Adoption Themes in the Movies 2012 BEST AND WORST

My TOP FAVES:

1- The Lost Child-2000 TVM; Mercedes Ruehl, Jamey Sheridan; Rebecca goes in search of her natural parents. After her adoptive father dies, Rebecca decides to find the family her dad had described to her. In response to her search, she is contacted by a woman on the Navajo reservation who is looking for her twin siblings who were stolen from their mother soon after they were born. The women soon realize that they are sisters and Rebecca is welcomed. But when her husband, Jack, comes to see them, the differences between the two cultures rise to the surface.

2- Breakfast on Pluto - This dark comedy stars Cillian Murphy as a transgender adoptee/orphan searching for love and her long-lost mother in small town Ireland and London in the 1970s.

3- Sudden Fury - A Family Torn Apart is a 1993 television film directed by Craig R. Baxley, based on the novel Sudden Fury: A True Story of Adoption and Murder by Leslie Walker, which itself is based on a true story. One of the adoptees in the family is Native American and he was thought to be the murderer of his adoptive parents but he wasn't.

4- The Italian - see this stunning movie for the brilliant ending. (Subtitles)

5- Bambi - Animated film about a young deer, Bambi, growing up in the wild after his mother is shot by hunters.

6- Stolen Babies-1993 TVM; Lea Thompson, Mary Tyler Moore; Social worker exposes the Tennessee Children’s Home Scandal. Mary Tyler Moore plays the evil babyseller Georgia Tann.

7- Liebestraum: 1991 adoption-theme thriller with dark twists (see my review on Dec. 30, 2010.   http://splitfeathers.blogspot.com/2010/12/liebestraum-1991-adoption-theme.html)

Not the Best:

1 - Sioux City aka Ultimate Revenge-1994; Lou Diamond Phillips plays the role of a doctor who gets suspended on his birthday. At his adopted parent’s home, he has a party and one of the gifts is an American Indian necklace with a note from his birth mother who he has not heard from since he was given up for adoption when he was very young. In the note she wishes to see him. So he leaves to visit her only to arrive a few days after her death. He visits the local sheriff because he is curious of the circumstances of his mother's death. He then heads to the reservation in search of any relatives. He runs into his grandfather who is kind of a witch doctor. On the way back to town he is attacked by some of the sheriff's men who try to kill him. They leave him for dead, but he is rescued. He does a vision quest to try to identify why he was attacked. He discovers the reason he was given up for adoption: his father was the local sheriff. He didn't love the birthmother and ordered her to give him up for adoption...

2 - Flirting with Disaster-1995; Ben Stiller, Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal, Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin; Farce about an adoptee searching for his birthmother. I was disappointed.

3 - Mommie Dearest-1981; Faye Dunaway, Diana Scarwid; about the adopted family life of Joan Crawford; several of her adopted children were stolen by the Tennessee Children’s Home and Georgia Tann. I hurt to watch this film.

4- Juno:  Juno is a smart teen confronting an unplanned pregnancy by her classmate Bleeker. With the help of her friend Leah, Juno finds her unborn child a "perfect" set of parents: an affluent suburban couple, Mark and Vanessa, longing to adopt. Luckily, Juno has the total support of her parents as she faces some tough decisions. Even as popular as this movie was, it disturbed many adoptees including me.

5 - Orphan: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1148204/ Disgusting!

6 - The Blind Side: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0878804/ Propaganda at it’s finest.

Movie Review: The Italian (5 STARS)

MOVIE TRAILER is not available


I was asked to introduce this movie THE ITALIAN at Common Ground, the 3rd Middletown International Film Festival on November 10th at the Russell Library in Connecticut. After the movie, I explained that I was also placed in an orphanage then foster care before I was adopted. I told them this movie is based on a true story.
This feature movie is everything I hoped it would be - truthful, complex and forthright.
The setting, a Russian orphanage, is exactly as I imagined, with children parenting each other, the older ones creating a system of providing for the younger ones (by any means necessary, including prostitution) and a corrupt bureaucracy that sells the younger children (let's not call them orphans because they do have parents) to rich buyers who they solicit to adopt.
What unfolds is Vanya (age 6) is slated to be sold to a rich Italian couple and is paraded to them exclusively.
Soon after he has an encounter with a friend's mother; the women is looking for her son from the same orphanage who was adopted to Italy.
You can see clearly how this mother's visit infects all the children with hope and possiblities, especially Vanya.
What happens?
Vanya goes looking for information to find his mother. First he has to learn to read and then find his file locked in a safe. And after a chase and many tense moments, Vanya actually finds her, his mother.
The light on his face - and the shine that returns to his eyes - is why I highly recommend this film.
For anyone interested in the topic of international adoption, this movie will shape attitudes to close such orphanges worldwide, end all international adoptions, treat all children with more respect, address poverty, allow women to keep their babies and children (even unmarried) and educate potential adopters who need to recognize these children were made into orphans by goverments and religions.
The moral of this story: unite children with their families.

MY RATING: 5 STARS

Read more:
http://zuguide.com/The-Italian.html
Vanya Solntsev (played by child actor Kolya Spiridonov), an abandoned young boy living in a rundown orphanage in a small Russian village, rebels when he learns that he is about to be adopted by a rich Italian couple. After getting help to read his personal file, Vanya sets off to find his birth mother. Directed by Andrei Kravchuk.
Categories: Drama, Family. Year: 2005.


ANOTHER CLIP: http://youtu.be/FBGjBvXknNw
Russia, Lenfilm, 2005.

Drama.
Writer Andrei Romanov and director Andrei Kravchuk constructed this ingenious, tragicomic tale of a desolate, decaying orphanage in the Russian countryside that sells abandoned kids to prosperous Western Europeans. The adults running the operation live in a haze of greed and alcoholic self--pity; the fatalistic elder orphans are thugs and hookers who accept crime and brutality as their only option in life. In this Dickensian world, nine--year--old Vanya is adopted by an Italian family. With a loving family and freedom in a new country on the horizon he is the envy of his fellow orphans. Yet rather than accept this new life, Vanya flees in search of his birth--mother and the truth of his past. A dual--award winner at the Berlin Film Festival and the 2005 Russian submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, The Italian is an elegant and poignant allegory for the moral crisis of Russia's new post--communist generation.

Cast: Nikolay Spiridonov, Marya Kuznetsova, Nikolay Reutov, Yury Itskov, Denis Moiseenko, Andrey Elizarov, Aleksandr Sirotkin, Vladimir Shipov, Polina Vorobjeva, Olga Shuvalova, Dmitry Zemlyanko, Darya Lesnikova, Rudolf Kuld.

Director Andrey Kravchuk.

The Italian - Итальянец
It's a pretty tall order to ask a six-year-old to suddenly take on responsibility for his own life. The questions facing Vanya are really tough: does he want to live a comfortable life as an adopted child of a loving family in Italy? After all, for an abandoned Russian child like Vanya it really doesn't sound like a bad option. Serene life under the Mediterranean sun is awaiting him. But the boy longs to find his own mother, so he decides to set off in search of her. But before he can begin, Vanya must learn to read the file that holds the information he needs to find her. He embarks on his quest--and encounters a mysterious and dangerous world. The world of children is a universe with its own laws; a realm in which sometimes one's heart speaks louder than one's intellect. (YOUTUBE)