American documentary maker to go to Daegu to make film about great uncle who hasn’t been home for almost 50 years


Filmmaker Taylor Stanton has never met his great uncle.

Herb Stankiewicz went to Korea to fight in the Korean War and has stayed there ever since.

Now in his early 80s, he has remained something of an enigma. Letters have been occasional and brief. The most recent photo the family has of him was taken in the early 1960s.

So Stanton has taken to Kickstarter to crowd-fund a documentary he will make about his great uncle, looking to find out what kind of man he is and what motivates someone to stay so far from home.

He admits that until he gets to Korea this summer, he doesn’t have much to go on.

“We know that he was married for some amount of time, that the woman died relatively young, that he was kind of a widower and we know that he worked for the U.S. military in one of the military bases in Daegu. We think it’s Camp Walker, but we’re not positive,” Stanton told The Korea Herald in a video interview.

“It’s pretty limited.”

As well as the few letters Stankiewicz sent, Stanton has had help from his relatives, who remember him from his time growing up in Detroit. But most of these memories are of him as a child.

“That tends to be where the family stories start to stop,” says Stanton.

According to relatives, Stankiewicz was headstrong and independent. He made a point of sitting with his back to the wall to prevent people from sneaking up on him. One account has him snapping his fingers in front of people’s faces when he thought they weren’t talking fast enough.

“They were all sitting around the dinner table, I guess in the ‘40s, and just told them ‘I’m smoking. I just want to let you guys know I’m smoking. I won’t do it here because I know it pisses you off but I’m just going to do it regardless of what you say,’” says Stanton.

“So there’s kind of just this attitude of not disrespect necessarily, but he was just going to do what he was going to do and he was not going to let people turn him down from it.”

After the war, he returned to the United States just once, for a brief visit in the 1960s.

Apart from that, they know he married, and lived on his in-laws’ property for some time.

“It was a strange-sounding situation and he hasn’t really gone into much detail about it,” says Stanton. “That’s the kind of stuff I’m curious to see: whether he’s living alone.

“You get the sense that he’s living alone, but I imagine he must have some kind of family or new circle of friends if he’s been living there that long.”

When he writes a letter, Stanton says, it is like an army report.

“It’s formatted as if he were addressing another military officer or something,” he says. “He’d give his ranking and military address. The longest letter I’ve seen him write is a page and a half to two pages.”

“It doesn’t go into the personal ‘I’m thinking of you’ kind of thing.”

Instead they are just matter-of-fact updates on his health and home.

“He might describe the renovations he was doing to his house, but he wouldn’t tell us what his job was,” Stanton explains. “He would ask my family to send over maybe five spark plugs, but then he wouldn’t say what he was doing with them.”

They are also short.

“In one letter he mentions having really high blood pressure, but he says ‘don’t worry, the doctors are putting me on meds.’ And that’s the entire letter.”

The lack of information has led to some big misconceptions. From the limited content of the letters, the family had thought Stankiewicz was living in a rural area with just a few dozen people.

“When I finally Googled Daegu and found exactly by satellite imagery what it looked like I remember my family being shocked and surprised that he actually lived in this fairly major city.”

While perhaps not directly connected to that, Daegu’s rise to prosperity is something he would like to incorporate into the documentary somehow.

“I think it’s kind of an interesting comparison to the rest of the family, because the rest of the family stayed in Detroit,” he says, “Now it’s almost switched, because Detroit has fallen on hard times and all of Korea has changed into this kind of economic powerhouse.”

Stanton says that he hadn’t started out wanting to make a documentary about his great uncle. Instead he wanted to look at the Korean War.

“Obviously knowing that Herb was there I was thinking of him playing some kind of role as being interviewed because he was a veteran of the war,” he says.

“He was surprisingly receptive of it. No one in my family thought he was going to say yes.”

This will still be the starting point for the film, it being the beginning of Herb’s Korean journey and also the period from which his family remembers him.

“Even though they’ve got letters from him in more recent decades it’s like the last time they saw him was the Korean War era,” Stanton says.

Some of that tough character he had back then seems to remain. Even since Stankiewicz expressed his enthusiasm for the project, Stanton says communication has been slow and that he tends to pick and choose the questions he’ll answer.

But Stanton says that he is going in with an open mind.

“I have ideas about why I think he made some of his choices but I’m curious to see how they line up with reality,” he says.

“In one of his more recent letters he describes how he has mellowed a lot and changed, so I’d be curious to see how some of those stories line up with how he is when I meet him now, 50 years later.”

Until then, Stanton is brushing up on his knowledge of Korea, including an attempt to learn some of the language.

“I’m not there yet,” he concedes, with a smile.

To find out more about the project, visit www.kickstarter.com and search for “Taylor’s Korean Documentary.” Stanton also plans to post updates about the project at http://taylorstanton.tumblr.com.

By Paul Kerry (paulkerry@heraldcorp.com)