Mein fremdes Land (2022) on Netflix

Manuel grew up in the south of Germany. His birth mother is said to live somewhere in the barren mountains of Bolivia. A rousing, soulful story about finding a place to belong.

The fourth child of a herdswoman is born on the floor of a mud hut in a Bolivian mountain village. A few months later, little Jose arrives at the house of an adoptive family in Germany. Jose Noe Estrada becomes Manuel Phillip Sosnowski. During his childhood, the boy doesn't want to know anything about his origins. Pictures from his orphanage in Bolivia, he turns away. "In fact, we have never really talked about it", Manuel remembers today. The only traces of his birth in a faraway country are now compiled in a folder with adoption papers written in bureaucratic language. To make sense of his own story, at the age of thirty-one, the young man decides, for the first time in his life, to ask the questions he never dared to ask. Why did his mother give him away and who is this woman supposedly living in a place called Yawisla-Potosi? With the sparse information available, Manuel embarks on a journey full of uncertainties.

—Johannes Preuss, Marius Brüning