It’s a family reunion … what could go wrong? Plenty, as we soon learn when Rita Davern exposes an ugly reality at the heart of a family legend. Her family members have always been proud to say that their great grandparents once owned Pike Island, a beautiful piece of land at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. But when Rita relates what happened to the people who lived there before, some family members react with understanding, others with arguments and anger. Rita’s attempts to understand what happened and why leads her on a journey that requires facing the complicated legacy of westward expansion in the U.S. Along the way she meets Ramona, a Dakota educator. What Ramona’s ancestors experienced because of U.S. government policies puts faces and names on this story. Rita listens and learns. She wants to find a way to put something right. We learn the value of finding and facing the past by watching her journey.

Stories I Didn't Know

It's a family reunion - what could go wrong? Plenty, as we soon learn when Rita Davern exposes an ugly reality at the heart of a family legend.

Hope's Home Hope’s Home is a short documentary film about Hope Fengmei Christopher, a fourteen-year-old girl living in the United States who went on a journey in search of the missing piece of the puzzle that could help her understand who she is. From 1998 to 2018, around 110,000 children from China were adopted overseas, and the majority of them were girls. Hope was one of those girls. Her American family has three biological children and four adopted children from China. Hope was left at a train station right after her birth, so she has recurring dreams of a grey, rainy train station in China where she hears a baby crying. And like many other transracial adopted children, she didn’t fully feel like herself or fit in with either the Chinese students or the American students at her school. Hope always wanted to go back to look for her birth parents and discover where she was from -- and she got lucky.With the help of a searcher, Hope’s adoptive mother connected with a Chinese family whose names were on her police report. They say they only found Hope at the train station, but Hope believes they could be her actual birth parents. She decides to visit them and her birthplace. Through the director’s intimate access, the audience is on Hope’s journey with her, from her initial nervousness to feeling overwhelmed by the affection of her newfound relatives. Along the way, there are many humorous and bittersweet moments. As Hope struggles with all the emotions that come with retracing her roots, we witness both the beauty and complexity of international adoption. Co-presented by <a href="http://caamedia.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Center for Asian American Media</a>

Hope's Home

Stories I Didn't Know Q&A

Stories I Didn't Know (plus Q&A) & Hope's Home

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San Francisco Independent Film Festival2440 16th St #107San Francisco CA 94103Tax ID 94:3372871

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