Lipitz has crafted in “Found” a portrait of the effects that China’s former one-child policy, in place for nearly 40 years with a number of modifications, had both throughout that country and the United States. Past an intertitle informing us that more than 150,000 children, mostly girls, were adopted from China between 1979 and 2015, the documentary is sparse on official data or an analytical perspective. Information explaining how many children ended up in the United States, how the policy was enforced differently in varying areas and economic classes in China, and the longstanding societal impacts of a policy that for many families caused a prioritization of boys over girls, are lacking here. And experts on China’s population planning, fertility rate, or economic transformation are missing, too. 

Instead, “Found” is devoted to exploring the person-to-person relationships and economic possibilities borne out of this policy, which led to children being anonymously abandoned on street corners, on building stairs, and under trees because their parents either could not afford to care for them, or could not afford the many-thousand-dollar government fee they would have to pay to keep them. Lipitz shows us the bonds between orphanage “nannies” and the dozens of children they cared for, between researchers who work to find birth families and the curious adoptees who hire them, and between various relatives in birth families who are also searching for the children that they gave away. Intimacy, rather than assessment, is the goal, and so “Found” follows three American teenage girls adopted from China who learn through DNA testing that they are cousins. They live in different parts of the United States, they’re slightly different ages, they practice different religions, and their opinions on their biological parents and their country of origin vary. And Lipitz, in tracking the girls and their families for a number of months, allows their myriad opinions—contrasting between each other, and sometimes contrasting within themselves—to be the documentary’s primary concern.

What is it like to grow up looking different from your parents? To be asked by your classmates how you can be Asian and Jewish at the same time? To watch home videos of your childhood spent in an orphanage that you don’t remember, surrounded by women speaking a language you can’t? Teenagers Chloe, Sadie, and Lily have struggled with those questions individually, and then find solace and solidarity in each other. Through months of video chats that Lipitz uses to share their personalities, the girls get to know each other and talk through their questions, regrets, fears, and curiosities. With the frankness and rawness of youth, they chatter about their college plans, about the boys they like, and about how much of their Chinese culture they want to explore—or feel any affinity toward in the first place.

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