A Gesture Life

Based on the novel by Chang-rae Lee
Screenwriter/Director: Dennis Lee

Franklin “Doc” Hata, is a Japanese man of Korean birth who is an upstanding citizen in an all-American upstate New York community. But he has buried the scars of his involvement with the Korean “comfort women” during the war, and he now realizes his life has added up to no more than a “gesture”. As Doc finds love with a compassionate neighbor, and attempts to reunite with his estranged daughter, he must come to terms with all of the horrors he has endured or be ruined once and for all.

Franklin “Doc” Hata is a Japanese 70-year-old man of Korean birth who has lived for decades in the affluent town of Bedley Run. From the outside, his life is the immigrant's ideal American Dream but when a minor home fire incident sends him to the hospital, memory weaves a deeper path.

Doc is haunted by sins from the past — mistakes made in the upbringing of adopted daughter Sunny, the horrors witnessed during his time as a medic in the Japanese army, and a relationship with a widow that slipped away. Above all, a doomed love affair with the mysterious “K,” a Korean comfort woman he hoped to save from her fate. Doc’s life begins to unravel as he tries to reconnect with Sunny and her young son, Tommy. He is a man who has lived according to appearances for his entire life, afraid to reveal the darkness within, submerged beneah his own guilt.

"A Gesture Life" is an engaging study of a man who exists between lives — Korean, Japanese, father, companion, doctor, American — and under the long shadow war casts upon the soul.

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