One Small Visit Stars an Indian Grandma Curious to Meet Astronaut Neil Armstrong
One Small Vist - Trailer
October 15, 2022
On July 20, 1969, the American astronaut Neil Armstrong put his left foot on the lunar surface and famously declared, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
A few months later that year, an Indian immigrant family were on a road trip in the United States, starting from their home in Delaware. The parents, with a months old baby, Anisha Abraham, were graduate students. They were accompanied by Abraham’s grandmother Elizabeth George.
Entering Wapakoneta, a small town in Ohio, they saw a sign “Home of Neil Armstrong. The first man on the moon.” Ignoring pleas from her family to avoid showing up at stranger’s homes, George knocked on Armstrong’s door. Neil Armstrong was visiting his parents that day at his childhood home. He had recently returned from a World Tour, including a visit to India.
Josephine (Jo) Chim heard this story from her friend Anisha Abraham, who was too young to remember the visit. But Abraham had heard it often from her parents and grandmother and there is a photo of the two families, with her being held by Armstrong’s mother – taken by Neil Armstrong.
Chim wrote, directed, and produced One Small Visit, a thirty-minute film based on the story – her debut in all three roles. She was eager to make the film, given the mix of the historical moon landing, racism faced by Black and Brown people in America, and the image of the “Indian women clad in their finest saris walking down Main Street Middle America in 1969,” Chim told Classic Couple Academy.
As a Chinese Canadian woman “I’m part of the larger, global Asian diaspora, people who have long been a part of the fabric in our adopted nations but constantly viewed as perpetual foreigners, visitors, those who don’t belong,” Chim writes on the movie’s website.
Among the five executive producers, who funded the film, are Anjali Kataria and Shubha Iyengar, both Indian Americans, and Mike Novogratz, a Wall Street executive and investor. The movie was shot near Hamilton, Canada and the post-production work was done in Hong Kong and Wellington, New Zealand.
Chim pursued acting in theatre, TV and film in New York, after a degree from Brown University, U.S. Now based in Hong Kong, she oversees a studio for branding and marketing content, specializing in making short form videos for a global private education company.
Anisha Abraham, a pediatrician based in Washington DC, is on the faculty at Children’s National Hospital. As a teen health expert, she treats young people with depression and other adolescent issues. She has been featured on CNN, NPR, Fox News and the BBC. Earlier, she was chief of an adolescent medicine division, and according to her website, a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army.
Abraham grew up in the U.S. and has lived with her husband and two children in Asia and Europe. She earned a 7-year BA/MD program from Boston University, and in Washington DC, her pediatric residency at Walter Reed Hospital, a fellowship in adolescent medicine at Children's National Medical Center, and a Master’s in Public Health at George Washington University.
One Small Visit was shown at the National Aviation and Space Administration’s headquarters and will be shown to school students at the Kennedy Center and the newly reopened National Air and Space Museum, all in Washington DC. The short film won the Best Foreign Film at this year’s LA Shorts International Film Festival - it was submitted as an entry from Hong Kong.
There are no borders between countries when the earth is viewed from outer space, Neil Armstrong says in the film.
One Small Visit, Anisha Abraham told The Washington Post, is about “The importance of compassion and tolerance and openness in a time when we’ve seen people more polarized than ever.” She also noted that, “I do come from a family of go-getter women who don’t take no for an answer. We had women who really didn’t perceive barriers.”
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