The Return

You don't even look Asian-this is how Karoline's adoptive mother has comforted her on many an occasion. But this would do nothing to ease her feeling of otherness whenever she-born in Korea but raised in Denmark-would study her face in the mirror. Now, many years later, she's still tormented by who she is. A trip to Korea is meant to provide answers. The title return, however, sounds more like a cruel joke, given that Karoline isn't familiar with the country where she was born-in fact, it's completely foreign to her. In Seoul, she has a chance encounter with Thomas, and soon it turns out that they have a lot in common. They are both victims, and in the first year of their lives, they were given up for foreign adoption. In her moving feature debut, Malene Choi Jensen blurs the boundary between fiction and reality while making allusions to her own personal experiences. In doing so, she avoids even a hint of falsehood or sentimentality. She skillfully shows cultural contrasts, using the journey of two contemporary nomads who are trying to patch together their identity from seemingly mismatched pieces. An unassuming film that really packs a punch.