Dai Sil Kim-Gibson

Dr. Dai Sil Kim-Gibson (/'daɪ/ /'sɪl/ /'kɪm/-/'gɪbsən/; (1938 – October 22, 2023) was a Korean–American documentary filmmaker and author. Her films and writing focus on humanizing "the voiceless" within issues of human rights, overlooked periods in history, and Asian-American diaspora.

Kim-Gibson is well known for her book and film of the same name, Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women. Both the book and the film are award-winning historical accounts of Korean women forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese army during World War II.

Early life Kim-Gibson was born in 1938 in Sincheon, Hwanghae Province, in an area which would later become part of North Korea after the division of the peninsula Kim-Gibson's early life coincided with the end of Japanese rule in Korea and World War II. During World War II, Korea was forced to support Japan's military, and 200,000 Korean and Chinese women and girls were forced into sexual slavery and labeled as "comfort women." The history of Korea during this era has been a frequent subject of Kim's work.

In 1945, at the age of seven, Kim-Gibson moved with her family, on foot, across the 38th parallel seeking democracy in South Korea. Her family was deeply committed to the Korean independence movement and to Christianity.

In 1978, Kim-Gibson began work at the National Endowment for the Humanities working on media programming grants. While working at NEH, she met and worked with Don Gibson, whom she later married.

In 1993, Kim-Gibson and two other Korean-American women, Christine Choy and Elaine Kim, released the documentary film Sa-I-Gu. Sa-i-gu is Korean for April 29, the date the Rodney King riot began in Los Angeles in 1992. Sa-I-Gu uses newsreel footage and interviews with Korean-American shopkeepers to tell the story of the King riots from their unique perspective. The film was aired by PBS as part of its independent film series POV (TV series) on September 10, 1993.

In 1999, Kim-Gibson released a book about the history of Korean comfort women during WWII, and the impact upon the women's lives. Kim-Gibson's film Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women was released in 2000.

Film festivals In 2011, the fifth-annual Korean American Film festival honored Kim-Gibson in Manhattan with a six-film retrospective and discussions led by her long-time collaborator, Charles Burnett.

In 2016, the United States' longest-running Asian film festival—the Asian American International Film Festival—featured Kim-Gibson's film People are the Sky.

The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival honored Kim-Gibson with the Artist Spotlight award in 2016 for People are the Sky.

Book

Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women (Mid-Prairie Books, 1999)

Filmography

America Becoming (Writer, 1991) Sa-I-Gu (Co-director, producer, 1993) A Forgotten People: The Sakhalin Koreans (Director, producer, 1995) Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women (Director, producer, writer, 2000) Wet Sand: Voices from LA (Director, producer, 2003) Motherland: Cuba Korea USA (Director, producer, 2006) People are the Sky (Director, producer, star, 2014)

Personal life

Kim-Gibson met her future husband, Donald Gibson, while working at NEH and the two were wed on October 1, 1979.

"Shoulder friends" was a term Kim-Gibson and her husband used to describe their close relationship. The term is a direct translation from the Korean word ‘eogaedongmu,' meaning friends who can put their arms around each other's shoulder.