Anna, a 38 year old Korean adoptee with a cognitive disability, cares for her aging parents as the family struggles to find a fragile balance in meeting each others’ needs. When a Florida heat wave claims mom’s life, the routine is shattered leaving Anna’s future uncertain.
SYNOPSIS
The fictional story follows Anna, a cognitively disabled woman who is also a caretaker, striving for autonomy. The script does not overlook her disability and she never becomes a savant, a burden, nor is she objectified — she is simply one of us.
The story uplifts the many facets of Anna’s character: she is disabled, yes, but she’s also an Asian adoptee, a sister and a caregiver to her aging parents. The story touches on themes about the adopted family as its own unique balancing act without glorifying adoptee trauma or white saviorism. Take Me Home empowers the disabled character and highlights the ethical dilemma of caretaking in the impossible American Healthcare system. There are glimpses of privilege and capitalism - who can get caregiving and who can’t? Who gets to live a respectable life after they have limited abilities?
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Following in the legacy of recent American social realist films such as Florida Project, The Rider, and Nomadland, TAKE ME HOME is a deeply personal story that will blend its fictional arc with the very real lived experience of its lead actor and other disabled and older adult members of the cast and community. While the script is carefully crafted as a narrative, the film blurs the line between documentary and fiction. The process is designed as almost a structured improv to offer a space for the actors to thrive rather than feel confined by a controlling traditional filmmaking process.
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The script, the production, the edit and the mission are built around my love for my sister Anna. Like Sing Sing, these are the conversations I want to create about how we make films that are truly inclusive. For all the years of feeling helpless drowning in anxiety and doom around my love for my aging disabled family, this film is a way for me to try to change the fabric of this world. It’s a way to share my insight and perspective on the lives I see quietly suffer. Take Me Home ends in a grounded magical realism that offers the viewer hope with a call to action to create a world where everyone’s needs are met.
Director Statement
I grew up in a suburb of Chicago to white midwesterners who had four biological children and then adopted seven more (six of whom are Korean) and several with various disabilities. As the middle child, I’ve always been the one to help siblings face borderline personality, PTSD, depression, and cognitive/developmental disability head on. Through my films, I am continually unpacking these experiences, examining cultural divides, intimate harrowing moments and transcending language.
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One in four adults in the U.S. are disabled, yet our culture is still playing catch up to this fact. This project was born from my own thinking about how this world isn’t set up for my youngest sister, Anna, who was born with a Cognitive/Developmental Disability (CDD) that left her with little short term memory. Anna is my favorite because she is spicy, empathetic, and always tells the truth. She will never be able to live alone. We both wonder what this will mean when she’ll no longer be able to live with our parents.
Supporter Statement
"Liz Sargent‘s moving short film “Take Me Home” packs a punch and plenty of heart in just 15 minutes of screen time." - Gold Derby
"Visually, the film is a compelling composition of meticulously framed shots and evocative cinematography that successfully immerses the audience in Anna’s world." - ZIZ
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Director Liz Sargent
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).
Co-Producer Ai-Jen Poo
An award-winning labor organizer and caregiving advocate, Poo has been recognized among Fortune’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders and Time’s 100 Most Influential People, and received a MacArthur “Genius Grant.”
As the co-founder of Executive Director of Caring Across Generations and the co-founder and President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, she has informed impact campaigns for award-winning films such as Roma, Still Alice, The Help and On the Basis of Sex, and leveraged their cultural impact to advance systems and policy change for women, domestic workers, family caregivers, older adults and disabled people
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