Private Project

One "Orphan" Every Hour

In the 60 years after the Korean War, nearly 250,000 South Korean children were sent abroad for adoption. They were presented to the world as “orphans.” Many were not.

One “Orphan” Every Hour follows Korean adoptees across South Korea, Sweden, and the United States as they search for the truth behind their own origins. What begins as a personal quest for parents, siblings, records, and lost language becomes an investigation into one of the largest child migration systems of the 20th century.

Journalist Wei Du traces how children were separated from living families, assigned new identities, and moved across borders through a network of agencies, governments, religious groups, and adoptive demand. Through adoptee testimony, DNA discoveries, archival evidence, official documents, and confrontations with those who helped run the system, the film uncovers contradictory records, copied origin stories, missing files, and institutional incentives that turned vulnerable children into exportable “orphans.”

The investigation reaches from Swedish government archives to Korean adoption agencies, from evangelical rescue narratives in the United States to the shadow of Jonestown. Along the way, adoptees discover siblings they never knew existed, birth families who say they never consented, and paperwork that may have erased the truth of who they were.

At once intimate and investigative, the film exposes how humanitarian language helped conceal a transnational system of family separation — and how the people who lived through it are now forcing the record open.

  • Wei Du
    Director
  • Wei Du
    Writer
  • Wei Du
    Producer
  • Mark Pestana
    Executive Producer
  • Lek Hwa Tan
    Supervising Executive Producer
  • Timothy Desouza
    Cinematographer
  • Kim Keat Ooi
    Cinematographer
  • Andy Tan
    Cinematographer
  • Geogette Soh
    Film Editor
  • Grace Xiao
    Film Editor
  • Project Type:
    Documentary
  • Genres:
    History, Investigative, Human Concerns
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 32 minutes 4 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    August 30, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    150,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Singapore
  • Country of Filming:
    Sweden, United States
  • Language:
    English, Korean, Swedish
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • Festival International du Grand Reportage d'Actualité et de Société
    Douai
    France
    March 31, 2026
    Official Selection, Autrement Vu
  • NYF TV & Film Awards
    New York City
    United States
    Gold, Documentary: Human Rights
  • NYF TV & Film Awards
    New York City
    United States
    Gold, Craft Program: Direction
Director Biography - Wei Du

Wei Du is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist with CNA, Singapore’s public broadcaster.

Her work combines investigative reporting with intimate, character-led storytelling, often focusing on migration, human rights, identity, and the consequences of state power.

In 2025, Wei was named Journalist of the Year at the One World Media Awards for Walk the Line, her documentary series following Chinese migrants on the dangerous route through Latin America toward the United States. The series was nominated for an International Emmy® Award and won Best Documentary Series at the Asian Academy Creative Awards, where Wei was also named Best Current Affairs Presenter.

Her latest feature documentary, One “Orphan” Every Hour, investigates the global scandal of Korean international adoption. Through archival discoveries, adoptee testimony, DNA revelations, and rare confrontations, the film examines how children were labelled as “orphans,” separated from living families, and moved across borders through a system shaped by governments, adoption agencies, religious groups, and foreign demand.

The film continues Wei’s work at the intersection of personal stories and hidden systems, challenging official narratives and asking urgent questions about truth, accountability, and identity.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

I began this film with an assumption I had never fully questioned. Like many people in Asia, I grew up believing that children adopted to the West were the lucky ones. Then I met Korean adoptees who had lost their language, grown up where they looked like no one else, and were still searching for the truth of how they were separated from their families.

What began as a film about identity became an investigation into a system. Adoptees showed us records that contradicted themselves: parents in one document, “orphan” in another; repeated stories of abandonment; missing or unverifiable files. DNA revealed siblings separated across continents. Archives showed how governments and agencies treated children as numbers, diplomatic problems, and sources of foreign currency.

The deeper I went, the more I felt this was also a story about whose motherhood was recognised as real. I am not Korean, but as an Asian journalist I recognised the wider hierarchy beneath these adoptions: mothers in poorer sending countries were often imagined as immoral, disposable, or less capable of maternal love and grief than the white families waiting overseas. That racial and economic imagination made it easier to turn children with families into “orphans.”

This film does not deny that many adoptive families acted with love. But love inside a family does not erase the need to examine the system that made those adoptions possible.

One “Orphan” Every Hour is about adoptees reclaiming the right to know where they come from — and asking who had the power to decide they belonged somewhere else.