DAI SIL KIM-GIBSON WILL SCREEN HER ACCLAIMED FILM SILENCE BROKEN: KOREAN COMFORT WOMEN AT BARD COLLEGE Film shatters a half-century of silence for Korean girls and women forced into sexual
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.— On Thursday, April 27, at 7:00 p.m. in Room 115 of the F. W. Olin Language Center, filmmaker and author Dai Sil Kim-Gibson will screen her recent film, Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women. Following the screening there will be a discussion and author's reception with a book signing. The evening's events are free and open to the public.
"A wrenching and formally inventive look," writes Gary Dauphin in The Village Voice about Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women, continuing "it crafts a complicated and impassioned historical document through interviews with survivors, dramatic recreations of their stories, and the bald-faced denials of many Japanese leaders and veterans." Dai Sil Kim-Gibson shatters a half-century of silence for Korean girls and women forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Their compelling testimony is presented side by side with interviews of Japanese soldiers and recruiters in the film. Their stories, told with unusual archival footage and dramatized images, echo soulful sorrow and the amazing resilience of the human spirit. The film is to be broadcast nationally on PBS on May 18 at 10:00 p.m.
During the reception Dai Sil Kim-Gibson will sign copies of the companion book to her film, Silence Broken. "These grandmas have gotten inside my soul." explains Joan D. Hedrick, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. "Extraordinary material, human resilience and outrage so palpable, and Kim-Gibson's unobtrusive voice in their stories makes them a kind of narrative. Incredible literary and emotional power." These events are sponsored by the Asian American Students Organization (AASO) and the Bard Response to Rape and Associated Violence Education (BRAVE).
For further information, call 914-758-6822
About the Filmmaker:
Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, a resident of New Paltz, New York, was born in northern Korea during the period when Japan ruled the country. She came to America to pursue graduate studies in 1962 following the Korean War. After receiving her Ph.D. in Religion from Boston University, she taught at Mount Holyoke College. Kim-Gibson was a senior program officer in the media program of the National Endowment for the Humanities and director of the media program of the New York State Council on the Arts. She received a grant from the Ford Foundation to produce the film America Becoming and subsequently wrote and produced three other films including Olivia's Story, A Forgotten People: The Sakhalin Koreans, and Sa-I-Gu. Kim-Gibson has served for three years as chair of the board of Independent Video and Filmmakers and vice-chair of the board of the National Asian American Telecommunications Association. She received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for Silence Broken and a grant from the MacArthur Foundation for Sa-I-Gu. Her films have been broadcast nationally on PBS and the Sundance Channel, and internationally on Discovery Channel. She is the author of and recently published a companion book to her film Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women.
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