25 Jun Alana and Yvette

Last night Alana and I went to meet with my friend Yvette. I’ve know Yvette for over a decade but we’ve always hung out in group setting so I didn’t know much about her background. Shortly after I posted my op-ed Yvette contacted me to tell me that she was adopted and had been thinking a lot about it recently. As I want the film to explore how people coming from different family configurations struggle with identity issues, I realized that it would be great to get them together.

It was an emotional discussion. Yvette’s tale of her adoption was complex and very different from Alana’s DC background, yet there were many similiarites between their desire to know their roots. Both of them had traveled to the country of their father’s origin and had found a sense of connectedness with the people around them- in Alana’s case in Poland- and in Yvette’s in Armenia.

Yvette’s father was an Iranian exchange student but making a visit to Iran proved much more difficult than traveling to Armenia which was once a part of Iran- so close enough.

Suki and I were discussing how to put the film together this morning. It’s a very different project than other things we’ve worked on as it won’t be as direct. In some ways this should make it easier for me- as I can see using voice over to tie scenes together- and pull out the different themes in a more direct way. It will require a slightly different working relationship though- as I will have to be a bit more directly involved editing wise.

For the last few years I’ve been more of a hunter gatherer. I go out and get the footage then Suki pores over it and pieces it together based on our discussions and the footage. I don’t sit with her at the computer all that often- which gives us less room to clash… in this case I will probably put together more of a script as a starting point.

I’ve filmed a lot with Alana over the last few days and want to film a lot more, as she is going to Europe for the rest of the year. I haven’t gotten into the complexities of her story here but they are a great conduit for exploring a lot of the idea that I want to get to in the film. We’ve gone over a lot of the same information repeatedly but I want to make sure that I get it in a useable way.