A documentary that interweaves audio conversations and family archive images to question the dominant adoption narrative and to explore the director’s own journey.

Directorʻs Statement- This film emerged from conversations about filmmaking and representation that my parents and I have been engaging in for the past two years. Layering together fragments of audio conversations with images from my family’s archive, I seek to complicate the dominant adoption narrative. So That Tonight We Might See is a poetic rumination on consent and permission within family and filmmaking. The film raises questions about what it means for me to see and be seen. Through my filmmaking process, I move towards answers while leaving space for all that cannot be known.

Director - Bea Hesselbart

Bea Hesselbart is a filmmaker and artist based in Portland, Maine. In her film work, she is drawn to explorations of the creative process itself and is intrigued by uncertainty, unknowns, and incompatible truths. She is interested in disrupting norms and deconstructing myths through speculative, fragmentary narratives. In 2022, Bea was the second annual Documentary Storytelling Fellow at The Nature Conservancy in Maine and a LEF Fellow at the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar. She is a member of the Asian American Documentary Network (A-Doc) and Brown Girls Doc Mafia (BGDM). She has a graduate certificate in filmmaking from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and a BA from Smith College.