‘Homesick’ Doc Film Director Interview on South Korea Adoptee: CPH:DOX

What is family? What are home and belonging? Who gets to decide about how those concepts apply to us? And what makes a good and a bad family or home? Those are some of the questions you will find yourself thinking about and struggling with when you watch director Taekyung Tanja Inwol’s (A Colombian Family) second feature documentary, Homesick (Hjemsøgt).

Described as “a raw family chronicle” that travels between Western Denmark and South Korea, the film about the director’s family and story about being adopted from South Korea world premiered in the NORDIC:DOX competition of the 23rd edition of CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.

“In Taekyung’s family in Denmark, everything was meant to look perfect on the surface, but behind the façade, there was domestic violence, breakups, divorce, suicide attempts, death, loneliness, and much more,” highlights a synopsis for the film. “When one’s origins have been erased in Korea, where does one turn when the family one has been placed in begins to crack?”

Homesick dives into all that, plus the news from June 2025 that the filmmaker’s adoption case was among just 56 cases in which the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission found violations of human rights. In fact, it concluded that her documents were falsified to make her appear to be a foundling and thus more quickly adoptable for profit. However, these findings have not helped her gain access to real information about her birth parents or any concrete action from either the Korean or Danish state.

Interviews, photographs, landscapes, and voice-overs help the director assemble her experience as the only adoptee in a Danish family and “as someone who has been erased from Korea her entire life,” the press notes for the doc highlight. “The film weaves together personal memories and imagination with the political realities of a transnational adoption system that long ago lost its shine.”

The producers are Rikke Tambo Andersen, Sona Jo and Virpi Suutari. The cinematographers are
Catherine Pattinama Coleman and Mathias Døcker, with editing handled by Matilda Henningsson. Impronta Film is handling sales on the Tambo Film production.

Inwol explains her motivation to make Homesick this way: “I have, as a child, had more families than most, belonged to many and nowhere at all — but the premise for them all was that someone had the power to decide where and to whom I was allowed to belong.” And she adds: “By what parameters can one even determine whether one family is better than another? The childless couple in the West Danish town of Varde had more right to a child than the single mother in the Korean port city of Incheon. Not just any child — but the child she had given birth to. In this way, a child born in Korea grew up in Denmark. Isn’t it strange that the child grows up in a random family on the other side of the world — and no one talks about it.” Silence, after all, can be more painful than harmful words.

Watch the trailer for Homesick here.

Inwol started thinking about making a film when her parents died to process how she felt and the questions she struggled with. “You know this whole thing about rest in peace?” she shares with THR. “People have this idea: let’s not speak ill of the dead. But I was like: ‘No, now’s the time to talk about all the stuff that we couldn’t talk about before.’ It was too difficult when they were alive. Nobody seemed to really agree with me, but I just had all these questions.”

Her initial focus wasn’t on herself. “The idea was to make a film about all the things that we don’t talk about in the family,” she explains. “I wanted to create a visual language for the things for which a language doesn’t exist. Interestingly, when I started interviewing the family, I realized that I was part of the secrets. So, I thought, okay, well, I guess it will have to be a film about me, or at least from my position in the family, as being one who we don’t talk about.”

In other words: “I just felt an urge to try and heal myself in some way, which then turned into this huge project, which wasn’t the original intention.”

Homesick actually is a more personal exploration of themes that already featured heavily in Inwol’s first feature, A Colombian Family, about a mother and daughter in Colombia looking to heal their relationship. “You can see a trend here,” quips Inwol. “I realized that the reason why I made that film was so that I could mirror myself in their relationship.”

So, how tricky was it to be both director and subject in Homesick? “It was never my wish to be a protagonist in my own film. So, when I started out making it, it was so important for me to have control over how I was presented and what people were allowed to see,” Inwol tells THR. “Being the filmmaker and the protagonist gives me all the control, but I needed to make a whole bunch of rules for myself and how I wanted to be seen. How do I keep control of the narrative, and how do I present the world through my gaze?”

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There were some particular challenges the filmmaker foresaw. “There is just no language for difference, and so I had to [think about] how to give myself that language,” she recalls. “And I am also very aware that the audience is not necessarily on my side, because I’m the minority in the story. So, how do I turn the gaze around? It means I had to make up a gaze. They have never seen my gaze on them.”

One recurring visual element is footage of Inwol standing next to other people, who don’t immediately get identified, in a set-up that will remind audiences of family photos. “I call them moving portraits,” Inwol explains. “Because it’s as if you take a portrait, but then just keep it going. This is the first moment that you get to meet these people, because these people are both family, but also somebody who I want to invite the viewer to look at. Putting myself next to them means you cannot tell from that shot alone whether it’s my parents or my brother or whoever. And I think that just shows the randomness of it all. So, by introducing them in that way next to me, it gives you the idea of the randomness of my being there.”

Homesick also has more performative scenes in Korea, in which Inwol and friends wear a hanbok, the traditional Korean clothing. “The other three women that I walk with are also adopted from Korea to Denmark,” Inwol explains. “And the idea for me was to show that I’m not alone, although the core feeling in the film is loneliness and not being seen or recognized.” But the footage of the women together “creates a sense of community,” with the hanbok symbolizing resilience and resistance, even though Korea is “a nation suffering.”

What’s next for Inwol? “There’s a red thread through my films, and that is the theme of family divided by conflict or war or diaspora experiences,” she highlights. “I’m in really early development on a film about a Korean community in Mexico. It is one of the oldest communities of Koreans. For me, it would be nice because it touches on themes I know. I constantly ask myself, ‘What films can I make? What films are for me?”