By Adam Chau

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Vietnamese adoptee Mike Frailey. Image courtesy “The Adoptees”.

A new film in production, centered around Operation Babylift adoptee Mike Frailey, who is also co-director, centers around Frailey’s journey to America.

The film, which has been in the works for seventeen years (but officially starting production two years ago) introduces us to Frailey, as he narrates leaving the orphanage he grew up in for the first eight years of his life.

“I remember them waking us up. I was scared, asking what’s going on? [Silence] We’re going to America.”

Frailey was one of the children in the now-famous AP picture, staring out the window on the plane en route to the United States.

That moment starts not only Mike’s journey to the United States, but also his friend Nga, who the film also looks at, even though each would live very different lives.

“Nga passed away about ten years ago,” Mike said, “We had a falling out about how we saw our lives in America, which I’ll touch on in the film. What I hope to do is share a bit of his journey as he was so crucial to our existence when we were very young boys running around the streets of Da Nang during the war.”

While the film centers around Mike’s journey, in addition to Nga’s story, the film will also use decades of archival footage, dual-subject interviews, and footage from the 50^th Anniversary of Operation Babylift, to help answer the questions: what were the lifetime consequences of adoption for Vietnamese adoptees, and how do they find meaning and purpose in lives created beyond their control?

The film is also being co-directed by Derrick Owens, who met Frailey while both were volunteering in the same after-school program teaching photo and video. While not an adoptee or Vietnamese adoptee, Owens has ties to both Vietnam and adoption.

His grandfather served two tours in Vietnam, and his sister is a transracial adoptee. Both shaped his perspective on each.

“My grandfather came back with pretty severe PTSD and addiction, which really messed up my family. It became important to me to see the country for myself as I got older,” Owens said.

He was the first of his family to visit the country backpacking across Vietnam for a month, which helped to shape how he saw the country beyond what he says is “how the American cultural industry portrays it”.

His sister is the main influence and motivation for his making of the film as co-director along with Frailey.

While Frailey and Owens, in addition to producer Anjali Alwis, are the ones who have been shaping the film over the last two years, they also knew that they wanted to make sure that they were also reaching out to other community members, to help ensure authenticity and accuracy.

This included bringing on Chinese adoptee Julia Hess as an associate producer, partnering with other adoptee and birth search organizations, and creating a Vietnamese Adoptee Advisory Board.

The board consists of Vietnamese adoptees working in the community helping to guide the film with their lived experiences and expertise including, Huyen Friedlander and Noel Nguyễn.

Friedlander is a licensed marriage & family therapist and the co-founder of Con Tìm Mẹ, a nonprofit dedicated to reuniting Vietnam War-era adoptees with their first families.

Nguyễn is a trauma-informed mentor, workshop facilitator, author, and healing educator who supports survivors in reclaiming their truth and rewriting the stories that were once written for them. She is the founder of My Life In Mud, a mentorship and guidance program, that helps people work through and heal from trauma.

“So many Vietnamese adoptee stories have been told through gratitude or survival—but not always through truth in its entirety,” Nguyen said, “It can shift the narrative from something simplified to something human, layered, and honest. And that matters.”

Frailey echoed a similar sentiment.

“I feel Vietnamese adoptees have an added layer of complexities in our adoptee journey due to the Vietnam war and when we came here. America had just decided to end the war and leave. Many of us were placed in US homes where families were affected by the conflict. Sometimes, we were told we were the children of the enemy and treated horrible because we were Vietnamese.”

Both Frailey and Owens hope to release the film in 2027, with hopes for the film to be seen worldwide at festivals, in-person screenings, and if possible PBS or other streaming services.

No matter where it plays, they both hope it can start more conversations.

“I really want people to understand what the lifelong journey of adoption looks and feels like emotionally. First and foremost, for adoptees, but also for their families as well. We want the film to be a showcase for potentially difficult, but necessary conversations around adoption,” Owens said.

For Frailey, he hopes the film can help empower adoptees who have been silent about how they feel about their adoption, to be comfortable talking about it.

The good and the bad.

“It was a lot to talk about Vietnam when I was young, to the point that I would get grounded if I said Vietnamese words in my sentence when I was learning English,” Frailey said, “I hope hearing and seeing the honesty of the story will help us be able to share our truths and not be ashamed of being who we are.”