Deann borshay liem biography channel
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Deann Borshay Liem Reflects on ‘Crossings’ and 70 Years of Un-Ended War
It has been exactly 70 years since military commanders of the United States, North Korea, and China signed an armistice to halt active combat in the Korean War. They recommended that the corresponding governments return within 90 days to settle the question of the withdrawal of foreign troops from Korea and “the peaceful settlement of the Korean question.” But a formal peace agreement was never reached: the war technically continues to this day.
That war has defined my identity and continues to guide my life’s work. When I was adopted from South Korea in 1966 at the age of eight, everyone thought I was a war orphan. My documents indicated that my father had died during the Korean War and my mother died giving birth to me. I had no other family.
I dealt with my adoption by forgetting everything about Korea. The amnesia was so complete that if my Korean mother had looked me in the face, I would no
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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 amerika 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 fem adult adoptees as they return to the nation of their birth, the film joins them on a vertiginous process attempting to recover history and con
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‘Crossings’ Continues Deann Borshay Liem’s Career-Spanning Korea Project
Crossings deftly recounts the group’s step-by-step adjustments to the obstacles thrown at them. While it’s tempting to laugh at diplomatic and political absurdity, the respective governments were not amused by Women Cross DMZ’s symbolic gambit to temporarily erase the border between North and South Korea.
Ahn’s tested cohorts include Nobel Laureates Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland, alongside women’s movement pioneer Gloria Steinem and Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin. The group’s goal of advancing peace is rooted in the overriding yet largely unknown fact that a peace agreement was never signed when the conflict was stopped in 1950.
“The Korean War literally did not end,” Liem explains. “We have this armistice that suspended the fighting but no formal peace. The war in many ways is still being prosecuted through pol