
How Adoptees from Bangladesh Search for Their Past
Since the late 1960s, thousands of children from Bangladesh have been adopted by families in Europe and North America, often marketed as orphans rescued for a better life. This film follows two of them living in the Netherlands. Sander traces his roots back to Bangladesh and eventually meets his biological family in person, a reunion the cameras capture in full. Suma works through the Shapla Community, a support network for Bangladeshi adoptees, as she searches for relatives she has never known. Interviews and archival material lay out how international adoption agencies operated in Bangladesh, revealing falsified paperwork, coerced birth mothers, and children reported dead to their families while quietly sent abroad. The film also checks in on the current state of child welfare in Bangladesh and sets the adoptees' lives in Europe against the lives they might have had if they had stayed. It is a quiet, personal account of what gets lost, and sometimes recovered, when adoption crosses borders and decades.