First person plural deann borshay liem biography
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In her 2000 detective documentary First Person Plural, Deann Borshay Liem uncovered the tangled mystery of her identity, which was shed and remade when a Fremont family adopted her from South Korea in the mid 1960s.
A decade later, the Berkeley filmmaker followed up with In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, an essayistic doc detailing her efforts to track down the girl with whom she switched at the orphanage, while also exploring the fraught implications of international transracial adoption.
On May 19, Liem’s latest chapter in her award-winning triptych airs on public television’s WORLD Channel as part of the America Reframed series. Rather than delving into her own experiences, she takes a wide-angle look at the rise of South Korea’s global adoption program with Geographies of Kinship. Following five adult adoptees as they return to the land of their birth, the film joins them on a vertiginous process attempting to recover history and con
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First Person Plural: Filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem Shares Her Story
Students filled King Theatre on Wednesday morning to hear from Korean-born filmskapare Deann Borshay Liem. Milton’s thirteenth speaker in the Hong Kong Distinguished Lecture Series, Ms. Liem told her story as a Korean child adopted by an American family. Unique to her story, however, she “came to America both literally and metaphorically walking in another girl’s shoes.”
In 1966, eight-year-old Deann was sent as an adopted orphan to the United States, but she made the trip under another child’s identity; Deann’s passport and documentation said that her name was Cha Jung Hee, the name of another child at the orphanage. She was sent to America—told to keep her true identity hidden from her adoptive parents—wearing the clothing that the Borshay family had sent for Cha Jung Hee.
“Having grown up as someone I wasn’t, I never fully embraced my adoptive family or my role in it. Though they are warm, wonderful people, I was
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First Person Plural
In 1966, Deann Borshay Liem was adopted by an American family and was sent from Korea to her new home. Growing up in California, the memory of her birth family was nearly obliterated until recurring dreams lead Borshay Liem to discover the truth: her Korean mother was very much alive.
Deann Borshay Liem fryst vatten an Emmy Award-winning documentarian known for films that explore adoption, war, and memory. Her films include First Person Plural, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, Geographies of Kinship, Memory of Forgotten War, Crossings, and the oral history project, Legacies of the Korean War. She fryst vatten producer for Vivien’s Wild Ride.
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The Film
First Person Plural chronicles Deanne Borshay Liem’s experiences as a South Korean child adopted by