大象传媒

Kolkata is the international adoption capital of India. Thousands of its children have been adopted overseas, where they have grown up with little knowledge of the people or culture they left behind. This film follows two women - both adopted as babies - as they return to Kolkata for the first time to find their birth families. They are searching not just for their relatives, but also for a lost identity.

Teri grew up as an only child in south London. The only thing she knew about her birth mother was that she had abandoned her at Mother Teresa's orphanage shortly after Teri was born. All of her life, Teri has struggled to understand why her birth mother decided to do this. As she returns to Kolkata, Teri searches for answers about the community she came from and the truth about her mother. She knows her family were Anglo-Indians, a Christian minority that began in imperial times when British soldiers married Indian women. As she searches in the slums and streets of Kolkata, she learns a story about her family that has remained hidden from her all of her life.

Leila had a very different start in life. She was given in to an orphanage when she was just one day old. The story her adoptive parents were told was that Leila's birth mother was the domestic servant of a wealthy businessman. They had an affair and Leila's mother became pregnant, but she was unable to keep the child because of social taboo. Leila has a pile of documents with her mother's name and address, as well as a photo of her. It is a promising start. But as Leila returns to Kolkata, she must confront the truth about the city's adoption industry. In recent years, dozens of people have been arrested for child trafficking and thousands of adoption documents have been proven to be false. Leila's must work out what is fact and what is fiction from the stories that she has been told, and see whether any of these stories can lead her any closer to finding her mother.