Annyeong! Hello from Minji

In April 2022, I was sorting through my mother’s belongings and found a clue written on a torn piece of paper that would change my life forever. My mother had just passed away from COVID-19, and that piece of paper revealed a secret she’d never told me: I was adopted.

That piece of paper unraveled everything I thought I knew about myself. Seven years after finishing my debut feature documentary film Family in the Bubble about my family and Korea’s real estate bubble — I discovered I wasn’t even born into the family I had filmed.

I lost the one person who knew my adoption story fully, and was left with a grieving father who could only tell me fragments. Once again, I picked up my camera — not just to document, but to survive. I began tracing the threads of my past, meeting adoption agencies, adoptees, and queer friends, searching for belonging in the aftermath of truth.

As I filmed, I discovered something unexpected: my queerness and my adoptee identity mirrored each other in strange and powerful ways. Both are stories shaped by erasure, secrecy, and reinvention.

Like my mother, who rebuilt her family by adopting me after losing hers, I now find myself rebuilding my family after losing her. My adoptive father passed away suddenly last December, and after losing both of my adoptive parents, I was forced to think about the meaning of family in a deeper way.

My Second Family is not just about adoption — it’s about rewriting what family can mean in a patriarchal world. It’s a story of grief, survival, and queer love.

I’m Minji Ma, a queer non-binary filmmaker from South Korea, and I’ll be in Brooklyn, New York this summer developing this deeply personal feature documentary about identity, loss, and the families we choose.

I’m so grateful to UnionDocs Summer Documentary Lab for offering me a chance to reflect on my experience, physically and emotionally far from my home in Korea, with guidance from mentors and a vibrant international community of artists. It comes at the right moment: after the recent loss of my adoptive father, I’m ready to move forward, to mourn, to transform, and to create.

Thank you for supporting me.

By supporting this fundraiser, you’ll help me:

– Work on developing My Second Family into a film with mentorship from experts at UnionDocs
– Pay for flights from Seoul to New York City and 5 weeks of lodging in a place that is about 282% more expensive for rent than Seoul
– Spend an unforgettable summer building connections with filmmakers from around the world
– Take one more step in healing through art

Minji MA (they/them) is an artist who brings stories from the world of non-fiction to life through film and writing. They identify as a non-binary queer, Asian, feminist, adoptee, survivor of sexual violence, and a bereaved family member of a COVID victim. Their work focuses on researching individuals, events, and phenomena that exist on the margins or defy clear categorization in a binary-driven society. By intertwining macro and micro-histories, they aim to reveal layered complexities in storytelling from a queer-feminist perspective, exploring and analyzing.

They directed their first feature documentary Family in the Bubble (Korea, Finland, 2017) about their own family in the context of Korean urban development and it has won the Grand Prize at EBS International Documentary Festival and honourably mentioned at Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival.

Verbal Life / Fiction / 10min / 2009 / Director
Apollo 17 / Fiction / 17min / 2012 / Director
The Journal of Seongbuk-dong / Documentary / 25min / 2014 / Director
Family in the Bubble / Documentary / 77min / 2017 / Director
What is A history / Experimental / 11min / 2018 / Director
Little Nomads / Documentary / 40min / 2020 / Director
Self Ritual / Experimental / 8min / 2021 / Director, Performer
Grounding / Documentary / 106min / 2025 / Director

About the Summer Documentary Labs:

The UnionDocs Summer Documentary Lab are a program for a select group of media artists from the US and abroad. Based in one of NYC’s most exciting neighborhoods, Ridgewood, Queens, the Summer Labs offer a platform for participants to spend the Summer making strides and clarify the creative direction of their projects to attract the potential team members, funders and producers they need to find their way to the finish. An intensive schedule of screenings, open seminar discussions, weekly industry “field trips,” and inspiring artist visits from some of the most dynamic voices across the field of documentary, the SUMMER DOCUMENTARY LABS are tightly structured environments that bring participants into a select group of emerging filmmakers to get challenged and encouraged to think through every aspect of their works-in-progress.

Drawing inspiration from across disciplines, this intensive program should not be mistaken for an industrial, journalistic, or traditional documentary training. Scholar Scott MacDonald highlighted in The New York Times that, “UnionDocs has a healthy sense that the older definitions of what constitutes ‘experimental’ cinema and what constitutes ‘documentary’ are up for grabs.” Much emphasis is placed on workshopping lab participants’ writing about their projects as a way to both clarify the creative direction and attract potential team members, funders and producers. Participants receive focused, honest and helpful feedback on their project proposals from prominent documentary artists and industry experts.

The Early Production Lab in July is for projects about to go into production. Filmmakers have already likely shot some of their material and have access to their subjects and are looking for ways to strengthen their media samples, and pitches and work through the ideas as they approach the production stage and plan for the entire process all the way through to distribution.