Film Image
Finding Christa
Camille Billops & James Hatch
1991
Color
55 minutes
US
English
Finding Christa
This documentary presents a moving yet unsentimental view of motherhood and adoption. It explores the feelings surrounding the reunion of a young woman with her natural mother 20 years after being given up for adoption. The reunion is between filmmaker Cmille Billops and her and her own daughter. Facing the re-encounter with mixed emotions, Billops interrogates her family and friends as well as her own motivations behind the decision. The result is an original and personal film that challenges societal biases about adoption and offers new insight on mother-daughter relationships.
Reviews
"Full of expressions of sponteneous emotion, it is terrifically artful" - Vincent Canby, NEW YORK TIMES
"For Camille Billops, autobiography is a means to a new black documentary style." - B. Ruby Rich, Sight and Sound Magazine
"Loaded with real-life family drama... a brave film [which] raises questions, opens closets, and takes the viewer through the filmmaker's unchangeable past." - Donald Taylor, East Bay Guardian
In 1981, visual artist Billops reconnected with Christa, the daughter she gave up for adoption 20 years before. A decade after reuniting, Billops composed this rueful, docu-fictional examination of the difficult choices that define a life. - Matthew Eng, Tribeca News
Awards

• Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival
• P.O.V. Documentary Series, PBS
Screenings
• African-American Women Behind the Camera series, Brooklyn Museum, 1993
• One Way or Another: Black Women's Cinema, BAMcinematek, 2016
• We Wanted A Revolution, Brooklyn Museum, 2017
More Films by Subject and Genre
African American Studies
African Diaspora
Documentaries
Experimental & Avant-garde
Family
Women's Studies
Youth Collection
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