Korean-American Filmmaker Sheds Light On Dark Times
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As part of Asian-American Heritage Week, NY1's Lewis Dodley recently sat down with a Korean-American filmmaker who isn't afraid to tackle the tough issues and filed the following report.In the film "Silence Broken," a woman sings of the anguish from some of the darkest days in history: When thousands of Korean women were forced into submission and sexual slavery by occupying Japanese soldiers during World War II.
The voices of so-called "comfort women" were once silent, but through the work of filmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson that silence was broken.
"It's a horrendous, very, very tragic sexual slavery in history," says Kim-Gibson.
"Silence Broken" is just one of the many films Dai Sil Kim Gibson has made over the decades to address some of the more difficult issues facing Koreans like the fallout from the 1992 Los Angeles riots, in which Korean-Americans suffered up to a billion dollars in losses. She says the mainstream media got it wrong.
"They turn people and issues into numbers, statistics and issues. We are not human beings anymore. It's all numbers. It made me boiling mad," says Kim-Gibson.
But sometimes that same passion turns to discovery like when she went to Cuba and saw Koreans dressed like revolutionary guards. And it was the special bonds formed in Cuba that gave Kim-Gibson a gift that would change her life forever: The notion that home is simply where you find like-minded people.
"So we should make the entire earth home. Not just America, not just here and there but wherever we go around with like-minded ideas looking for fairness, basic human rights and fair justice, love, compassion," says Kim-Gibson.