"Still" An Adoptee Short Film

Logline: Eight year old Chinese adoptee, Layla, observes the fading relationship of her parents. As she experiences her parents' separation she tries to make sense of it and looks for reassurance that she and her brother will always have a family (no matter if her parents are together or not).

Director's Statement

At its heart, this film is about family. When I was younger, the definition and maintenance of family was always important to me. I needed confirmation and justification that I had one. Growing up as a Chinese adoptee always brought the challenge of defining what family is, because physically I’ve never looked like the one I belong to. When my parents got divorced I was only five years old and my sister was three. She’d only been in America for a year and when I ask her about our parents, she can’t remember them ever being together, but I can. Now, when I look back at that time in my life, minute details stand out to me that used to be hidden. Like warm Florida nights at the top of my bunk bed, pushing my body as high up on the wall as I could manage to cool my body down with the cool air that dripped out of the small vent above. Through that same vent dribbled in the angry voices of my parents. I also remember sensing a change in my father. I thought he’d been replaced by someone new. But after their separation, there were still Forever Family Days (or Gotcha Days). These days I know my parents endured for us. We’d all go out to eat together to celebrate me or my sister and I’d get to pretend that the divorce never happened, yet like in my memories, there were always truths that snuck in to remind me that it did.

This story is a reflection of how I remember experiencing my parents' separation, but it also depicts questions I wished I'd asked to make the change easier to swallow and the hope easier to see. I wrote this film as a letter to my past self. To the girl who sat at Forever Family Day dinners, trying to ignore the truth and worrying that her family wasn’t real. For adoptees, the definition of family can be testing. With this film I hope to help normalize interracial families and separated families.

This film has sat in my mind for a long time, starting as questions that I couldn't stop trying to answer. These questions developed into dialogue and then characters. By donating, you will help me tell this story and answer the questions that both adoptees and non-adoptees deal with when facing a structural change in their family. Donations will contribute directly towards post-production needs (music, sound design) and film festival entry fees.

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