Side by Side: Out of a South Korean Orphanage and Into the World
New Day Films
•
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.
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