Institute History
Description
Adopt Me, Michael Jordan is the vérité story of five adolescent Ethiopians who become friends in an American-run orphanage in Addis Ababa. At first, the children are all hoping to be adopted by American families. One by one, they are chosen for adoption and leave for wildly different familie in America.
Weynsht, a sassy thirteen-year-old, is the first to leave. Her adoptive parents are evangelical chicken farmers raising five biological children in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas. Despite their differences – language, culture, race – Weynsht and her new family are bound by faith and believe they have been brought together by God. Next, Fanuel and Tizita, half-brother and sister, are chosen by a liberal, outdoorsy couple from the suburbs of Denver. At 13, Fanuel and Tizita will be the couple’s first children. Zemedkun, 11, waits the longest at the orphanage longer than any other child. Finally, he is chosen by a couple in small town Oregon. A bright and funny but often angry boy, he is thrilled that after three years of watching friends leave for America his turn has finally come. But he has no idea what to expect when his long-held wish comes true.
The children arrive in the US as veritable strangers to the families and discover they must overcome language, race and culture barriers to truly become family. Even the smoothest transitions are marked by uncertainty, frustration and despair. The first year is hard for the children as they try to navigate peer pressure, race, and almost daily shifts in identity as they transition from being African to being American. Additionally, our characters learn, once they have joined their new families, that a number of children adopted before them have since been rejected by their new families. As they learn about the possibility of ‘disruption’ in adoption, the already high stakes move even higher.
When the rough spots are smoothed out, the resulting success can be truly uplifting. The film culminates at an annual reunion of adoptive families, where the children meet their old friends from Layla House. So much has happened during this year and the children now talk to one another in English. It is immediately apparent how changed they are: how much they have gained and how much they have lost. They will be bound to each other forever by shared experience, but will never again be as close as they were in the orphanage.
As the film opens, Tigist and her younger siblings are brought to the orphanage by a neighbor. At twelve, Tigist acts as a mother to her two-year-old sister and seven-year-old brother. We learn that she has cared for them since their mother and two other siblings died of AIDS six months ago. Their ten-year-old brother is HIV+ and in a community AIDS home. As we see our other characters adapt to life in America, we go back to Tigist adjusting to life at the orphanage. She learns about her future adoption and has dreams of life in America, as the other children increasingly mourn losing the life they led in Ethiopia. The film ends when Tigist and her siblings are adopted by a “mega-family” in Seattle. Her HIV+ brother, Behailu, falls through the cracks and is left behind in Ethiopia. But ultimately her new parents, who have adopted seven other children already, learn of Behailu and manage to bring him to Seattle to join his little brother and sister and Tigist.