Culture Clash: On Editing and Korean Refugees

By Daniel Greenway

As a British student, currently mid-way through my second and final year at the National Film and Television School, I have found meeting and working with people from different corners of the world an exciting and greatly rewarding experience...

I am specialising in editing and recently worked with Haryun Kim, a talented young documentary director from South Korea, on a film about Korean adoptees that live and have grown up in Britain...

...exploring what she considered the important and interesting issues faced by Korean adoptees: what it has been like growing up in a country like Britain and how it has affected their lives; how much they feel part of this society and culture; and what their attitude is towards their Korean ‘Motherland’...

...since we started work on this film a number of articles have appeared, notably on the BBC and in the New York Times, about children who have been adopted by the West from China, whose population continues to swell. Korea’s continuing and extensive adoption programme is largely unknown by the general public as is the fact that it involves, almost exclusively, girls and that the number of Chinese children growing up in the West pales in comparison to the number of those from Korea....

...the editing process took about four weeks during which we had tutor support from established British documentary makers. I have realised that it is during the editing process that the film’s narrative is truly ‘discovered’, and Haryun’s film was no exception...

...continuous tutor support and criticism also aided us to rely more on nuance and detail to put across difficult questions rather than overusing dialogue. This enables the audience to engage with and to make up their own minds...