Reviewed by Alicia Glass 

The story of a queer Korean adoptee and her reunion with her original family, sharing cultural misunderstandings, long-held regrets, and familial bonds with laughter and eventually, love. 

When the film begins, the Kim family and the daughter they had to give up for adoption, Mieke Murkes, have already connected in person, and gone their separate ways since. And while lamenting the attempts of making actual connections with her birth family and the troubles language barriers create, Mieke also struggles with old hurts and the understandable desire to live her own life, somewhat at arms length from her birth family. At least the knowledge that Mieke is gay and her Dutch fiance, Marit Bosman, is a native Norway woman, doesn’t have any member of the Kim clan bat an eyelash. 

Okgyun Kang, Mieke’s birth mother, sorrowfully recounts the story of her choice to give up her fourth child for adoption, after coming to the reluctant realization that her family of a husband and three children already simply cannot afford another one. Okgyun talks about the adoption agency and their insistence on silence and absolute refusal to tell her about anything to do with her fourth child. It wasn’t until decades later, when the Kim patriarch took it upon himself to try and begin searching for his fourth child, that there was any information to be gained, and even then, it took father Kim five whole years to find her. 

So Mieke as a baby was sent to the Netherlands, where she was adopted by a nice normal white couple, who did their best to raise their different daughter without emphasis on her Korean heritage. Not that anyone made an issue of it mind you, Mieke’s heritage was just something that couldn’t be explored as a child. Which makes things all sorts of more complicated here as an adult, when Mieke informs the Kim clan of her plans to marry her Norwegian girlfriend Marit. 

Matters of the heart are solved in a unique and loving way when Mieke and Marit travel to South Korea and take part in a traditional Korean wedding with the whole Kim clan in attendance. Mieke laughingly takes the part of the groom in a traditional hanbok of blue, while the ladies of the family have a grand time making up Marit in a bright many-colored bridal hanbok, they joyfully go through a wedding ceremony and take a bunch of pictures together afterwards, and by the end of it there isn’t a dry eye in the house. 

For the family ties that bind and occasionally gag, an exploration of the trials and tribulations of queer adoptees around the world and the birth families forced to give them away, have your tissues handy and watch Between Goodbyes.