The Hanji Box
Directed by Nora Jacobson
USA | Fiction | 2016 | 62 min
Film Source: Filmmaker
Sponsors: Duncan Wisniewski Architecture / A Single Pebble / VTIFF Board President Lorna-Kay Peal
Showtime: Friday, October 21 | 7:00 p.m. | FH
* Opening Night film, world premiere *
Director Nora Jacobson and lead actors Suzanne C. Dudley & Natalie Kim will be in attendance.
A tense cross-cultural love story, inspired by Meg Dean Daiss’ essay about her own experiences. Hannah, a recently divorced art historian, has decided to downsize. Her adopted daughter Rose helps pack the house, but resists clearing out her own room. The tension between mother and daughter escalates until finally, an item of great importance to both of them gets broken: Rose’s Hanji box, which Hannah and her husband bought for Rose years ago in New York City’s Koreatown. Or did they? Determined to prove a point, Hannah takes the train to Koreatown to find the store where she purchased the decorative box made from traditional Korean paper. In the process, she meets a Korean artist and compulsively spends time with him and his friends. The encounter leads to a mental journey of cultural discovery and a form of reverse adoption: her desire to be adopted by her daughter’s birth culture. On another level, through its narrative of interracial adoption, The Hanji Box magnifies familiar and complex mother-daughter relationships. ~OY