Moving away from family to attend college is difficult for everybody. For international students, the distance we travel prevents us from seeing our loved ones even once or twice a year. We know we are lucky to have the educational resources to live and study abroad. At some point, however, we begin to realize that honoring those resources means turning a blind eye to the very people who gave us the opportunity in the first place: our parents.
We want to provide a snapshot of this dilemma – when your mother’s presence gets in the way of your academic success, what do you do? Through this film, we want to be the voice of the Korean international student community and act as a conduit in telling their story. In doing so, we are memorializing our presence and our importance in this country.
This is an ambitious project, and we want to do it justice. Without the budget we need, this film won’t be able to tell the story as effectively. We are doing everything we can to raise money for this project: we are the recipients of the Johns Hopkins Film & Media Studies capstone grant, and are in the process of applying to other research grants.