In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee

NEW DOCS

Imagine that your birth date and name are not really yours, but someone else’s, someone whose place you’ve secretly taken. Filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem, who in 1966 was adopted from South Korea by American parents under another girl’s name, sets out forty years later on a cinematic quest to find the “real” Cha Jung Hee. She returns to her old orphanage in South Korea, sifts through records, and tracks down several women her age named Cha Jung Hee, providing the film with some of its most memorable moments. But more than personal odyssey, the film takes on the history of adoptions from Korea as well as the thorny subject of transracial international adoptions in general. Moving interviews with Korean adoptees from around the world are interspersed with Korean War footage, as well as family footage that shows the filmmaker arriving in the U.S. literally in Cha Jung Hee’s shoes, to offer us a provocative exploration on the tangled themes of memory, deception, and identity.  AK

Director

Deann Borshay Liem

Producers

Deann Borshay Liem, Charlotte Lagarde

Editor

Vivien Hillgrove

Cinematographers

Michael Chin, Byung Ho Lee

Release Year

2010

Festival Year

2010

Country

United States, South Korea

Run Time

62 minutes