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).