Side by Side: Out of a South Korean Orphanage and Into the World
Immigration
•
38m
Directed by Glenn Morey and Julie Morey, co-directors • Documentary • 2018 • 38 minutes
What happens when the lives of children are reset 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.
Up Next in Immigration
-
La Camioneta
Directed by Mark Kendall • Documentary • 2021 • 71 minutes
Every day dozens of decommissioned school buses are sold at auction and depart the United States on a southward migration that carries them to Guatemala, where they are repaired, repainted, and reconstructed as the brightly-colored camio...
-
My Motherland (w/ Fanny Ardant)
Directed by Benoît Cohen • Drama • With Fanny Ardant, Nawid Elham, Pierre Deladonchamps • 2025 • 91 minutes
Celebrated actress Fanny Ardant stars as “France”, a well-to-do widow living alone in her Parisian apartment. When she hears on the radio that an NGO is pairing homeless refugees with thos...
-
The Underground Orchestra
Directed by Heddy Honigmann • Documentary • 1999 • 108 minutes
THE UNDERGROUND ORCHESTRA is a glorious documentary profile of musicians who play on the sidewalks of Paris and in the Metro. Filmmaker Heddy Honigmann (METAL AND MELANCHOLY and O AMOR NATURAL), illuminates the lives and music of a r...
