Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s feature-length documentary, Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women, was broadcast nationally on PBS this past May. The VILLAGE VOICE in New York praised it as “a wrenching and formally inventive look at the abuse and torture of Korean ‘comfort women’ by Japanese soldiers during World War II. ‘Silence Broken ‘crafts a complicated and impassioned historical document through interviews with survivors, dramatic recreations of their stories and bald-face denials of many Japanese leaders and soldiers.” The critical praise in the mainstream press (WALL STREET JOURNAL, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY) and national prominence accorded ‘Silence Broken’ is only the most recent achievement in Kim-Gibson’s long and distinguished career in the media arts and higher education.
In recognition of her many outstanding contributions as an independent filmmaker, media arts administrator and advocate, educator and writer, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson has been named recipient of the 2000 STEVE TATSUKAWA MEMORIAL FUND AWARD to be presented October 21 at the 30th Anniversary Celebration of VISUAL COMMUNICATIONS (VC), pioneering Asian Pacific Media Arts Center in Los Angeles. She is the 16th recipient of the Award, which was established in 1985 to recognize those who carry on Tatsukawa’s legacy of commitment to community service and the advancement of the Asian Pacific American media arts.
Tatsukawa was widely respected as a program executive at KCET-Southern California PBS, executive director of VC, national media advocate, filmmaker and community activist. When he passed away in 1984 at the age of 35, his friends and associates decided to commemorate Tatsukawa’s remarkable achievements and irrepressible spirit. They formed an ad hoc committee and began to select recipients for an annual $1000 award, supported solely through individual donors to the Fund. Sixteen years after his death, Tatsukawa still elicits the devotion and generosity of hundreds of people across the country who continue to cherish the memory of his unique wit, energy and creative brilliance.
On receiving news of the Award, Kim-Gibson commented: “I am honored to receive an award to commemorate Steve Tatsukawa. His life was taken away from us at such a young age, but it was a life marked with achievements and spirit that continue to inspire us.”
Kim-Gibson also expressed delight “that the committee chose an ‘oldie’ like me who was not born in this country. This, I hope, will help us go beyond America to the continent of Asia, and beyond the now to neglected history as we continue to search for and define our identities as Asian Americans.”
Dai Sil Kim-Gibson was born in northern Korea when it was under Japanese rule, crossed the 38th parallel as a child and endured the trauma of the Korean War in the 1950s before coming to the United States in 1962 to attend graduate school. After receiving a Ph.D in Religion from Boston University, she returned to Korea in 1970, but within a month she was back in the U.S., the result of the oppressive political climate in South Korea at the time. Since then she has been a de facto immigrant in America.
During the 1970s, she taught religion at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, “teaching students about the truth claims of different religions, and about human freedom and destiny” on a campus she describes as “idyllic.” Then she left the academic world to become a senior program officer in the Media Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, D.C. She was hired as a scholar to evaluate the research and content of grant proposals, but it would eventually lead to her next career as a filmmaker. In her post she provided support and counsel to independent filmmakers and minorities who lacked familiarity with the complex process of federal grant applications.
While the NEH program emphasized scholarly research and content, her next job, the directorship of the acclaimed Media Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, encouraged innovation and experimentation in film and video. She again worked to help independent filmmakers and minorities become more familiar with the intricacies of the grant process. After three years of encouraging other artists to pursue their visions, she resigned this position in 1988 to work on her own writing.
From her earliest days as a student in Korea, Kim-Gibson had written both scholarly pieces and creative works, such as plays and children’s stories. Now at home, struggling to write what it meant “to be a woman caught between two cultures,” she received a fortuitous call from the Ford Foundation. It was an offer to bridge the gap between scholarly research and the creativity of filmmaking by producing a film based on national research about the changing relations between newcomers and established residents in the U.S. She invited Charles Burnett, critically-acclaimed African American writer/director (Killer of Sheep; To Sleep With Anger) to direct the film.
In collaboration with Burnett, she wrote and produced a feature-length documentary, America Becoming, which was the beginning of a long, creative partnership with Burnett. The production crew for America Becoming was 95% minority, mostly African American. Traveling around the country with the crew, she saw it “with different eyes.” The experience “pounded my heart with all of this society’s wealth, poverty, class distinctions, racial prejudices, despairs and hopes.” Kim-Gibson was hooked on filmmaking “for better or worse.”
Since then, she has continued to be an active voice in the world of independent filmmaking and served for three years as Chair of the Board of Independent Video and Filmmakers, a national membership organization with over 5000 members. For six years she was Vice Chair of the Board of the National Asian American Telecommunications Association which Tatsukawa helped to found. A recipient of a Rockefeller Fellowship and grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the MacArthur Foundation, her credits include a range of innovative and uniquely expressive work:
Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women (1999), a film that shatters a half-century of silence for Korean women who were forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. The compelling testimony of these women is presented side by side with interviews of Japanese soldiers and recruiters. Powerful dramatized sequences echo with soulful sorrow and testify to the resilience of the human spirit.
Olivia’s Story (1999), a lyrical drama narrated by a young Korean American and her grandmother in which an innocent baseball game played by children from diverse backgrounds triggers Grandma’s bittersweet memories of the Korean War and her first encounters with African Americans.
A Forgotten People: The Sakhalin Koreans (1995), about the Korean forced laborers on Sakhalin Island, victims of World War II and the Cold War, initially indentured by the Japanese, then fallen under control of the Soviet Union in 1945-then forgotten for a half a century.
Sa-I-Gu (1993), a film about the 1992 Los Angeles crisis from the perspectives of Korean women shopkeepers, which the L.A. Times called “a powerful, new film.”
America Becoming (1991), six locations reveal the great diversity of America, contrasting the lives and relationships of new and ever-more-diverse immigrants with established residents.
The Urban Poor: A Student Radical; Sweatshops; and Farmers and Fishermen (1988), a series of five-minute programs broadcast on NBC’s Today Show.
In addition to a number of articles and essays, Kim-Gibson recently published a book, Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women. Of her substantial body of work, Kim-Gibson observes: I try very hard to help the voiceless to tell their own stories. I do it in a personal way, which is different from telling personal stories. The emphasis on telling personal stories in documentary filmmaking these days has both strengths and weaknesses. The strengths are obvious, but the weaknesses are something from which we should take heed-blinding ourselves from seeing broader, deeper issues and things beyond one’s self.