Under the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, the policy of sōshi-kaimei forced Korean people to replace their names with Japanese: an act of cultural genocide — the eradication of Korean language, customs, identity. In these years, my grandfather’s family was renamed: KuniMori. The eldest of the brothers, Park Young In, became Masami Kuni. Far beyond the end of the colonial period in 1945, he lived and died by this name. This film explores why, and what he left behind.

Masami Kuni became a pioneering modern dancer, performing and teaching across Japan, Germany, Denmark, the United States, and Brazil. Passing in 2007 at age 99, he left standing: a dance institute in Tokyo, a widowed life partner, and five children around the world who never really knew their father. Perhaps no one fully did. 10 years after his passing, they learn he died with a secret: that he was Korean, not Japanese. Previously unknown to each other, his descendants and kin begin to unearth the traces he left behind.

This is a film about Masami Kuni — and simultaneously, a film that is not about him at all. Filmed largely in vérité, the film is not an architecting, so much as a witnessing: a braiding of distinct journeys across the relatives of Kuni while exploring our living inquiry around family wounds and healing, identity and expression, death and memory, belonging and freedom. What is included on-screen is not a perfectly composed outcome, but the imperfect and unknown borderlands of real life. The film invites viewers into the emergent and frequently incomplete process of understanding our selves and our family’s story — for in stories we heal, individually and collectively; and in healing we get free.