adoptees are made very different by their disparate adoptive families, countries, and experiences. But they are bound forever by the singular experiences of separation from families of origin, and inter-country adoption.

No amount of filmmaking craft, in our minds, could make these stories more compelling, or these subjects more worthy of our empathy. So we left our craft at home, as we traveled the world in search of these people—9 interviews, selected out of 100 filmed in 7 countries, 16 cities, and 6 languages—all part of the greater Side by Side project and an unprecedented effort to deeply understand 65+ years of inter-country adoption out of South Korea.

In all of this, we were driven by “the danger of a single story,” as described by the author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We were inspired to minimalism by the one-house video portraits of the German photographer, Thomas Struth, and we were supported by the love and active participation of a worldwide community of inter-country adoptees out of South Korea.