SEOUL SEARCHING ALMOST GOES BACK TO THE WOMB
Thousands of Koreans have been adopted around the world. In some cases, their mothers wanted them to have a better life for reasons mostly unspecified in Seoul Searching. The film tries to recall the annual summer camps for teenage Korean expatriates held in Seoul so that they can learn about their cultural background. Directed by Benson Kim, the camp held in 1988 evidently was more raucous than previously but that makes the story more enjoyable. The focus is on three boys living in the same dorm room—from Hamburg, Los Angeles, and México. Emulating, their host country’s stereotypes, the German Korean is calm and collected; the Angeleno is a punk; the Mexican is oriented toward sex. But the punk is presented in the most depth: His Korean father does not show any favorable emotion toward him, and his response is to act up in an asocial manner until the camp leader explains that he had the same problem growing up in Korea. They also are aggressive toward a group of visiting tourists from Japan that turn out to be Japanese Koreans. The main politics in the film, as in many feature films, is the effort of a leader to keep order amid a lot of chaotic behavior. One Korean female finds her birthmother with disappointing results but later falls in love with the Korean from Hamburg who has previously helped her to set up the encounter. MH