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My wife worked in adoption for a number of years and through the grapevine I'd hear stories of the grief of couples who couldn't start a family as well as pain from young teenage girls who found themselves pregnant when they didn't want to be. Sitting between those two worlds was my wife and the beauty of adoption. The idea of people who so desperately want children not being able to have them and people who don't want children finding themselves with one stayed in my mind so deeply.

This point was pushed even further when we had overseas missionary friends lose their baby during birth. That same year my wife and I got pregnant and we began to wait for something to go wrong. Every doctor's appointment we'd wait for the hammer to drop with some terrible news about our baby. But, all in all, everything went very smoothly and our beautiful boy was born perfectly healthy. For a while, there was guilt as to why our son was born so easily while our friends doing God's work were struggling to start a family. Return to Me was a film for me to process those feelings and questions. We shot the film entirely without a script, just based on an outline, and allowed the actors to fill in the gaps with their own truths. What we discovered was tremendous hope in the midst of darkness.

Benjamin Ironside Koppin
Writer/Director