The Liberators

The Liberators is an extraordinarily beautiful and deeply moving story of immigration that asks: what does the next generation carry with them from the past, and what do they hope to find in an uncertain future? 

In the late 1980s in South Korea, Insuk and Sungho are arranged to be married by Insuk's father, Yohan, an influential man at the height of the military dictatorship. The couple soon moves to San Jose, California, with Sungho’s overbearing mother-in-law, Huran. They have a  son, Henry, who grows up steeped in the mysterious Korean-Chinese restaurant where his mother waitresses and in the traditions and their local Catholic church. Grieving the loss of her past and her divided homeland, Insuk finds herself drawn into an illicit relationship, while Sungho is lured from his family by the promise of the American Dream, spending countless hours working low paying jobs before finally opening his own business.

As Henry comes of age, he falls in love with Jennie, a North Korean defector, and boldly attempts to change the course of his family’s future. Through exquisitely drawn portraits and the symphonic testimony of four generations of guards, prisoners, perpetrators, and liberators, E. J. Koh delivers a stunning and elegantly wrought family saga of memory, trauma, empathy, and the consequences and fortunes of inheritance.