Residual trauma: the island of dokdo

Set in the unresolved trauma of the Japanese occupation of Korea, Land of My Father (아버지의 땅) is a story about two individuals who take on the establishment in an attempt to change accepted historical narratives. A Korean farmer protests the Japanese government in Tokyo for claiming the disputed island territory of Dokdo after finding out his father was abducted and enslaved in an iron mine during the Japanese occupation of Korea. A Korean woman who lived on Dokdo with her father struggles to keep his legacy alive after the Korean government mysteriously erased their history of being pioneering residents.

Residual Trauma: The Island of Dokdo is an online program highlighting select scenes from the film. This page is a companion piece for in person screenings and lectures.

The project is supported, in part, by the City of Austin’s Cultural Arts Division, and the Korean American Association of Greater Austin.

Director: Matthew Koshmrl

Matthew is a filmmaker, cinematographer, and professor based in the USA. He has been the cinematographer on documentary films that have played at International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, DocumentaMadrid, and True/False Film Festival.

In 2016 he received the Antarctic Service Medal from the US congress when he was commissioned by the National Science Foundation to travel to the Antarctic Peninsula to make a documentary about paleontological expeditions and has a film playing at Carnegie Museum of Natural History about dinosaurs of Antarctica.

Matthew personally focuses on cinema-vérité documentary films that explore the evolution of tradition, individual and national identity, and unseen processes.

Land of My Father is Matthew’s feature documentary directorial debut.

Editor: Christina Sun Kim

Christina Sun Kim is a Los Angeles-based editor who grew up in South Korea and the Midwest of the United States. She discovered her love of editing while studying documentary filmmaking at the University of Texas at Austin. Soon after graduation, she cut her first full-length documentary, Tattooed Under Fire (dir. Nancy Schiesari), an ITVS-funded film about Iraq veterans and their emotional scars.

In 2014, Christina earned her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was also named a Film Independent Project Involve fellow. She then spent time producing and editing short social justice documentaries, collaborating with Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmakers and a network of community organizers throughout California. Her short film, The Migration Continues, chronicled a group of DREAMers fighting to defend DACA and was a finalist for the 2018 Shorty Awards.

Christina was happy to find her way back to editing long-form documentaries with her most recent work, Land of My Father (dir. Matthew Koshmrl). She is the 2020 Karen Schmeer Emerging Editor Fellow and is currently working on So Yun Um's feature documentary, Liquor Store Dreams.