Over the past year, the documentary “A Lot Like You” has been picking up awards at both Asian American and African American film festivals. In search of her roots, a mixed race, first-generation American filmmaker Eliaichi Kimaro traces her father’s footsteps back to Mt. Kilimanjaro where she discovers the beauty and brutality of the life he left behind.

Eliaichi Kimaro is a mixed-race, first-generation American with a Tanzanian father and Korean mother. When her retired father moves back to Tanzania, Eliaichi begins a project that evocatively examines the intricate fabric of multiracial identity, and grapples with the complex ties that children have to the cultures of their parents.

Kimaro decides to document her father’s path back to his family and Chagga culture. In the process, she struggles with her own relationship to Tanzania, and learns more deeply about the heritage that she took for granted as a child. Yet as she talks to more family members, especially her aunts, she uncovers a cycle of violence that resonates with her work and life in the United States. When Kimaro speaks with her parents about the oppression that her aunts face, she faces a jarring disconnect between immigrant generations on questions of patriarchy and violence.

A Lot Like You raises questions about the cultures we inherit and the cultures we choose to pass down, and reveals how simply bearing witness to another’s truth telling can break silences that have lasted lifetimes.

A Lot Like You Trailer