Upon her adoption of a Chinese baby girl, filmmaker Linda Goldstein Knowlton wondered how, in years to come, her daughter would view her racial identity, her roots in China, and the family who abandoned her because of her gender. So the filmmaker befriended a community of teenage Chinese-American adoptees, and made this engrossing documentary portrait of four of these girls. All live in comfortable homes with Caucasian families. One, a violinist whose goal is to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, says she's a banana, yellow on the outside, white on the inside. But her story takes an intense turn as she joins other adoptees who travel to Chinese villages looking for faces that mirror their own. One girl makes it her mission to find an American family to adopt a disabled orphan. Another has an epiphany that her manic drive to excel could be an attempt to prove her worth to the family who gave her up. These are young women well worth listening to, and Somewhere Between does so with grace and respect.
