A Quiet Girl

Boat People DIRECTOR: Thao Lam, Kjell Boersma . Canada . 10 minutes A short but powerful look at survival and the lasting impacts of history on human lives. Based on the widely celebrated storybook The Paper Boat from Toronto children's author and illustrator Thao Lam. As a child, Thao's mother would save ants from drowning, and later, in a twist of fate, ants helped guide her family to safety during their escape from Vietnam across the South China Sea.

A Quiet Girl DIRECTOR: Adrian Wills . NL . 86 minutes A deeply moving and personal documentary about a Montreal filmmaker, Adrian Wills, who was adopted from Newfoundlnd as an infant. Wills pieces together a portrait of his complex beginnings in Newfoundland, traveling between Canada’s most eastern coastline and Arizona over two years in search of answers. What begins as an urgent search for identity, reveals disquieting parallels between his own life and that of the birth mother he never knew, transforming the meaning of family, the voice of a birth mother in the distance, and Wills’ understanding of his place in the world along the way.