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ABOUT THIS PROJECT
About the Project
My name is Deann Borshay Liem and I’m a documentary filmmaker and Korean adoptee. While traveling around the world with my previous films, First Person Plural and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, I met hundreds of Korean adoptees from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Canada. I’ve had the tremendous privilege of hearing countless stories from adoptees of all ages – sometimes heartbreaking, oftentimes funny and ironic, always inspiring. These stories cover the gamut of life experiences – from stories about searching for identity and belonging; to stories of love, loss, and discovery; to questions about “who am I” and “how did I get here?”
Geographies of Kinship presents a small handful of the amazing stories I’ve heard from around the world. We meet, for example, Estelle Cooke-Sampson, a bi-racial adoptee who revisits the orphanage where she grew up until she was adopted by an African American soldier at the age of seven. She wonders how the nuns felt about having a black child in the 1950s. Emma Anderson is a Swedish adoptee who visits Korea for the first time and unexpectedly reunites with her birth mother, discovering family secrets along the way. Meanwhile, Michael Holloway is in San Francisco when he meets his birth family via webcam on a live television show. He is shocked to discover he has an identical twin. These, and other riveting stories, serve as a springboard for exploring the history of transnational adoptions from Korea, from the 1950s to the present.
We have already started development of the project, collected some archival material and shot some interviews. I was thrilled recently to receive development funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities which is now enabling us to complete archival footage research, write a script, consult with scholars and experts, and edit a fundraising reel. We will be done with these important steps in the Fall.
We are now asking for contributions via Kickstarter so that we can continue our momentum and complete the production (shooting) phase of the film by following our film’s participants on their individual journeys. Your support will help us get all the elements we need for the film so we can actually start editing and make what I know will be a fantastic film.
Geographies of Kinship presents a small handful of the amazing stories I’ve heard from around the world. We meet, for example, Estelle Cooke-Sampson, a bi-racial adoptee who revisits the orphanage where she grew up until she was adopted by an African American soldier at the age of seven. She wonders how the nuns felt about having a black child in the 1950s. Emma Anderson is a Swedish adoptee who visits Korea for the first time and unexpectedly reunites with her birth mother, discovering family secrets along the way. Meanwhile, Michael Holloway is in San Francisco when he meets his birth family via webcam on a live television show. He is shocked to discover he has an identical twin. These, and other riveting stories, serve as a springboard for exploring the history of transnational adoptions from Korea, from the 1950s to the present.
We have already started development of the project, collected some archival material and shot some interviews. I was thrilled recently to receive development funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities which is now enabling us to complete archival footage research, write a script, consult with scholars and experts, and edit a fundraising reel. We will be done with these important steps in the Fall.
We are now asking for contributions via Kickstarter so that we can continue our momentum and complete the production (shooting) phase of the film by following our film’s participants on their individual journeys. Your support will help us get all the elements we need for the film so we can actually start editing and make what I know will be a fantastic film.
I wanted to let you know that on Wednesday, June 20th, we are launching a 
I agree that qualifiers should be used rather than blanketing something or someone and all of adoption in discourse. A qualifier would have been suitable here because it's not entirely true. There are indeed *many* instances where adoption has caused the loss and separation of mothers and children.
As an adoptee and feminist, I have long been concerned with the U.S. obsession of "righting" the "illicit" childbearing of impoverished and/or unwed mothers by adoption--something that came about after careful marketing and the creation of a supply and demand system in the domestic industry in the United States. In the 1970's, for every one "unwed mother" who might give her baby up for adoption, there were ten prospective adoptive couples waiting to adopt (that ratio has since skyrocketed astronomically) with few facilitators and institutions at the time disagreeing that an adoption wasn't the only option. This system stacked against vulnerable, young, women did in fact cause them to lose their babies to adoption. The need for adoptions to happen as, second to marriage, the only way for a woman to "redeem" unwed childbearing drove the losses of over one million women. These are losses the blossoming industry at the time absolutely caused.
The over one-million U.S. women, and who knows how many worldwide, victimized by this system should not be dismissed. Their children were also victims. How can we dismiss them or tell them how to feel about it all either?
I know you've heard the voices of these mothers. What they say is true. My mother was treated very much like this in the 1980's. The second she walked into the agency, the decision was already made for her. Adoption was the agency's #1 priority and so many absolutely repugnant things happened to her, I, and my adoptive parents, just so adoption was the end that justified the agencies means.
Not every person, mother, family, or adoptee shares that experience. But we cannot dismiss them. I don't want my mother dismissed because her loss to adoption--because of adoption--isn't nice to think about because that's not fair. She was one of those women people use as examples of those who don't want their babies, she was raped. She loved me. She wanted me. I don't "pine" that I wasn't kept. I "pine" because of her horrific experiences--because she's a human being, and my mother, and no one should have to be treated that way.
I don't blame my adoption, adoptive parents, adoptive parents as a whole, adoption workers, original parents, or anyone else for any problem that I've ever had. But I do expect adoption to be accountable for the reprehensible amount of losses it, in itself, causes to orphans, foster children, youth adoptees, adult adoptees, original families, and adoptive families. I'm gladly a "whiner" for the cause of accountability ;-)
My point is that the facts are that a child was conceived, in any manner (marriage, unwed premarital sex, rape, incest, IVF, etc) and then adopted in any manner, that adoption does not CAUSE the loss and separation. A life has been produced, and no matter how it was brought into being, babies and children are in the world having already suffered loss and separation.
It is these and other conditions that CAUSE separation/loss not the other way around. It may be death of one or both parents, it may be extreme poverty, it could be the mother was forced by the societal and family lack of support, or she just did not want to be a mother yet. Rape or incest, and a decision not to abort or lack of facilities or religion may prevent turning to abortion. There are many Causes for the separation.
AGAIN, this is Post conception and relinquishment phases. Demand for children to be adopted did not Cause pregnancy and male preference did they? No. "Supply" is over abundant for many factors, in different ways over the years it changed as in the USA fewer women gave up their children. Single motherhood became more acceptable by society in many countries (one factor). It is a clear indication that THE RESULTING adoption both Domestic and International is that there is a huge SUPPLY. Not Demand 'causing' the Supply. YOU SEE? You prove my point, that it is not the cause but the Effect of the huge SUPPLY that led to the marketing and some abuses within the system. THIS I AGREE WITH, that abuse HAVE and DO occur.
I can agree with those who are upset about the extreme viewpoints (i.e. "forever families", Christian zealous motivations to adopt and save a child"). There are also problems of the Process that international adoption has undergone and In-Country adoptions are still unregulated in Sending Countries. Non-Hague signatory countries are still allowed to send orphans, so the Hague Conventions are worthless and cannot be enforced.