Approved For Adoption
– This remarkable animated documentary traces the unconventional upbringing of the filmmaker Jung Heni..
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. Animated vignettes – some humorous and some poetic – track Jung from the day he first meet 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 above all, inspiring in the capacity of the human heart.
06 Jun 2012
French, Korean
European on the heads side, Asian on the tails side. Cartoonist. 42 years old according to his civil status, Jung prefers to place his birth at the age of 5, when a policeman found him wandering alone on the streets of Seoul. He is one of those 200 000 adopted Koreans spread around the world. Jung decided to return, for the first time, in South Korea, in order to breath the air of his home country, tread the land of his ancestors, and maybe find traces of his biological mother. This trip of reconciliation with his roots and with himself, shot as a documentary, leads our character to recall in animation
3 wins & 4 nominations.
$4,014