My Father

My Father (Hangul: 마이 파더; RR: Mai Padeo) is a 2007 South Korean film. The film, which is based on a true story, is about an adopted son who is searching for his biological parents in South Korea. During his search he meets his real father, a condemned murderer on death row. Daniel Henney plays the lead role of James, who works as a volunteer in the United States armed forces in Korea. He asks questions of why his father is on death row and finds out things that he always wanted to know. Then he finds more and more truths unravel about his father and his life.

The release of the film inspired controversy because the family of the father's victims did not support its production. In its first week on release it topped the South Korean box office sales charts.

The adopted son on whom the story is based is Aaron Bates, a licensed insurance broker for his family's insurance brokerage, Insurance Services of America. He lives and works in Arizona and is raising two boys of his own with his wife.

West Indies

The West Indies is a region of the Caribbean Basin and North Atlantic Ocean that includes the many islands and island nations of the Antilles and the Lucayan Archipelago.

After the first of the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the Americas, Europeans began to use the term West Indies to differentiate that region from the Indies (South Asia and Southeast Asia).

History

From the 17th through the 19th century, the European colonial territories of the West Indies were the French West Indies, British West Indies, the Danish West Indies, the Netherlands Antilles (Dutch West Indies), and the Spanish West Indies.

In 1916, Denmark sold the Danish West Indies to the United States for US $25 million in gold, as per the Treaty of the Danish West Indies. The Danish West Indies became an insular area of the US, called the United States Virgin Islands.

Between 1958 and 1962, the United Kingdom reorganised all their West Indies island territories (except the British Virgin Islands and the Bahamas) into the West Indies Federation. They hoped that the Federation would coalesce into a single, independent nation. However, the Federation had limited powers, numerous practical problems, and a lack of popular support; consequently, it was dissolved by the British in 1963, with nine provinces becoming independent sovereign states and four becoming British Overseas Territories.