Anna, a 38-year-old Korean adoptee with a cognitive disability, cares for her aging parents in a fragile balance of meeting each others’ needs. When a Florida heat wave shatters their family and Anna’s routine, her future is uncertain - until she creates a world where she can thrive.
In a modest Florida suburb, 38-year-old Anna, a Korean adoptee with a cognitive disability, lives with her aging parents in a fragile, interdependent existence. Their family is every family: doing their best to get by in 21st-century, late-capitalist America, while navigating unique challenges. The household is a mix of tension, unspoken love, and mundane day-to-day survival as their carefully balanced world spins slowly out of equilibrium due to age and disability. Underneath it all lies the question: what will Anna’s future be, and who gets to decide?
Then on an ordinary day, Mom, sitting in a chair, succumbs quietly to the heat while Dad is away. Anna finds her unresponsive and calls her sister Emily in New York. Without the words to explain, Anna is brushed off—but the weight of the call soon becomes clear: their mother is dead.
Anna and Dad struggle to maintain their independence - long waitlists, unaffordable costs, and exhausted resources. Left with no other option, Dad considers a heartbreaking choice—if he abandons Anna, the state will step in. But eventually, Dad reaches a dead end financially, and ultimately disappears. Anna is left alone.
At this pivotal moment, the film shifts into a kind of utopian alternate reality, where Anna finds independence within her disability. In this imagined world, her needs are met in community, and she finds purpose and dignity. It’s a call to action for the audience to rethink what’s possible—and to imagine how small shifts in society could offer real hope.
Liz Sargent is a Korean-American adoptee and award-winning filmmaker whose work delves into adoption, disability, and family dynamics. With a background in choreography, she brings emotional depth to her storytelling, shaped by her experience as the middle child of eleven in an intersectional family.
A two-time NY EMMY winner (2020 & 2021), Liz is also a HALF Initiative Mentee (2022 & 2023), an MSSNG PCES AICP Mentee (2023), and NBCU's Launch Director (2024-2026). Her debut narrative short, Strangers' Reunion (2019), produced by Ritz-Carlton and Hearst under the mentorship of Mike Figgis, was an adoptee reunion film released in six languages worldwide.
Her proof of concept, Take Me Home, premiered at Sundance (2023), won the Grand Jury Prize at American Cinematheque's PROOF FF (2024), and was the centerpiece at the White House to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Olmstead Act, where Liz and her sister, the film’s star, shared their stories with key officials. Take Me Home screened at over 50 festivals with distribution on PBS, Kanopy, Swiss & French TV stations and a limited run on Delta Airlines.
The feature script won an SFFILM Rainin grant (2023) and was a finalist for the Humanitas New Voices Fellowship (2024) and an honorable mention for the Lynn Shelton Grant (2024).
AT&T Untold Stories & Tribeca Film Festival
American Cinematheque Proof of Concept FF 2024 - Grand Jury Award
Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival 2023 - Golden Reel Best Short Winner
Julia S Gouw Fellowship with Janet Yang Productions & CAPE 2022
Executive Producers: Janet Yang Productions, Cinereach, River Road, Caring Across Generations, Ai-Jen Poo
Producers: Apoorva Charan, Minos Papas
Actor - Bridget Everett
Actor - Ali Ahn
