The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger
A film by Jane Jin Kaisen & Guston Sondin-Kung (DVC Pro 720p, 78 min. 2010)

In The Woman, The Orphan, and the Tiger a genealogy is created by relating the stories of three generations of women: the around 200,000 former comfort women from various countries in Asia who were kidnapped from their home-countries and subjected to military sexual slavery by the Japanese military between World War I and II – the around one million women who have worked as sex-workers around US military bases in South Korea from the 1950s to the present, a system of military prostitution encouraged by both the governments of the US and South Korea – and the around 200,000 children who were adopted from South Korea to the West since the 1950s through an efficient adoption industry mainly run by American Christian organizations and sustained by a South Koran patriarchal norm system and ideals of racial purity.
Thus, The Woman, The Orphan, and the Tiger attempts to situate international adoption within a longer history of military and patriarchal violence against women and children in the aftermath of Japanese colonialism, the Cold War, and the emergence of US Imperialism. The film further explores how bio-political violence onto women’s and children’s bodies became central in geopolitical negotiations between South Korea, the United States, and Japan, and how this part of world history has been systematically silenced, but reverberates in the present moment.

It looks at the ways in which multiple generations of women were affected by similar oppressive mechanisms while accounting for the multiple subjectivities and different issues at stake. By portraying the shared desire for recognition, reconciliation, and reparation, the film proposes potentials for further strategic alliances to be formed in order to confront and dismantle the structures and ideologies that enabled these forms of oppression and silencing.