Adopted girls seek their Chinese birth parents in Found, a Netflix documentary that follows them from US to Guangdong province
- Three American teenagers travel to southern China looking for the biological parents who abandoned them in documentary Found
- Chloe, Sadie and Lily struggle to to reconcile their feelings, and when they see the orphanages from which they were adopted, the culture shock is palpable
Three Chinese teenagers who were raised in America return to Guangdong, southern China, to search for their biological parents in Found, a documentary streaming on Netflix from October 20. It’s a journey that unleashes a cascade of emotions.
Chloe, Sadie and Lily met each other through 23andMe, a service that matches relatives through DNA samples. Although they lived in Phoenix, Nashville, and Oklahoma City, respectively, they became close friends over social media.
Documentary filmmaker Amanda Lipitz began following the girls after shooting her niece Chloe’s bat mitzvah celebration. When they contacted My China Roots, the girls and their families arranged a group trip to Guangzhou. There genealogist Liu Hao had been reaching out to orphanages and potential biological parents.
“You go into a verité documentary not knowing where things are going to take you,” notes Anita Gou, one of the film’s producers. “We wanted to temper our expectations. Everybody was hopeful, but we knew that statistically the search was going to be tough. Our emphasis was more about the three girls finding themselves in different ways.”
