Last Friday (2/21), the AARC’s Arts Committee brought Dan Matthews to campus to give a kind-of-exclusive screening of his upcoming documentary, aka DAN. In the film, Dan, a Korean adoptee, travels to Korea to attend the IKAA (International Korean Adoptee Association) 2013 summit and to meet his biological family for the first time. You can learn more about the work through his Kickstarter, but I’d just like to take a moment with this post to reflect on the event.
In introducing the film, Dan said that more than anything his film was about mothers. Thinking back, that was definitely the case. The interactions with his adoptive, biological, and foster mothers really showed how maternal love can manifest itself in such a wide range of ways. I personally felt that the meeting with his foster mother was especially moving, as he was the only of her twenty-or-so foster children to find her.
I don’t want to give away too much more, but you should definitely check out the full documentary as its released in four parts starting early March on his YouTube channel. There isn’t a whole lot of media on Korean adoptees (a fact that Dan addressed in his Q&A), but hopefully Dan’s film will be a great resource for the larger community.
The Asian American Resource Center 