Like Amanda Lipitz’s first documentary, “Step,” a portrait of a girls’ step dance team during their senior year at a Baltimore high school that took home a Special Jury Award for Inspirational Filmmaking at Sundance, “Found” seems destined to resonate widely. The emotionally-charged Netflix film kicks off with an unexpected connection forged on 23andMe and culminates in a life-changing trip to China. It follows Sadie, Lily, and Chloe, adopted teenage girls living in the U.S. who discover that they are blood-related cousins, a revelation that “opened up new ideas about [their] adoption.”
The trio enlist a history and travel group to learn more about their roots, an inquiry that’s led by Liu Hao, the woman who becomes their detective, biographer, and guide. She leads their journey to China when they decide to go abroad in search of answers. But not everyone is searching for the same thing.
While “Found” highlights Sadie, Lily, and Chloe’s shared history and their evolving, strengthening bonds with one another, it’s careful to differentiate them. The teens have grown up under different circumstances and in different homes. They have different feelings about being adopted. They have different opinions about growing up in white families and with white friends. They want different things out of their trip to China. Two of the girls are interested in finding their biological parents. One is not. These young women feel uniquely connected to one another, but the film makes it clear that their identities as adoptees, and as individuals, diverge.
This is a story of multiple perspectives. In addition to spending time with Sadie, Lily, Chloe, their families, and Liu, we’re also introduced to parents in China who gave their children up for adoption, and carers who took care of the babies at orphanages. All of these roads lead back to China’s one-child policy, in effect from 1980-2015. Though “Found” dedicates its runtime to a deeply personal story about Sadie, Lily, and Chloe, and those linked to them, it’s circling around the one-child policy, and its unimaginable impact on generations of Chinese families. We hear from parents who didn’t choose to put their children up for adoption, but instead resorted to it. They couldn’t afford to pay the penalty for disobeying the policy, and were consequently forced to leave their babies on bustling streets with the hopes they’d eventually find a home with a loving family.
Asked what she’d like people to think about after watching the film, Lipitz told us, “I hope it is more about how the people in the film touch their hearts. That it gives everyone the courage to find out ‘who you really are.'”
“Found” is now streaming on Netflix.
