Billing was born into what seemed to be a model family, devout, multiethnic, prospering; his father was a real estate developer. The 10 children included adoptees: four Crow siblings, two boys and two girls, who’d come from a broken and violent home on a Montana reservation. In 1978, seven years after they became part of the Billing family, the boys, early adolescents, disappeared one night and were hit and killed by a freight train the next morning. They were buried nearby.

Their deaths, still shocking in the memory of those living in the community at the time, were never explained. Thirty years later, Billing uses a cross-country journey to re-bury his brothers where they were born, on the Crow reservation, as backdrop for unraveling the story of how and why they left their adoptive family. The movie is about families and betrayal, and whether forgiveness is possible. And it stunned the audience. The documentarian is also a newsman, and was NBC bureau chief in China for five years. “Lost Sparrow” is making its way around the film festival circuit, and Billing is also talking with networks about broadcasting options.

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Director (editor, writer, everyman and, most importantly, “brother” and “son”) Chris Billing takes the audience on the most personal of journeys to discover just why his adoptive brothers Tyler and Bobby Billing died. Hit by a freight train, they were killed just over thirty years ago. Why were they lying on the train tracks? Why did they run away from home? And why didn’t they move?

These questions “Why?” initiate a series of devastating answers that lead only to more questions and heavy hearts.

How did these Crow Indian kids come to live with them anyway – in New Jersey?

And so it begins. With alcohol. With welfare. With violence, poverty and neglect. And so four Crow children came to be adopted by a couple who had another six in the house already – four biological and two other adoptees (including one Apache) who, together, formed a family balanced by five Caucasian kids and five Indian children. A truly racially integrated unit. But the adoptive family, despite a 13,000-square-foot house and hundreds of acres of farmland, had problems of its own – infidelity, anger… and secrets best left to the documentary to deliver as it unwinds and, in doing so, wrestles with issues of reconciliation and forgiveness, of faith, and of “family” in the philosophical sense.

Billing is not satisfied with just exploring the story that grew up around him, however, and by speaking directly to the Crow Indian tribal members who toughed it out around their children’s adoption by white families, raises questions of theft. Should these kids, despite the concerns over the chaos into which they were being introduced to the world, have been removed from their homes? Forced to forsake their right to an upbringing within their ancestral community? Should they have been left with their tribe regardless of the neglect they faced originally? Once the threats had passed, should they – could they – have been returned?

Billing provides more observations and talking points than judgments or answers in his feature. Made with the help of the International Documentary Association, Billing’s work wanders simply and straightforwardly into the midst of the documentary discipline. Aiming for sincerity over animation, and utilizing the subtle pan-fluted tones to symbolize both native history and organized religion, Billing is one to watch. At a time when some moviemakers are making a name for themselves by inserting their persona and bias into their material, Billing’s work is a welcome return to the non-fiction auteur as observer, even if those on whom he’s focused his examining lens are his closest family.

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