Chance meeting of immigrants and Neil Armstrong in his small hometown in Ohio is the subject of a new short film

The parents of Neil Armstrong pose with the
Abraham family. (One Small Visit Film Ltd.)

On a road trip in 1969, a family of Indian immigrants spied a roadside sign announcing the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, as the home of Neil Armstrong, who had recently become the first man to set foot on the moon. To pay their respects, they knocked on the Armstrong family's door. The cross-cultural encounter is the subject of "One Small Visit," a short film that's already been shown at NASA's D.C. headquarters and will be soon at the National Air and Space Museum, writes Theresa Vargas, a columnist for The Washington Post. 

"Ultimately, 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," Jo Chim, the writer of the film, told Vargas. Chim found out about the visit from Anisha Abraham who, as a one-month-old, accompanied her mother, grandmother and father on the road trip. Abraham, now a pediatrician in D.C., said she grew up hearing the stories of the visit from her family. 

Abraham described the "the stares and whispers her mother, Nirmala Abraham, and grandmother, Elizabeth George, drew as they walked through the town in their flowing saris and how her father grew nervous when her grandmother suggested they knock on the door of Armstrong’s parents’ home to pay their respect," Vargas writes. The Armstrong family invited the Abrahams inside to talk and connect. Chim wrote the film after seeing divisions deepen globally during the pandemic and sees the story as a way of "issues of race, identity and belonging," Vargas reports.

"In the film, Neil Armstrong talks about how looking at Earth from space made him feel small and the planet look fragile," Vargas writes. "He describes the view as allowing a person to see that borders between countries don’t exist." A notable photo from the visit shows the Abraham family standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the astronaut's parents. Neil Armstrong is not in the photo. He was holding the camera and taking the picture. He just happened to be visiting his parents at the time, when Wapakoneta had just over 7,000 people. It now has about 10,000. Armstrong died in 2012.