This startlingly personal documentary presents a moving yet unsentimental view of motherhood and adoption. It explores the feelings surrounding the reunion of a young woman with her birth mother twenty years after being given up for adoption. The reunion is between filmmaker Camille Billops and her own daughter, Christa. Facing the re-encounter with mixed emotions, Billops interrogates her family and friends as well as her own motivations. The result is an original and daring work that challenges social biases about adoption and offers new insight into mother-daughter relationships.
Plays with:
Suzanne, Suzanne
Dir. Camille Billops & James Hatch, 1982, USA, 25 min
This poignant documentary profiles a young Black woman—Billops’ niece Suzanne Browning—as she confronts a legacy of physical abuse and its role in her descent into substance abuse. Family remembrances reveal the truth behind her addiction: Suzanne and her mother were victims of domestic abuse at the hands of the family patriarch. Suzanne is compelled to understand her father’s violence and her mother’s passive complicity, who suffered at her husband’s hands as well, as the keys to her own self-destruction. After years of silence, Suzanne and her mother are finally able to share their painful experiences with each other in an intensely moving moment of truth.
The first-ever worldwide theatrical retrospective of the complete films of Camille Billops and James Hatch centers Black cultural life and storytelling on screen with six autobiographical works that innovate documentary form and artfully weave together personal histories and social issues.
This worldwide theatrical release is presented by Third World Newsreel in cooperation with Dion Hatch and the Hatch-Billops Collection Estate. This program is made possible through support from the Ford Foundation. The new 4K restoration of Suzanne, Suzanne is by IndieCollect with thanks to Sandra Schulberg, Eva Yuma and team.
Generously sponsored by IATSE 856 Manitoba.
