Project Synopsis

In Summer 2025, I stayed with, interviewed, and filmed each of my three mother figures in their respective homes. Weaving together moments with each of them – Joyce, my adoptive mother, Tessa, my childhood nanny, and Aida, my birth mother – the film offers a glimpse into one process of ongoing repair. Through my families’ experiences, UNBRAID~unravel complicates adoption, motherhood, and the Western nuclear family with the realities of labor, migration, and gendered care.

THE CHILD

First seen packing a balikbayan box to the brim with nonperishable food items and wrapping a large, framed photo of myself as a toddler, I not only interview but also answer questions and receive advice, sometimes solicited, sometimes not, from my mother figures.

THE MOTHERS

My Filipina birth mother, Aida, laments her uncertainty about what out lives could have been like had things been different. Now back in the Philippines, much of our conversations recall periods of time when we were not together, and the moments we missed in each other’s lives. Meanwhile, my American, Jewish adoptive mother, Joyce, and I, look through baby photos as I prepare to travel to the Philippines. In her suburban home where she tends a garden of Pacific Northwest and Southeast Asian vegetables, Tessa, my childhood nanny, recalls meeting me during her first interview with my American parents. “You’re three months old at that time,” she says, going on to say that in those days, she wished that I was her child.

THE STORY

Fragments of conversations reveal key truths about my adoption against constantly changing backdrops of Pacific Northwest evergreen trees, the wide sky and manmade riverbanks of an unnamed tributary to the Cagayan in Northern Luzon, Philippines, and the blue-brown waters of the Columbia River at the Oregon/Washington border.

Throughout filming, I move continuously between my mother figures’ three homes. UNBRAID~unravel revolves around my relationships with each of these women, at a pivotal crossroads in our lives. I’m navigating a shift to becoming an adult with older parents, and yet revisiting memories of my childhood with those parents who birthed and raised me. UNBRAID~unravel draws my maternal figures into my own artistic process of remembering and re-collecting moments from my birth, adoption, and growing up, as part of the ongoing experience of reunion. 

Crowdfunding Purpose

Your contributions will help us cover finishing funds, festival fees, travel costs, and impact campaign/community engagement. In particular, we’re interested in screening the film within a series of workshops designed to encourage conversations around labor, migration, and adoption/separation, as well as address the anger, grief, and other complex emotions that embody those experiences. The workshops ask audiences to critically consider adoption, its relatives fostering and trafficking, and their connection to the U.S.-Philippines labor relationship, experience of overseas Filipino workers, and Asian diasporic communities, as well as U.S. imperialism, forced migration, and diaspora more broadly. Alongside local collaborators, the workshops will also introduce and immerse audiences in various forms of care. Depending on location, partner organization, and intended audience, each workshop will address different types of care work, and invite care workers as audience members, participants, and facilitators.

Director bio

Alexandra Lenore Ashworth (they/ze, xana/Dzana) is a Filipinx, Jewish filmmaker and writer, born and raised in the US. Zir work explores collective memory, trauma, and healing in the face of colonization and globalization. They recently completed their MFA at UC Santa Cruz, focusing primarily on kinship, adoption, and family separation.

Dzana previously worked in entertainment and political news at HuffPost, and is a 2022 Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellow. Ze has directed and produced for PBS, Art21, the MET, MOMA, and Brooklyn Museum. Their poetry appears in You Are Holding This, an abolitionist zine for and by adopted, fostered, and trafficked people. They were Associate Producer and Co-Impact Producer for award-winning feature documentary Fire Through Dry Grass (2023).

Dzana is a NatGeo Explorer, and a proud member of Writers Guild of America (East), Brown Girls Doc Mafia, and the Asian American Documentary Network. They studied Spanish, screenwriting, and magical realism at Sarah Lawrence College. They get excited about building with radical queer, disabled, and marginalized communities. Ze also enjoys swimming, fishing, and scifi and fantasy fiction.

Learn more about Dzana at www.dzanaashworth.com