The Diasporic Homecoming: Framing International Korean Adoptees in Black Butterfly and Anna’s Will

This paper explores the diasporic experience and sensibility of Koreans represented through international Korean adoptees in two Korean films, namely Black Butterfly (Heungnabi, 1974) by Byeon Jang-ho and Anna’s Will (Anna-ui Yuseo, 1975) by Choe Hyeon-min. These are films that represented international Korean female adult adoptees for the first time in the history of Korean cinema. The issue of international adoption in Korea parallels the compressed modernity of Korea and Koreans’ changing social and cultural awareness of kinship and ethnic identity. The paper analyzes the representational mode of adult female adoptees returning from their Western adoptive countries to find out about their roots, which began to emerge in South Korean cinema in the 1970s, and discusses the unique features of diasporic sensibility developed in a Korean context. In both films, the international adoptee returnee serves as a cultural marker and political device for the military regime’s rigid censorship and propaganda to present the nation’s fast recovery from the traumatic war and unprecedentedly rapid economic development on silver screen. The diasporic sensibility of displacement represented through international Korean adoptees functioned as a consolation for the collective postmemory of the South Korean spectators as the diasporic subject, thus, prevented the audience from seeing the material and ontological condition of international Korean adoptees.