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  • 15 hours ago
While helping another woman search for her birth mother, a filmmaker reopens her own family story. In searching for her missing sisters, she unearths a legacy of abuse and exploitation, and begins to ask: can the creative power of self-authorship help her rewrite the scripts she has inherited?
Transcript
00:04Even if you didn't want me, I wanted you because children want their mother.
00:12The other girl.
00:16I want to help her find her family.
00:22Here I am, picturing myself crying in a crib as a baby.
00:26Not being held.
00:31Why did you leave me? I didn't leave you.
00:40You would be your father, Michael.
00:47We create these stories in our heads that repeat themselves for our whole entire lives until they're proven wrong.
00:56This sounds so basic. I wanted to see who I looked like.
01:03Oh, no way. This is mom. This is mom?
01:05Yeah.
01:07It's just not quite enough, you know what I mean?
01:13When Mihila and I were growing up, we would ask about our birth mothers.
01:20And our adoptive parents would tell us that they were cold.
01:28Unfeeling.
01:29Unfeeling.
01:32But when I look at these women, I don't see coldness.
01:41I see a kind of despair.
01:47What do you think it would have been like if me and you and our sisters were raised together?
01:58I would like to try and find our sisters, right?
02:04Right? If you want to, we will. We will. We'll try.
02:12There were certain things that he didn't really talk about and I don't think he gave us the full story.
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