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Innovative films go beyond borders

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Displaced: A scene from Approved for Adoption, denoting how the Belgian bureaucracy classifies Asians. Courtesy of Europe on Screen

Two films featuring innovative storytelling will hit Jakarta today as the film festival Europe on Screen proceeds into its fifth day. 

Both of these films strive to prove that cinema is an international language, that a story from material in a faraway country can touch audiences oceans away. 

Take Laurent Boileau and Jung Henin’s Approved for Adoption for example, a French animated film with English subtitles that chronicles the journey of an adopted boy from South Korea living in Belgium. 

The film is a partial autobiography of the filmmaker Jung’s own journey as a young boy. At the start of the film he is alone in Seoul, meditating on his past — about how he was found by a police officer while wandering the streets of Seoul as an orphan. Abandonment is a permanent condition for him. 

Jung was one of 200,000 South Korean kids living in an orphanage awaiting adoption by foreign parents. Finally, he was adopted by a Belgian family and arrived in the country when he was 5. 

The film’s French title, Couleur de Peau: Miel, literally translates to “color of skin: honey”, denoting how the Belgian bureaucracy classifies Asians. 

For the orphan Jung, identifying himself as a honey-skinned boy gives him a sense of identity that he didn’t have before. But on the other hand, the categorization is racist and belittling. 

Approved for Adoption blends live-action documentary and fiction-animation. Early in the film, real-life footage of Jung’s Belgian family is shown, before the narrative becomes completely animated. 

As a child, Jung often denies his identity. He is embarrassed that he is not white like the people around him. He is also embarrassed that he is Korean and disguises himself as Japanese, drawing manga of himself as a Japanese soldier and practicing karate in his room every day. 

Read full story here  
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