Atlantan shares journey to China after adoption in new documentary

In December 2023, Abigail Kemp traveled to China with her father for the first time since she was adopted 22 years ago.

During the trip, she visited Beijing, then went on to Hefei, the city where she was born, and finished in Guangzhou, where she lived in an orphanage. She documented the entire journey on video.

Between film production jobs, the metro Atlanta native pieced together the footage with a video diary her dad made of his and his wife’s experience adopting Kemp all those years ago. The result is an 88-minute documentary titled “Year of the Rabbit” in honor of her birth year. The film, which Kemp produced on her own, will premiere at 4 p.m. Saturday during the Atlanta Documentary Film Festival.

With the documentary, Kemp offers another perspective on adoption, one that centers her experience as an adoptee and does not revolve around a search for her birth parents.

A new perspective

“The thing that we were missing (from other documentaries) was having an adoptee as the storyteller,” Kemp said during a recent call from her Sandy Springs home.

From the 1990s when Chinese adoptions opened to U.S. citizens, up until August 2024 when China abruptly ended international adoptions, more than 160,000 Chinese children were adopted internationally. In recent years, more adoptees have spoken about the complex feelings surrounding their adoptions, especially the challenges that come from being transracial and transnational adoptees.

The idea for the documentary struck Kemp while she was taking a composition class that focused on race at Kennesaw State University. The course and professor inspired her to consider her experiences through a different lens and to recall memories that she had buried or shrugged off.

Between essays and discussions with her professor, Kemp realized she had a lot to say about race and adoption. She decided that year to major in media and entertainment, and knew she’d one day travel to China and make a documentary about that experience.

Film has always been present in Kemp’s life, as her dad started making video diaries before she was born and well into her childhood.

Abigail Kemp and her father, Michael Kemp, pose for a photo during their trip to China in December 2023 for her documentary, "Year of the Rabbit." (Courtesy of Abigail Kemp)

She thought it would be interesting to look back through her dad’s footage, then visit the spots in China that he documented two decades ago.

But she had to put this goal on pause as she completed college and gained experience in the workforce.

In the meantime, Kemp began talking to other adoptees about their feelings and experiences, and she learned that plenty of people had no desire to seek out their birth parents. It was an experience she felt was underrepresented in media since in many films, adoptees are portrayed as “broken, they’re alone, they’re abandoned, they’re missing something,” she said.

“I think it was important to show somebody who I believe represents my friends and the people that I’ve talked to where it’s like, we are whole, we have goals that aren’t just finding family,” she said.

Kemp spent most of 2023 sorting through the archives of video diaries her father made for her years ago. Since they were all on tape, she also had to convert them into DVDs, then upload them to her digital software. She said she’s still discovering old videos that she missed.

In December, near the end of the Year of the Rabbit, the zodiac in which Kemp was born, she flew to Beijing with her dad to begin filming for her documentary.

Filmmaker Abigail Kemp created a documentary about her trip back to her hometown in China where she was adopted from in 2001. (Courtesy of Abigail Kemp)

“One of our guides was like, ‘It’s funny because 20-something years ago, your parents came here, brought you home and now you’re taking your dad and showing him your hometown, and you’re both experiencing it for the first time,’” Kemp said.

Bringing her dad along ended up working in the story’s favor, she said, especially since she had decided not to look for her birth parents.

“I wanted to represent a story point where it’s like, what if you just went back for yourself, because just experiencing a place you’ve never been to but were born in, is insane.” she said.

In addition to her time in China, she filmed interviews with her parents at their home in Sandy Springs, and she traveled to Eugene, Oregon, to interview some of the people at adoption agency Holt International, an organization that was instrumental in opening up international adoptions.

Building community through vulnerability

As an indie filmmaker, Kemp did nearly everything herself. Starring in and producing the film at the same time was one of the hardest challenges she faced throughout the experience.

“Going into these topics of race, adoption, abandonment, all of these things cropping up — I remember being in China and having to basically split my mind into two,” she said. “OK, so this location looks great, but we have to talk about something serious.”

There were moments before she went to China where she was filming her own interviews in her room at home, and the vulnerability required to share that side of herself was challenging to push through, she said.

Once the film was complete, she embarked on another difficult journey: Playing the film festival circuit. Kemp said she was turned away by countless festivals, a task made more challenging because her documentary is a feature-length film, and many festivals look for big names and big studios to back them.

It was a relief for Kemp when she learned that the film was accepted into the Atlanta Documentary Film Festival, but it also created more pressure since she knows the first people to see it will be friends and family.

As an indie filmmaker, Kemp did nearly everything herself. Starring in and producing the film at the same time was one of the hardest challenges she faced throughout the experience. (Courtesy of Abigail Kemp)

“I think it’ll hit me as soon as I hear the first few lines and I’m like, oh my gosh, everybody I know and love is in this room,” she said with a laugh. “I hope this doesn’t change their opinion of me.”

In a few short days, Kemp’s documentary will be available for friends, family members and strangers to watch and to witness her journey from China to Atlanta and back to China again.

While working on this project, Kemp also began building a social media following where she shares her experiences as an adoptee and filmmaker. It inadvertently turned into a community of people who can learn from and connect to her stories, she said, many of whom are excited to see the film once it’s released.

Between “Year of the Rabbit” and her social platforms, this is only the beginning of what Kemp has to say.