Made in Korea: A One-Way Ticket Seoul-Amsterdam?
Made in Korea: Een enkeltje Seoul-Amsterdam?
When he was three months old, In-Soo Radstake arrived at Schiphol Airport. Just like the eight other orphans in the same aircraft, he had been adopted by a Dutch couple. Radstake never looked into his Korean background while growing up and 25 years later he still feels 100% Dutch. But this certainty comes to an end when he decides to look for his former travelling companions.
He falls in love with one of them and finds out that most of the adoptees he had travelled with had gone looking for their roots in recent years. Some of them had found their birthparents and built up a unique bond with their Korean family. Among them his girlfriend, who starts to feel more Korean than Dutch.
The director eventually decides to travel to Seoul with his girlfriend and look for his birthmother. While he hopes to find her, the journey is for him largely a quest into his own identity. Conversations with his girlfriend and others form the main thread in this rite of passage, until the director finds himself in a new chapter in his own story when he takes part in a Korean TV programme to find long lost family and friends. In the end a woman comes forward. But Radstake’s documentary debut does not have a clear, sentimental ending: this is a film on searching, not on finding. (SdH)
Film details
- Country of production
- Netherlands
- Year
- 2006
- Festival edition
- IFFR 2007
- Length
- 73"
- Medium/Format
- Betacam Digi PAL
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