The feature documentary UNLOCKING THE HEART OF ADOPTION, by Sheila Ganz, birthmother and filmmaker, premiered at the Film Arts Festival, Thursday, November 14, 2002, at BRAVA! Theater Center in San Francisco, CA.
In 1969, Sheila became an unwed mother. UNLOCKING THE HEART OF ADOPTION chronicles her journey of surviving rape and the relinquishment of her newborn daughter, and interweaves the stories of 15 adoptees, birthparents and adoptive parents in same race and transracial adoptions. Their stories span 70 years, from a birthmother whose child was adopted out without her consent in 1922, to an adoptee who uncovered the truth after his parents died when he was 36, to a birthmother and adoptive mother in an open adoption with twin boys born in 1991. The film explores transracial adoption through the stories of three mixed-race adults adopted as children: a Japanese American woman, a Filipino American man and an African American man with his Caucasian adoptive father. These stories are told against the historic backdrop of adoption in America narrated by Helen Hill, adoptee and chief petitioner of ballot Measure 58 in Oregon. This landmark legislation passed in 1998, giving adult adoptees in Oregon unconditional access to their original birth certificates.
Sheila's artistic background is in the visual arts and sculpture. Throughout the film, as Sheila tells her story, she constructs a life-size sculpture of a mother holding her baby in a hospital bed using chicken wire, bamboo, burlap and plaster. UNLOCKING THE HEART OF ADOPTION is her directorial debut.
You can get more information on the film at www.unlockingtheheart.com.
(This feature appeared in the Summer 2002 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)
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