Oma Rhee

20 mins, 1999
Color, filmed on 16mm

Growing up, my sisters and I never talked about our mother.  Her death was a secret weighing on our family, creating a heavy silence I was desperate to lift.  For the first time, I asked my sisters to talk about Oma.  I wanted to open the door to honest conversation with these powerful, complex women so we could acknowledge what happened.  This film is a portrait of our family's struggle with unexpressed emotion and the healing that comes with release.  OMA RHEE, my first documentary, was made during college.

"The Rhee's are not your average American family unit.  What begins as a somewhat familiar station wagon tour of tacky highway tourist attractions unfolds as something far deeper.  Home movie footage is narrated by [conversations] with the Rhee sisters describing conflicted and unresolved emotions about the turbulent events of growing up with their mother Oma.  It is only as adults that they are able to understand the impact her unstable role in the household had on their lives." 
- New England Film & Video Festival

OMA RHEE purchased by these universities/colleges for their libraries:

Bryn Mawr College
Harvard University
San Francisco State University
Stanford University
Swarthmore College
Syracuse University
The University of Iowa
UC San Diego
UC Santa Cruz
University of Pittsburgh

Screenings

National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., 2007
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, 2001
Women in the Director’s Chair National Tour: sites included universities and cultural centers around country, 2002-3
WTTW PBS television release, Chicago, IL, 2001
San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (now known as CAAMFest), San Francisco, CA, 2001
Ladyfest Scotland, Glasgow, Scotland, 2001
Ladyfest East at Anthology Film Archives, New York, New York, 2001
Ladyfest Midwest, Chicago, IL, 2001
Olympia Film Festival, Olympia, WA, 2000
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (formerly DoubleTake FF), Durham, NC, 2000
New England Film & Video Festival, Boston, MA, 2000

panels

"Playing by Different Rules: Personal Filmmaking," Olympia Film Festival, Olympia, WA, 2000

Press

"My personal favorite, OMA RHEE, is a devastating portrait of the filmmaker's Korean-American mother, a doctor who curtailed her career to raise daughters -- children who now probe old vacation photographs to understand why their mother became a monster." - SF Weekly

Order copies of the film and request public exhibition information by contacting rosy.rhee@gmail.com
Purchase price:  $400