Meet the "Adopted: The New American Family" Team
Barb Lee, Director: I’m like everybody else. I love a good story. But, my favorite stories are the ones that teach me something important about myself. That’s why I love "Adopted: The New American Family." This project is an extension of the very themes that I have spent my whole life probing. As a Korean adoptee growing up in the mountains of North Carolina, I was constantly examining concepts of race, identity, and family. What I’m now learning through the filming of this documentary is changing who I am as a person, an adoptee, and a mother. Wait until you see the personal stories of two families, striving to understand what family means when it crosses international and racial boundaries. You’ll never look at your own family the same way again. This project has truly been the best gift of my 20 years in this business.
Nancy Kim Parsons, Producer: My experience as a Korean adoptee has greatly shaped who I am. Like the families we follow in the documentary, I too had to confront issues of identity and race. I now hope to use this very personal understanding of transracial adoption to educate, inform, and perhaps change some preconceived notions of what it means to be adopted and Asian in America. Please join me in my efforts to give voice to the many different people and perspectives that are touched by adoption.
Molly Fowler, Producer: I love to hear a good story and I love to tell them. The stories that come out of our lives seem to mean the most to me. When I met Barb and Nancy, I connected to the passion with which they have taken on this portrait of families evolving in a very complex world. I was also struck by who they are as women, as adult adoptees and as storytellers. While I did not think a film about transracial adoption had anything to do with me, I was curious about the transracial thing. Barb and Nancy’s perspective has helped me understand the weight of my white privilege. They haven’t done it in a particularly pejorative way; they’ve simply shown it to me.
A curious thing happened during the process of making this film though. My husband died, and my two young daughters and I are wrestling with issues of abandonment and grief as we redefine our family. Suddenly a film I thought belonged to transracial adoptees and their families, began to resonate for me. Ultimately, we’re telling a story about survival. As someone who is drawn to personal narrative, how could I resist this one?
Randip Ghuman, Assistant Editor: I do a little bit of everything when it comes to production. I’ve been the grip on most of the shoots for the current documentary project and I’ve done most of the off-line editing for Barb, as she reads all the transcripts and pulls together sound bytes. I like the families, but I’m most fascinated with the way in which the story will be told. It feels like a big responsibility because emotions run high when it comes to family and just a cut instead of a dissolve can change the tone or the perception of a sequence. I know it’s important that we get the story right. I’ve always liked video because I think it’s a powerful medium. What I’ve learned on this project is that it also comes with a huge responsibility.
Emma Gardner, Research Assistant/Website Developer: I’ve always been fascinated with other cultures, and I’d like to think I’ve spent a large part of my life attempting to understand people from different backgrounds than my own. When this project came along, I jumped at the opportunity to further broaden my horizons and learn more about the transracial adoptee community. Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to delve into issues of race, identity, and Asian-American culture. There really is nothing better than to have my preconceived notions of race in America questioned every time I go to work.
Catherine Wigginton, Website Developer/Associate Producer: Prior to joining Point Made, I worked as a freelance journalist writing features on education, family, law and real estate for newspapers and magazines including the Village Voice, American Lawyer, and the Real Deal. Originally from Denver, Colorado, I headed east after college for Washington, D.C., where I worked as a historian doing research for environmental and Holocaust litigation and then later managing publications marketing for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foreign affairs think tank, and the Bill of Rights Institute, an educational services organization. In 2004, I decided to pursue journalism after a serendipitous encounter with a gypsy at an election night party. Three weeks later, I sent my application to Columbia.