The Hanji Box

The Hanji Box is about Hannah, an American writer who travels to Korea hoping to unravel the mysteries of her adopted daughter's birth. Instead she meets a Korean painter whose art awakens in her unexpected emotions. As he acquaints her with Korean culture and history, they begin an intense but delicate relationship, fueled by passion and her secret desire to make her family whole.

Director's Statement

I have always been fascinated by the complexity of people's emotional lives, and how political, historical and social forces outside us affect us internally.

The Hanji Box is a cross-cultural love story, inspired by Meg Dean Daiss’s essay about her own experience in Korea. I was intensely moved and fascinated by her immersion into Korean culture, and her desire to connect with the birth mother of her adopted child. I was also interested in her love affair with a Korean man: To me it seemed as if she unconsciously wanted to become Korean--so as to erase the cultural and racial difference between her and her adopted Korean children.

One could almost say that The Hanji Box is an adoption story in reverse: an adoptive mother wants to be adopted by her daughter's birth culture.

The film also tells a universal story about family, loss, love and reconciliation. It's hard enough to grow up, and it's hard enough to be a parent. With adoption, and especially inter-racial adoption, all of those family dynamics--of identity, of worthiness, self-image, possessiveness–-can become magnified to an even greater degree. To me it seemed a ripe and potentially dramatic area to explore.

Intercutting Hannah’s journey towards self-awareness in Korea with her daughter’s gradual steps towards recovery in the United States, the visual style of the film will reflect mother and daughter’s separate paths, with a very different look and feel for the American and Korean sections. The scenes in the Unites States will have a stark, almost monochromatic, abstract feel to them--to highlight the daughter Rose's journey as she slowly emerges out of her cycle of disassociation and despair.

In contrast, Hannah's scenes in Korea will be visceral, full of saturated color, movement, and depth. The light will have a shimmering, sparkling quality. I hope to take advantage of Korea's rich architectural heritage and shoot in as many actual locations as possible. The sets we build will have a strong attention to color, texture, fabric and spatial dimension. All of these qualities will contribute to Hannah's feeling of being in a wonderland, where her life changes and where she is transformed.

--Nora Jacobson