Newly Funded
The Other Side of Memory
A Korean adoptee travels to Seoul to seek answers about his past and find his biological parents, leading to personal discoveries that reshape his understanding of family.
Length
90 minutes
When filmmaker Nick Capezzera discovers a single Korean address buried in his adoption records, what began as a quiet search for answers decades ago becomes an international investigation stretching from New England to New York to Seoul.
At the same time, Nick’s older sister Anna—also adopted from Korea, but from a different family—starts a quest of her own. Hoping to learn more about her medical history, she locates her birth mother and three sisters. It sets the siblings on parallel paths that reveal the different outcomes adoptees can encounter in the search for identity and belonging.
The Other Side of Memory explores Nick and Anna’s New England upbringing and the complexities of growing up in a transracial adoptive family. As DNA tests yield few answers, Nick returns to Korea, where translators, journalists, and community advocates help him piece together the events surrounding his birth. The search leads to new revelations, including a woman who remembers the night he was left on her doorstep and, ultimately, an encounter with the Korean couple who cared for him as an infant.
As Anna reunites with her birth family in Seoul, both siblings arrive at a deeper understanding of the forces that bind a family together.