Screen/Society--Tournées French Film Festival--"Approved for Adoption" [7:30pm]

Monday, February 2, 2015 - 2:30pm to 4:00pm
Screen/Society--Tournées French Film Festival--"Approved for Adoption" [7:30pm]

Film Screening:

Approved for Adoption/Couleur de peau: Miel

(Laurent Boileau & Jung, 2012, 74 min, France/Belgium/South Korea, in French and Korean with English subtitles, Color, Blu-Ray)

-- Introduced by Prof. Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (AMES)
-- Discussion to follow

This remarkable animated documentary traces the unconventional upbringing of the filmmaker Jung Henin, one of thousands of Korean children adopted by Western families after the end of the Korean War. It is the story of a boy stranded between two cultures. Sepia-toned animated vignettes - some humorous and some poetic - track Jung from the day he first meets his new blond siblings, through elementary school, and into his teenage years, when his emerging sense of identity begins to create fissures at home and ignite the latent biases of his adoptive parents. The filmmaker tells his story using his own animation intercut with snippets of super-8 family footage and archival film. The result is an animated memoir like no other: clear-eyed and unflinching, humorous and wry, and above all, inspiring in the capacity of the human heart.

--Winner of the Grand Prize at the 2013 Japan Media Arts Festival!

Cost: Free and Open to the Public

Sponsors: The Center for French and Francophone Studies, the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI) and the Department of Romance Studies. Made possible by the FACE Foundation and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

Bryan Center Griffith Film Theater