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 AMERICAN ADOPTION CONGRESS

In Conjunction with

 PACER
(Post Adoption Center for Education and Research
 

Presents

VOICES OF ADOPTION:
SPEAKING OUR TRUTH, RESTORING OUR RIGHTS

 The 2010 AAC SPRING CONFERENCE

 MARCH 18 through MARCH 21, 2010
 

 SHERATON GRAND SACRAMENTO
1230 J Street
Sacramento, California, 95814
(916) 447-1700
 

Conference Chair:
Donnie Davis

www.americanadoptioncongress.org

 

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San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival

  March 11-20, 2010

It’s film festival season again.  This year’s 28th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival opens its 10 day run on Thursday March 11, 2010 and includes two excellent adoption-related films which are so good that they have both been selected for the prestigious PBS award-winning series Point of View.  Buy your tickets to see these films online in advance, or you can try on the day of the event at the screening venue.  We will have PACER events related to both films later this spring.

“In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee” (world premiere)  
Berkeley director Deann Borshay Liem journeys back to Korea to explore her true identity  after living with the knowledge that the name on her adoption papers “Cha Jung Hee,” given to her at age 8, is not her true identity at all.  Liem was adopted at age 8 from the The Sun Duck orphanage in South Korea in the 1960’s and sent to America as “Cha Jung Hee” for her eager American adoptive family--Borshays.  She grew up as “Deann” in this very loving family and lived her life quite successfully.  She ultimately became the executive director of the National Asian American Telecommunications Association.  She actually forgot who she was before she came to America and everything about her life in Korea.  Through dreams and events that jarred long-suppressed childhood memories, the urge to know her story became an obsession.  She began to believe that she was both victim and complicit in a complex hoax that altered the course of her life and the life of the real Cha Jung Hee, whose place she had taken in America.   The film captures her attempts to heal as she pieces together her identity with what facts she can find and people she meets along the way.  This is a sequel to her 1999 Emmy award winning “First Person Plural.”   

Screens—FRI 3.12 (6:45 PM, Clay Theatre, San Francisco), SAT 3.13 (3:30 PM, PFA, Berkeley), SUN 3.21 (6:45 PM, CAMERA, San Jose).
 

 “Wo Ai Ni Mommy” (world premiere)
Director Stephanie Wang-Breal breaks important ground when she travels to Guangzhou, China with adoptive mother Donna Sadowsky of Long, Island, New York, to meet her 8 year-old daughter Sui Yong (“Faith”), an orphan, for the first time.  Wang-Breal acts as a fly-on-the wall documentarian, capturing the moment by moment complexities of forging a loving and healthy bond with an older child from another culture.   As the film unfolds, nothing is held back--- from the first awkward hug, to moments of ambivalence, sheer fright and acting out, to meeting Faith’s Chinese foster family, to traveling back to Long Island where Faith meets the rest of her new family, to her subsequent integration into life in America.  Faith is the newest member of an outspoken Jewish family with two older brothers and a younger Chinese sister who was adopted into the Sadowsky at age 14 months.  Language, food, habits—everything Faith has known as young Chinese girl vanish.  Over the course of 17 months, we gradually witness her transformation into a lively, outspoken American child who has nearly forgotten her native language but wants desperately to communicate by Skype with her beloved foster sister in China.  We also marvel at the courage of the Sadowsky family who allow a camera to roll uncensored through this intimate and often raw experience.  What emerges is a very realistic account of the hard work and love it takes to pull adoption off on a daily basis.  This is a deeply moving and intelligent film that probes the very heart of what family means while exploring issues of identity, cultural assimilation and bonding.

Screens-- SUN 3.14 (3:30 PM, Kabuki, San Francisco), WED 3.17 (7:00 PM, Kabuki San Francisco).

 

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PACER  •  Post Adoption Center for Education and Research  •  pacer-adoption.org

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