A knock back in 1969 still reverberates

WASHINGTON — The extraordinary story spilled out in the most ordinary of ways: at a dinner party.

Jo Chim and Anisha Abraham were living in Hong Kong, and during a get-together, Chim listened as Abraham talked about the day her family met Neil Armstrong’s family.

She listened as Abraham described how the encounter occurred months after the astronaut walked on the moon, an event that brought people together as other issues pulled them apart. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated a year earlier. She listened as Abraham described how she was a baby when her parents and grandmother, who had migrated from India to the U.S., went on a road trip and passed a sign that announced the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, as the home of Neil Armstrong.

Abraham described the stares and whispers her mother, Nirmala Abraham, and grandmother, Elizabeth George, drew as they walked through the town in their saris and how her father grew nervous when her grandmother suggested they knock on the door of Armstrong’s childhood home to pay their respect.

Elsewhere in the country, White people had set dogs on Black and brown people who showed up uninvited. Abraham’s grandmother decided to knock anyway.

What happened next is the subject of the short film “One Small Visit” that Chim wrote and directed. The actress hadn’t written a screenplay before, but the story stayed with her, and in 2020, she started working on a draft.

“This story was just too wonderful to keep within one family,” Chim said. “I thought we should share it.”

The film recently won Best Foreign Picture at the LA Shorts Film Festival and has been viewed at screenings across the world, including at NASA’s D.C. headquarters. It will also be shown at the Kennedy Center to high school students, at the DC South Asian Film Festival and at the National Air and Space Museum.

A small family story grew into a big screen production, and 53 years after that nervous knock came another. This time on a D.C. door.

Chim described the film in this way: “It’s a story between two very different families finding connection and a shared humanity; a testament to taking leaps of faith and small acts of openness and kindness that make a difference.”

Chim said she also sees it as a story about strong women. Abraham’s grandmother, Elizabeth George, didn’t let the perceptions of others limit her experiences. In the film, when people stare at her, she waves unbothered in a queenlike manner at them. She teaches her granddaughter, Anisha, to do the same.

Abraham lives in D.C. and works as a pediatrician who specializes in adolescent medicine. She is also the author of the book “Raising Global Teens.” In the film, she is depicted as an infant. She was only months old when her family took that trip. But she grew up hearing about it. In the photo in a family album, her parents and grandmother stand in front of Neil Armstrong’s childhood home, alongside his parents, Viola and Stephen Armstrong. In her arms, Viola holds Anisha.

The photo was taken after the Armstrong family invited the Abraham family inside and they spent time talking and connecting. One of the most interesting details about that photo is that the person who took it was Neil Armstrong, who had recently returned from a tour that included India and happened to be at his parents’ house when the Abrahams showed up.

In the film, Neil Armstrong talks about how looking at Earth from space made him feel small and the planet look fragile. He describes the view as allowing a person to see that borders between countries don’t exist. The phrase “the overview effect” does not appear in the film but it has been used to explain the shift in perspective that can occur when people travel to space and return feeling more connected to the planet and the humans on it.

I asked Abraham what she hopes audiences will take away from the film. “The importance of compassion and tolerance and openness in a time when we’ve seen people more polarized than ever,” she said.

Chim interviewed Abraham’s parents for the film and Abraham said she learned things about them she hadn’t known. Her dad had once been invited by a rotary club to give a speech at a restaurant, and when he went back the next day, without the rotary club members, he was told he couldn’t come through the front door.

“My dad is in his late 80s and my mom is about to turn 80,” Abraham said. “It’s been such an empowering thing for them to be able to share their story.”

Recently, Abraham’s parents were at her home in Chevy Chase, along with the cast and crew of the film. Abraham was hosting them for breakfast before the NASA screening. She also had another reason to bring everyone together.

Neil Armstrong’s son, Mark, had seen the film, and he and his wife, Wendy, wanted to surprise her parents.

That morning, the Armstrongs knocked on the door and the Abrahams opened it.