Recently we watched the documentary movie Adopted that as the title implies, talks about adopted people.
The film documents two different stories. The first one is the adoption of a Korean woman by a white couple about 30 years ago and the second one is the adoption of a Chinese girl taking place in present time, also by a white couple.
The purpose of the film is to raise awareness over the difficulties of raising children adopted internationally and also, as in the case of the first story, to present the point of view of the adoptee and the sad consequences of not acknowledging the culture and race of your adopted children. There is also some intention to highlight the differences between both adoptions and how white adopting couples are “changing” their approach to transracial adoptions.
The story of the Korean woman was the one that moved me, because it’s not often that you can hear the voice of an adult adoptee, and I hope that her story is able to open the eyes of some adoptive parents. Many viewers have criticized this adopted Korean woman saying how ungrateful she was and even cruel to question her sick parents about the denial of her identity. Sickness and old age aren’t excuses for wrong behaviors, and the adopted parents should have shown some greatness and recognize their mistakes and be able to help their daughter to reconcile with her identity. 
I’ve found the second story not so compelling. It’s true that some adoptive parents have changed the way they see international adoption, but that special couple didn’t seem that “aware”; it even was a little shocking the contrast between the happiness of the new parents and the sadness of the woman in the first story. Yes, this couple got interested in the culture of her daughter, but it still seemed like the adoption was all about themselves. Maybe their interview was not deep or long enough to show the complete picture, but if the makers of the film wanted to show a change between “then” and “now” they should have made an effort to portrait these new parents as more committed to her adopted child or simply they should have chosen another couple. It just felt it was all about knowing a few words in Chinese, watching a few cute Chinese children videos and hanging some souvenirs brought from China on the wall. 
This movie has a second DVD called We Can Do Better with interviews to adoptees and adoption specialists, but we rented Adopted via Netflix, and the only disc available there is the first one. That’s a pity, because I think the more interesting stuff is in the second disc. Apparently, you can only watch those interviews if you buy the two DVDs together online from the makers’ website, and to charge you $60 for the two discs is a bit too much. Anyway, if you want to watch little snippets of the interviews, they posted some videos on their site. Overall, the movie was not what I expected and “they could have done better”.

AliciA