One Family - unsolicited DVD review

We watched the DVD, One Family, this past weekend. It is really well done. It is just 35 minutes, and shows a family preparing for their trip to Ethiopia, and going to pick up their 10-yr-old daughter at Layla House. It includes some interview time with mom, dad and brother, and some scenes where the adoptive parents meet their daughter's Ethiopian family members. It also shows some of the beauty of Ethiopia and its people. We are going to use this DVD to help our extended family and friends get a feel for what we are doing and to help start more conversations on adoption. We enjoyed seeing how well cared for and loved the kids are at Layla House. We are especially eager to show it to our kids so they can see how much Ethiopian kids are like them.... because I think they, like most Americans, have a picture in their heads of sad, starving children. There is lots of love and laughter in this short film, and it is SO worth the price of admission. There are tears, too, because life involves tears. The producers of this film really caught the essence of what's important in life.

Melissa Fay Greene review

"One Family: An Ethiopian Adoption captures the essence of older-child inter-country adoption. Where before there were separate parts, a new family now stands. The filmmakers have a light touch, yet their story is true and moving."

-Melissa Fay Greene, author of There is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey To Rescue Africa's Children

Adoptive Families magazine review

This documentary, about a Vermont family who adopts a 10-year-old girl, can be seen as a sweet story, an intimate portrait of Claudia, Rob, Eli, and, finally, Meskerem. But One Family: An Ethiopian Adoption (Jim Ritvo and Dave Raizman) has broader implications, too. People are beginning to speak about openness in international adoption, but almost always in adversarial terms--baby stealing, baby selling. So, the scenes in which Meskerem's birth family--her adoring grandmother, big brothers, and aunts--entrust her to her new American parents are awe-inspiring, and a lesson for us all. This, you realize, is how it should be. Split by race, distance, poverty, disease, and grief, two families are connected by a delicate hinge, Meskerem, and they become one.

One family, two filmmakers journey to Ethiopia

MIDDLEBURY, VERMONT — A Middlebury family’s trip to the other side of the world to bring a daughter home is the subject of one of the films featured at the Green Mountain Film Festival’s Vermont Filmmakers Showcase on March 29.

Dave Raizman and Jim Ritvo, the local filmmakers behind “One Family: An Ethiopian Adoption,” will be at the 10 a.m. event. A discussion will follow the show.

Recording of the 35-minute film was done in 10 days in the summer of 2004. It involved shooting up to 40 hours of video footage and traversing Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, home to two million people.

“It was very fast and we just sort of hit the ground running,” said Raizman, who lives in Adamant. “When we went, we weren’t really sure what the scope of the story was going to be. When we left, we came away with this powerful story of this family.”

The film highlights a couple from Middlebury who have two sons, and their effort to adopt a 10-year-old girl from Ethiopia. Both of her parents are dead and her relatives who remain cannot afford to raise her, so she lives in an orphanage. According to Ritvo, adoptions in Ethiopia are on the rise, with approximately 1,200 a year.

“Really that’s a drop in the bucket,” said Raizman. “There’s a million (orphans), you’re talking about 1 percent.”

The children are well cared for, he adds. Ethiopia has an affectionate culture and the orphans do not lack for human touch.

“In Ethiopia everybody picks up kids,” said Raizman. “These orphans seem to be in better emotional shape than we’ve seen in other countries.”

Although the Vermont mother had traveled to Ethiopia before, the family had no say in who they would adopt. Any cultural, color or continental differences that may have been an issue were non-existent, both filmmakers said.

“We saw a kid and a family bond, like, instantly,” said Raizman. “This girl is ready to love and they’re ready for her. … She was their daughter. There were just no ifs, ands or buts about it.”

The idea for the movie came to Raizman and Ritvo via a suggestion from a third party. Each man owns his own production company and the two have collaborated on a number of projects over the last seven years.

“I think we’re storytellers and it sounded like a good story,” said Ritvo of Montpelier. “We hadn’t thought boo about it. … It’s had a nice response in reviews and film festivals.”

The New England filmmakers learned a few lessons while in the African country. Ritvo’s luggage did not arrive until the day before they left for home. As he put it, “I was the largest man in Ethiopia,” and was unable to find a pair of pants that fit. His wearing the same clothes for several days was not something the people of Addis Ababa noticed.

“We have so much that we just take for granted in this culture,” said Ritvo, who was impressed with the generosity of those who had nothing, yet offered so much. “We were crying a lot.”
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From africamom

I feel back in the mire tonight... There was an African film festival here, and my SO and I went to see a short film about a family from Vermont who adopted a 10-year-old girl from ET. It was really quite heartbreaking. The girl had all kinds of family in ET and it was so sad to see how sad they were to let her go and how sad she was to leave them. (Her mother had placed her in the care center shortly before dying.)The shots of the adoptive parents driving through Addis were hard too--I could identify much more with what others have written here about the discomfort of feeling so unjustly priveleged. I cried through the whole film. We left the theater bewildered and sad and not sure at all anymore that we could go through with this and still feel good about ourselves.

I think we're feeling ignorant--rather shockingly so, at this stage (and considering the amount of reading we've done). I knew that children often had surviving bio family members, but I had no idea that they could be so extensive, and so intact.

And, Carrie, I'm intrigued by your comment about guilt: "where most of my guilt would spring from, thinking about that other parent 1/2 way across the globe who was forced to such a heart-wrenching yet noble decision for her or his child. Yet even that guilt seems perhaps somehow self indulgent of me--for the real decision was from the parent."