This was an amazing film I watched on PBS tonight and I highly recommend it to you all out there. For one, it isn't all a rosy tale of adoption and shows some of the real hardships that all the participants go through during the process.
The filmmaking is exceptional in this piece as it poignantly shows both sides of the situation of what it might be like to adopt a little girl from China. The filmmaker profiles a family from Long Island who starts out in the process of adopting their second daughter from China and the filmmaker, Stephanie follows the family for about two years. The most touching part of the documentary is hearing from the mother and daughter themselves.
The difficulty of this process was highlighted by the request of the youngest daughter, also Chinese, that she wanted a sister, but she wanted a "big sister" and that is where the challenges start. Since Faith, the older, newer girl adopted from China has already learned the Cantonese language growing up, this proves to be extremely hard work to learn English and thus, assimilate to being "American", when she already had a Chinese sensibility. There are some lovely shots of "Faith" looking out the windows in the film and we can feel her anguish and pain at being taken away from all the she knows so well. A heartbreaking scene also involves Faith crying in the driveway of her house when she's having difficulties carrying her books inside (she's disabled with weaker hands and feet) and we feel her pain and isolation in that moment.
There are intense scenes in the film that show the Long Island family and their trying to understand what is happening in this process and then the "truth" is spoken by this little girl, Faith as she eventually becomes American. I loved watching the scenes with her foster family before she leaves China and then when she is video-chatting with them later after living in America. The pain at the end is in the Chinese sister's face as she cries after understanding that Faith has forgotten the language in which they used to share their secrets. So powerful and sweet, is this film about all of us out there, trying to understand each-other across our various cultural divides.
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