278 Adrian Wills
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/278
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is fellow Canadian, award winning director and filmmaker, Adrian Wills. Adrian has a brand new documentary out called A Quiet Girl, where we get to follow his journey of a public search for his birth mother and experience every new discovery alongside him.
Today, we talk with Adrian about how his friends prompted his search and what he's discovered about the people of Newfoundland through his time there. We also discuss how we can often create these mythical personas of our biological parents from a few short sentences in our non [00:01:00] identifying adoption information.
Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon Adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. We wrap up with some recommended resources, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. We have an extra treat at the end of the episode. I was able to get permission to share some clips of audio from A Quiet Girl with you, so stay tuned for that. Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Adrian Wills. Hi, Adrian.
Adrian Wills: Hi, Haley.
Haley Radke: I would love it if you would start by sharing some of your story with us.
Adrian Wills: I'm adopted from St. John's, Newfoundland. And I was adopted when I was three months old into a family, a multicultural family in [00:02:00] Montreal, Quebec. My mother was from Malta and had emigrated to Australia and at 21 had decided to see the world and met my adopted father who was from New York and they met at Expo 67 in Montreal and in, in this, in the early seventies, they decided to adopt a child and that was me.
Four and a half years later, they adopted my sister. And my sister is also multicultural in the sense that she's Inuit. She's from Baffin Island, which is Nunavut. And yeah, I grew up with as an adopted child. And many years later, I found myself back in St. John's, Newfoundland with some friends, and they were really good friends.
People that I had known for, all my life, probably like 35 years or something. I'd gone to high school with them and grammar school with them. And they said, we should go looking for your parents. And I thought, no, we really shouldn't [00:03:00] because I was completely 100% you couldn't be more in the fog than I was. And here I was in Newfoundland, which is actually a maritime province in Canada where there's a lot of fog. And so I was it was summer, there wasn't any fog, but I was definitely still there emotionally in terms of my adoption. So my friends said, we should do this almost like it was a parlor game or something.
And I went along with it because I thought it would be over pretty quickly. And so Saint John's is actually a pretty small. There's only Newfoundland's only 500, 000 inhabitants and Saint John's is pretty small. And there's only, there were two hospitals. There's the The Grace and St. Claire's.
And I was, I thought I was adopted from The Grace and then found out that actually I was adopted from St. Claire's. I found myself at a warehouse where all the records for both hospitals were kept [00:04:00] and I said to the woman there I'd like to see what's going to happen with, I was adopted here.
Maybe you can tell me some information. And I gave her a name, and the crazy thing was that my adopted mother had been given a name, which was my name at birth, but they had made a mistake and sent it to her, as opposed to sending it to her as being the adopted mother, they sent it to her as if she was the biological mother, and so she had this name, and I actually didn't just for whatever reason I didn't actually know that this was really the name, but I used. It was a name that I had kept it was the name Wayne Cousins and I used it and I went in and I said okay this is my name. I think here's my birth date I think I was born here And I expected that was the end of it and we were on our way to a pub for lunch and ten minutes later the phone rang and the woman said, I found your records. And so all of a sudden that changed everything for me because [00:05:00] I started to realize that I actually had been someone else.
And so I, we, screeched the car around. And I showed up and I got those records and I started tearing through them. And I realized, I was looking for my biological mother's name and it wasn't there, but I saw this name for baby boy cousins, which was who I was. And something changed in me at that moment.
And I realized this fog kind of started to lift. And I realized that these questions I've been having my whole life about having been adopted and all the experiences I'd gone through, I'd been tamping them down. And now they were just screaming at me. And so I spent the week there in Newfoundland and people would come up to me.
We started telling people the story and people would come up to me and they would pull out their cell phones and they would say, oh you look like you could be this family, or you look like you could be that family, or, and it was overwhelming, to realize that you could have this whole [00:06:00] other history.
And so I went back to Montreal and I'm actually a filmmaker. I've been a filmmaker for about 20 years or more. And I'm a filmmaker who's made a lot of films, documentary, fiction, all different types of films. And I, I'd followed a lot of people's stories, including I worked a lot with Cirque du Soleil for many years.
I was used to having made films and I had also made a TV show called Who Do You Think You Are? Which was like a show about taking celebrities and taking them through their gene, genealogical experience. So I came back to Montreal and this idea was really getting to me and I realized that went to see the National Film Board in Canada and I said, look, I have this idea for a film.
I think I'm going to go on radio in St. John's. There was a radio station there that's been there since 1936. And I'm going to go on radio and I'm going to say everything that I know about my adoption, which is very little. And I'm going to see what kind of [00:07:00] response I get. And so I went on radio and I started to read my non identifying background summary, which I'll read to you quickly.
It was, it was biological mother, 20 years old, 5'7 tall, weighed approximately 150 pounds. She had brown hair, hazel eyes, and wore glasses. She was of Irish English descent. She was one of five children, all of whom were in good physical health. She had completed grade eight in school and had been employed in a service occupation, laundry work, since leaving school.
She was a quiet girl who did not talk very much, nor did she find it easy to express her feelings. The biological mother felt that she was unable to provide a good life for her child and wanted the best for him. She saw adoption as being the best way of providing him with all that she would like him to have.
And so there was something about the way that was written that it felt to me like a story that I wanted [00:08:00] to understand more about. I felt like the person who had written this knew her and that there was something emotional about this. And so I was hoping I would get this information and what ended up happening was COVID hit actually an hour after I had done this radio show Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada announced that COVID was taking over all of Canada and my message my radio show got shared like 20, 000 times in Newfoundland And three weeks later, I got contacted by someone in my birth family.
And that became a two year process or two and a half year process of making a film where I tried to learn as much as I could about what I thought was originally going to be just my history. But I realized more and more, it was about me wanting to connect act was my birth mother.
Haley Radke: You know what I got stuck on, Adrian, was [00:09:00] you said you were in the fog.
How did your friends know you were adopted? And what was the pressure there? Were you just this is where I came from?
Adrian Wills: I was something like, I've never shied away from the fact that I was adopted. It was just something, it was like saying, I've got brown hair. Or I wear glasses, but it didn't have any emotional real implication for me, or I wasn't allowing it to for many different reasons.
And my friends, because they were such good friends of mine I call them my brothers a friend of mine, John and my friend, James, John and it was just, I was, we were always together. And I think he knew what, I think he wanted me to go on a search that maybe I hadn't even decided I was going to go on.
Because it was strange because the whole way through this process, the two and a half year process, I would keep having calls with John about, the different things I was learning about this experience, because I was trying to figure out [00:10:00] how to deal with it, because the thing with this film that I made a film called A Quiet Girl.
The thing with this film is that I really realized early on, but I didn't want to make anything like what I had made before in the sense that I wanted to be, I wanted people to really understand what it's like not to know and what it's like to search and the only way to do that was for me to only discover everything on camera.
So it put me in a position where I realized, this story was a, it was a dormant story in the sense that it had happened many years ago. But I realized that I was the person who was going through this experience in that. But I wanted people to understand really what that's what it's like to be adopted, what it's like to really have these questions, how fundamental these questions are to us.
And I wanted people who were adopted to be able to see the [00:11:00] experience and get something from it, but I also wanted people who weren't adopted to understand a little bit about the process like how it feels to be adopted. As you well know you've had so many different people tell their stories.
Every story is completely different, but there's a lot of similarities to the stories of what it's like to be adopted that I found anyway, which is there's this sense of there's a form of alienation where there, you feel what you feel or I feel anyway. That I was alone, in the world, and that was okay because you're put in a position whereby you need to it's, in a weird way, it's, I can compare it to passing or something, this idea of passing in a society where you start to pass as somebody who's part of a family, or you try to, feel like you're part of that family, you know that you're different, very different than the people that are around you, you can see it physically, you can see it when you see other people's families, and you see this kind of musicality that [00:12:00] happens, that's invisible between them where they just seem to, there seems to be this, yeah, it almost feels like they complete each other in some ways, even if they don't get along. When you're adopted, there's something different there, and I think you're always aware of that, I think you become hyper aware of it your whole life.
So yeah, I wanted, I wanted people to understand a little bit to I don't know, to pull the veil on the whole kind of process of what that feels like, and especially to search. And the way I did that was. The way I did that was by being as transparent as possible, which was to film every everything I learned on camera the whole way through this experience.
Haley Radke: Why did you choose to go on radio to make your plea to the public versus so many of us we apply for our records and, hope there's something in there or else we're doing our DNA testing and trying to find a search angel to help us put the, tools together to figure out [00:13:00] what it means if you have a fourth cousin match.
It's complicated, but to go on and make a public plea, what was that like? And why did you choose that?
Adrian Wills: I look, it's interesting. I, when I say I was in the fog, I really was in the fog, right? Like I didn't know all of these different things you could do because I hadn't been searching.
So a lot of other people have searched and they have figured out all these things and they've looked into it. I didn't. I fell into this vat of, discovery fundamentally. So I did what I knew how to do, which was I knew how to make films. I've been making films my whole life and it was the way that I've made sense of the world.
My films have always somewhere along the line, they've always dealt with family, somewhere in the film. I made a film where I followed the Beatles Love Tour, L ove Experience with Cirque du Soleil, and I was filming with the Beatles, and George Martin, and his son. And to me, the story I was telling was this story about these [00:14:00] people who had come together and were almost like a family, and now they had lost two of their members.
And that's how I told that story, which was very different than maybe how somebody else would tell that story. And I did it just because that's what I felt, and I went with that direction. So the same thing with this, I the reason is really simple. I was in a pub and a woman came up to me and gave me I was in St. John's and she gave me a can of sausages, little wiener sausages that you put on crackers and she said, this is a Newfoundland delicacy and we have these at Christmas and I want you to have this. And by the way, there's a radio show called Voice of the Common Man. And they used to have people go on and talk about their adoption and ask, the public to see if anybody knew.
And so that was what I had. I was like, wow that makes sense to me. And so it fit with this idea of okay how do I understand the world? I understand it through making a film and [00:15:00] fundamentally I didn't know what I was doing. So originally I thought I was going to make a film about, cause I really wanted to know what it's like to be a Newfoundlander and where am I from? And, all this kind of stuff. So I thought that's what I was doing, and I didn't realize I was really ignorant. Because I was so in the fog that I didn't realize what kind of implication this was going to have, in terms of how it was going to change me how it was going to have me face questions that I never, that I, guess maybe knew existed, but I had never let live.
And all of a sudden, all these things started to live within me that I couldn't explain. I had gone to the Quebec, when I decided, when the NFB said, yeah, we'd like to, explore this idea with you. And there was a whole process, you have to write and, explain how you would make a film or whatever.
And I had gone to see the Quebec government, and I did have a file going, because I was adopted from the Quebec government, and I [00:16:00] also saw the Newfoundland government, and neither of them could really help me, to be honest. The Quebec government was able to tell me that they might have that they think they might have found, my birth father, but that he passed away and that they couldn't give me the name, and so there wasn't much help.
Whereas when I went to Newfoundland and Newfoundland is this amazing province in Canada, there's a famous musical that's been going around North America called
Haley Radke: Come from Away.
Adrian Wills: Yeah, that's what it's called.
Haley Radke: I've seen it, so I know it.
Adrian Wills: Yeah, and Come From Away was in, during 9 11, like three planes landed, or five planes landed in Gander, which is a small airport in Newfoundland from all over the world because they couldn't keep flying.
And the Newfoundlanders all got together and basically spent like whatever it was, five days or a week, putting them up, finding them food, making sure they were [00:17:00] comfortable and treating them like guests. And it was such an impactful experience for all the people who were involved. I think even some people got married and there was a whole experience that happened.
And it was so impactful for people that they ended up writing this musical and people told stories and there was a documentary made about it. But really what it was very illustrative of who the Newfoundland people are. And there are people that are incredibly, there's the expression salt of the earth and that's true of the Newfoundland people. So what I found was that pretty quickly, when I did have these questions that were beating at me or living in me, when I was searching that everybody wanted to help me, and I'm not sure that would happen everywhere in the world, but it happened for me.
And that was such a special experience to have this sense of community in this sense of people trying to help and it carried on while I was making the film. And that was something I wanted to document too, because it was something that I felt was [00:18:00] very much a part of being what I was hoping or what I was learning about to be a Newfoundlander, which is, who I am.
Haley Radke: I find it interesting, the interprovincial chaos of it all with the record keeping because Just like the states, every province has different legislation for adoption, open records, etc. Or if there's a veto or not, and both Newfoundland and Quebec, again, have complicated laws regarding that.
I, it's interesting that your search is crowdsourced. One of the reveals in the, I'll just say this. One of the reveals in the documentary with regards to Newfoundland is that they had a very common, oh, I have too many kids. You ship one off to your neighbor's house or your cousin's house or whatever.
Very communal living plus this [00:19:00] huge amount of infant adoptions. And I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about finding that you're like, oh, I'm one of many kids who were shipped off in those couple decades, super Catholic province, no birth control, all the classic things.
Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Adrian Wills: Yeah, sure. It was partly, it was in the beginning as I was still discovering, it was one of the, one of the things I was discovering in the film is I went to see Jean Ann Farrell and she was the, I found like she was the former coordinator of Newfoundland Adoption Services when I was adopted, so she would have dealt with my case and, I went to talk to her because I wanted to know, okay what's the experience?
What, how does this work? And I showed her, my papers, my, the paperwork that I had found in, in that record keeping warehouse and started to ask her about my specific case. And then, she started to tell me that, that when [00:20:00] she got into adoption, that there were hundreds of young children being available on a daily basis from both those hospitals.
And that, that there were so many children, that you, she said that, that they were actually putting ads in the paper to adopt these kids and that they were putting the ads in the paper so that they would, you, the idea would be you would get a, a baby by Christmas. So there was so many which is it's pretty crazy. And then there was this sense of people just being, helping each other because of the sense of community. Taking or I don't know, shipping each other's children or whatever, but more this idea of taking in another child or helping another child or people growing up. So there was this whole case of this occurring all the way through Newfoundland in a way that wasn't that uncommon.
So one of the guys, like the people that I, that helped me in the film was actually a he's a really amazing novelist from Newfoundland. His name is [00:21:00] Michael Crummey. He's written, I think, I don't know, eight to ten books. And his books are historical fiction, but usually dealing with what it's like to be a Newfoundlander.
And he, I went to see him originally just to find out a little bit about what that was like. And then it ended up being that he followed, I went to see him many times because he became somebody who became really invested in my story because he as well had this experience, where when he was young, I think it was his aunt or something somebody made a play to actually maybe take him as a child and that he knew a lot of people who had gone through this. And he felt like it was something that he could speak to and help me and he wanted to help me through that. It is definitely because of the fact that they're Roman Catholic.
It's definitely the whole experience of, what the adoption process is, it is like when somebody gives up a child for adoption, which was like, the nurses wouldn't let you [00:22:00] see the baby. Yeah, it's, these are stories that a lot of people know about, but they're stories that have impacted a lot of different people.
There was an article when we ended up screening the film in Newfoundland, and an article came out and got picked up by 190 papers in Canada. And it was talking about how there's 300, 000 children people from, who were adopted that are still searching in Canada that want answers.
So the story that I was following, which was really individual, my individual story was really, I think is actually a story that a lot of people have experienced. And I know that because when we've screened the film, people have come up to me and talked to me about their experiences.
In fact, it's, it was the most bizarre thing when we would screen the film, we screened it all through Newfoundland and it's screened in different places. And we were doing it with something called the Nickel Film Festival. And they had come up with this great idea of having a counselor after the screening on hand.
And so I was, I'd never heard of that. [00:23:00] And and yet when it's screened, there were people going to see the counselor, either walking out of the film or going to talk because they had their stories that they wanted to reveal, it was the craziest experience was when the film would finish playing, people would come up to me and then they would just download these secrets to me that, they've been keeping for years and years and hadn't been telling anybody.
And now they were telling me in like a four minute kind of flurry. And it was just. It's you know, it's it you realize that you're not the only one searching.
Haley Radke: That statement it's just it's profound right to think about because there's so many people that adoption has touched in a variety of ways and the if you think about the adoption constellation like it's, there's so many people.
I'm not surprised that people are coming up to you and sharing with you because as you said, all your moments through this process are recorded on film and you [00:24:00] present this incredibly vulnerable Adrian to us in so it does feel like a very intimate look into your life. One of the things you share in the film is that you go, you went through a really dark period of depression while making it.
Are you comfortable talking about that? And before you go into that, this whole thing started as on a whim with your friends poking you. And so one of my questions was going to be like, how did you prepare to search? Were you prepared? And I don't know, do you wish you had prepared in a different way?
Adrian Wills: Yeah, I didn't. I wish, do I wish I'd prepared in a different way? I once I started to decide, or once the film started to be made and once I started to, because I was learning everything in real time, I didn't know what I was getting into. So I didn't know what the story was going to [00:25:00] be.
I didn't know what I was going to find. I didn't know anything. It was like being completely blind. And I remember saying in the beginning that I thought this is going to be like going from the dark into the light. That's what I'm hoping. And I think in many ways that did occur, but I was really in the dark for a long time.
But again, I think that's what people have felt, or at least that's what I felt, and I wanted to be honest. That was the thing, if I was gonna make a, I've never made a film about myself, I have no interest. I'm not like a big, I'm not on Instagram, I'm not a big social media person, even though I've made a lot of films and stuff.
It's yeah, I'm actually very I don't know what the word is, but circumspect or where I'm I, I treat my privacy with a lot of respect. And so to do this, I, yeah, I didn't know what I was getting into. I had no idea, but I wanted to be honest. And that was something that was something I was very, cause I thought if I'm going to [00:26:00] do this or if I'm going to let people into any part of my life or whatever I discover, and I have to honor and respect everybody who's going to be part of this experience.
Then I have to do it in a way that at least the one thing I can offer is honesty. And so that's what I did is I was honest all the way through. And unfortunately for me, that honesty had effects that I didn't expect. So yeah, there was a massive depression that I went through that I ended up recording parts of.
Because when you're adopted, at least I can speak for myself, you create myths, you create myths about. Who are your parents? I remember being a little kid and thinking that Han Solo could be my father and that all three of the Charlie's Angels could be my mother.
And, it was this idea of being able to conjure up whatever I wanted in terms of who they could be. [00:27:00] And when I started to, when I saw that, the, that form, like I saw my birth records. It got, it was all of a sudden, it was like getting closer and closer to the myth. It was like actually being able to maybe make something real.
And so I didn't know what I was going to be making real, what I was going to discover. But what I ended up doing was, there was so much that I ended up having to grieve while making this process. And that led me to a lot of depression. And that, that grieving comes from so many different experiences, but it also comes from all the things that you've missed and what you've been hoping for and what your whole life have there's been pendrils of wanting this experience of being held or touched or spoken to or loved by what you'd conjured up as mythical characters.
Haley Radke: When did you first receive any of the non identifying information the paragraph that [00:28:00] contains that really beautiful phrase a quiet girl
Adrian Wills: Yeah, the crazy thing is I think I've had this for a long time I think I had this and the name for a long time.
Like it was part of my records. It was like, I was like, oh, I think I've got something. It was in a word document somewhere. And then I'd found it and it was like, it was typewritten. It looked like it was typewritten. I think like I'm estranged from my adopted father, but I think, and that happened in my early twenties.
But I think prior to that, I think he might have given it to me because it looked like it was type, typewritten in his hand. So how he got it, I don't know, because I'm estranged from him and with my adopted mother. Yeah, it's a long time ago and also, life changes a lot of things and it changes people's memories and so it was like one of those things that I just had, but I didn't, first of all, I never knew I was going to use. And second of all, I didn't know what it meant. And it was only [00:29:00] literally when I saw that birth record. I don't know how to explain this, but when you look at your birth records and you see another name, it takes, it's this really strange experience.
Where you go into another universe where you realize, my God, I, there's so many other things that could have occurred and that they're not just, and I, like I said, I work in fiction and I work in documentary. I work in story. And all of a sudden it was not, yeah, it wasn't a story.
It was actually real and that there were probably real people that were associated to this and a whole world that I, I'm relatively adventurous in some ways. Like I just jump into things and discover it as I go. And I guess I did that with this too. And maybe it's because if I prepared too much there was a lot of fear.
Involved in this search, there was a lot of fear, because you don't know, you don't know how people are going to react. You're going to see people when you're [00:30:00] very vulnerable and you don't know if you'll be rejected. And to be honest, without being too cross promotional one of the ways I was preparing when I was making the film was I started, I found your podcast.
And I started to listen to all these other people's stories and because I wanted to know a little bit what am I getting into? How bad can this go? Where can I go? And even though I did that it's still I still ended up in places. I didn't expect.
Haley Radke: I was thinking about the non identifying information. I mean before we've ever talked in this is our second time talking but I was I had mine from a long time ago to. And it's funny to think of when the first time I read it I didn't understand that a social worker wrote this paragraph upon, I don't know, how many meetings with someone who knows, right? And they got to put something down. And [00:31:00] yet, I hung on all the words, like I, it's that's all I knew to try and build a person like a human with all their complexity out of this like short paragraph and so I what I was like, oh my gosh, I think in my info, it might have the same phrase. It doesn't. That would be a good reveal. It's not. But you did share yours with ours. I thought I would read a little bit of mine. I think the social worker in my case, maybe it was a little bit vain or something. I don't know. There's a lot of physical descriptions in here. She is described as being well groomed and is very careful about her appearance. She has an oval face, pretty eyes and well proportioned features. She is shy, doesn't like crowds, is considerate, reliable, and dependable. She enjoys reading, drawing, and painting, etc. It goes on a little bit. But I remember, she is shy, she likes reading. Done. Same [00:32:00] person. There's this thing where you like, want to have a mirror. You're desperate for a mirror because you don't have that. And you were describing that so well earlier. About what it's like to be adopted and walk around in the world, but nobody knows unless you reveal to them. I found it so amazing that's what you named your film. This little phrase, because you're reaching for finding her. And how do you build that person,
Adrian Wills: Yeah, 100%. That's exactly why we went in that direction for naming it. That name and a quiet girl just kept coming back. But yours. She was shy, in my case, she was a quiet girl. One, if you think about a woman who's going in to talk to somebody who, and she's about to give up her child, like you're not going to be the most vociferous, right?
Like it's not, that's not your most gregarious moment. That's so obviously you're going to be reserved because there's a sense of are you doing the right [00:33:00] thing? Do you feel like you're doing the right thing? And I only started to see that afterwards, after I had gone through years of trying to put together, like you said, try to build a human or try to understand or all these different experiences.
I only saw it afterwards that I was like, Oh God, what people you would have gone through, the thing I've learned so much from this experience too, is all these birth mothers coming up, like to talk to me and telling me about how they feel. Because one of the questions you ask yourself, I think, or I ask myself is, was this, were you loved or, do they think about you?
Are you, or were you just something that just happened and then they moved on with their lives? And my experience, both from having made the film and also from all the different people I've met accordingly, is that they think [00:34:00] about you continuously and that it's a massive part and that to separate people in that way is like a really massive cleaving for everybody involved.
Haley Radke: How are you doing now that this film is, when we're recording this, it's not quite out for the public, but it is right now, when you're listening to this, you can watch this. How does it feel to have it out in the world for people to learn more about you. You do seem like a private person. You're hinting around earlier.
Yeah, you seem like a private person to me. But this is one of the most deeply personal parts of you that you're sharing with us. Are you doing okay? Like how are you?
Adrian Wills: It's all a process, so when you've made something like this, I don't know how it's going to be seen, my experience so far [00:35:00] has been very.
It's been limited to some screenings and, a couple, here and there if I've attended them, you know, and maybe a couple of people who read an article reaching out to me to say that they wanted to see the film. So I haven't really had an experience yet of what that's of having it out or being part of that dialogue.
I don't know. It's a process. How am I doing emotionally after having made the film is that it had such a massive impact on who I was and who I am in terms of it really changes your life. When you do start to look at these questions square, in the face or eye or if those questions are personified and to actually face them, and I think my experience has been that the more you face things, [00:36:00] the more you can grow.
And so I think that there's a part of, especially if you're searching, I think there's a part that feels incomplete in some ways. And so to try to find any way to start to complete it is not just gratifying, but it actually starts to heal. Something within you, and it starts to sew back up things that may have been more gaping than you knew.
Haley Radke: I'm picturing you discovering the multiverse when you find that name in the papers. And now you're, like, in a whole nother universe. Where you're like, no, this is who Adrian is. This is with some of my pieces and some of this collection of info.
Adrian Wills: Super interesting. It's actually, you don't change who you are because you are who you are. You just don't doubt the same way.
Haley Radke: Very good. You are who you [00:37:00] are. I like that. Okay, so I am, like, unreservedly, absolutely recommending people watch A Quiet Girl. It was so beautifully shot. It is one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. I've seen a lot. It's so wonderfully done Adrian, I'm not just saying that because you're there. Look at me. Sorry. I'm going to grab my paper because I want to make sure I cover a couple of things. It's visually compelling, just gorgeous. I love how you said Newfoundland is foggy. Relatable. And you spend your time, first of all, I'm super proud of us for not doing any big reveals. Like you guys are going to discover all of these things when you watch the documentary. But you reveal this deeply personal mystery to us. And in over the course of the time, it's just, [00:38:00] oh, I was just wonderful. I cried. It's just beautiful. And I'm so excited for folks to see it because it is this very unique experience of watching someone come out of the fog, literally, like it's right, even though I don't think there's a shot where you're like actually coming into the fog. But,
Adrian Wills: Yeah, totally. Yeah, the people I worked with who helped me make the film were you know, my editor, Heidi Haynes she and I have made like 14 films together, including everything we'd done, and I kept coming back to her, and so all of a sudden, it was making and the same with the producer, Annette Clarke, and the woman she was working with at the National Film Board, Kelly Davis.
It all became very family like, and it was all people that I really trusted and respected and because I allowed them into my world and like my editor, Heidi, even though we'd worked together for that many years, she didn't know anything about my story. And so all of a [00:39:00] sudden we were in an edit room, trying to put this thing together and it was, that was that was pretty insane because you have to relive the experience, and you have to try to find a way to synthesize it and make sense of it.
But if I didn't have the people. The same kind of generosity of community that I've discovered all the way through the film, and you'll see that when you see the film, is the same generosity I had from the people who helped me make it. And and that was like really necessary. Because otherwise I don't think I don't know. I don't know if I would have been able to continue.
Haley Radke: You get the answers that, that as a viewer, you can come to it and you can know that you will get some answers. And yeah, it's it's lovely as an adoptee watching it. I felt so connected to you and cheering you on and I didn't know what was going to happen when I watched.
I had no spoilers either and I want, [00:40:00] I was just like, wow, this is this is going to be so valuable for our community. Again, to know they're not alone. There will be adoptees who watch this and say, I have had a similar experience and will feel validated and seen. And the way you talked about earlier, you want folks to know what it's like who aren't adopted to know what it's like.
And I really think you got that. I think you really show like what it's like when you don't have answers. And yeah, I hope everyone watches it. It's really tremendous.
Adrian Wills: Yeah, I guess I can tell you it's gonna play it's for free, it's streaming in Canada on nfb.ca. And then it's also available on Amazon and Tubi in the U. S. Yeah, it's, people are gonna get to watch it. Yeah, it's very cool.
Haley Radke: Wonderful. We will have links to all the spots you can watch it in the show notes. So make sure you do that. And what did you want to recommend to us today? [00:41:00]
Adrian Wills: Oh, wow. So when I was making this film, I So I, I like to do, research like I said, I was listening to your show, but I was also watching a lot of other people's films about adoption when I could, and one that I found that really spoke to me was by another Canadian filmmaker. Her name's Tiffany Hsiung and her short film's called, it's like a 29 minute film, it's called Sing Me a Lullaby.
And it was filmed over 14 years between Canada and Taipei. And what it was that she was looking at she was looking, she went for the search not for her own parents but for her mother's birth parents because of the relationship that she had with her mother which was difficult. And she was trying to understand that and I think she was trying to give something to her mother.
And that film, she was so honest in that film and, watching it. So I called her before I was making the film and I, we spoke and she ended up telling me that for her, the biggest part about it [00:42:00] was capturing the authenticity of the moment. And that was the thing that I decided. That if I was going to take anything away that would be that so I would recommend it's beautifully shot. It's a beautiful story Sing Me A Lullaby. And then my other thing would be there's a book that a collection of stories that I read at the time called Family Wanted Adoption Stories and it was edited by Sara Holloway and it's multiple perspectives. It's the adopted child, it's the birth mother, it's people wanting to adopt and it deals with all different themes and it's all true stories. And I ended up using a quote, there was this quote that really touched me when I was making the film and I'll just get it up and I'll read it to you because I thought that this to me encapsulated a lot of what it felt like. And so this is from a story called The Fortunate Ones and it's an adopted child is really a wolf [00:43:00] raised by humans. "We are loved children bastards unrespectable by blood the world has chosen to raise us from the goodness of its heart. The world is under no obligation we are not its kin. Letting this cut both ways through the injunction to honor thy father and mother applies to us only if we choose those terms. We can create our own code, born with no boss. Our parents never gave us life. Our lives are like something found lying in the street. And in our old age, we will not turn into our parents. We are truly, defiantly, one of a kind. We may become monsters, angels, something new under the sun. And ours is the world of magic, fairy tales, and legend. From Thumbelina to Dorothy of Oz down to Jesus. Mythical figures don't have parents."
Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. I'm really excited to, to read that collection. I hadn't heard of it when you initially shared with me, so I'm really [00:44:00] excited to order that. Thank you, Adrian. What a pleasure to get to talk to you. You just seem like an amazing human, super thoughtful. My kind of person. Where can we connect with you online and make sure we see all the things you've got coming out in the world and including A Quiet Girl?
Adrian Wills: Yeah, I've got a Facebook group page, which is like Adrian Wills director. And I have a website, which is www.adrianwills.com, but I, like I said, I don't do a lot of stuff with socials. Maybe I'll start.
Haley Radke: Don't do it. Don't. Don't do it. Don't get sucked in with the rest of us. You got to be out there making your art. That's what we need more of in the world. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us, Adrian.
Adrian Wills: Thanks Haley, it's a real, like it really is a pleasure to speak to you and really your show, like it [00:45:00] really helped me while I was making this because all the other people's stories all their hearts, what they'd experienced, their disappointments, they're also like there's, their triumphs, all of that I took with me. And yeah, I really want to thank you for that because I think you, you do, you have a beautiful show.
Haley Radke: Thank you.
Oh my goodness, I really have enjoyed my time with Adrian. We've had a couple of conversations now and he's just is such a genuine person and at as a fellow creator who is like putting myself out there in the world, I have so much respect for folks who are willing to like, put their vulnerability out there.
And this documentary is just like such a tremendous example of that. I think so many people are going to [00:46:00] feel very moved and really get a deep understanding of what it's like to not know where you're from and to be searching for your origins and like the tumultuous nature of searching for identity. I feel so grateful that we have been given permission to share the audio from the trailer from A Quiet Girl.
So I'm going to play that for you right here.
An adopted child is really a wolf raised by humans. We are loved children, bastards, unrespectable by blood. And ours is the world of magic, fairy tales, and legends.
Adrian is a filmmaker from Montreal, but born in Newfoundland, and he's starting a journey, and you don't know where this is going to take you. [00:47:00]
Early 70s, there were hundreds of young children being relinquished for adoption on a daily basis. Newfoundland's famous for trading children around, right? They just farm them out. Unbelievable I was told that you were in a hospital. No, they didn't tell you the truth.
My biological mother, she was 20 years old. She was a quiet girl. That's your mom. I believe she was a soldier. She did create problems with the family.
Trying to understand what my origin story was, but it's turning into something else. Wait, we don't have any choice but to close the file here. Do you think you should always look for the truth? I think the truth can f you up. But if you're not interested in the truth, then you're not interested in living.
Your best [00:48:00] starting point is with the police. Someone has called in, someone has found her. The way I see it, absolutely everything was taken from her. My journey and her journey have too many similarities.
Haley Radke: You want to watch it now, don't you? We'll have links in the show to all the places you can stream A Quiet Girl.
And I would love it if you would share the show with just one fellow adoptee, especially if you know a Canadian adoptee. I am really trying to reach more Canadian adoptees and figure out how we can build. I'm so thankful for all of you that listen in the States and worldwide. And it is so cool to have so many international listeners.
And it's always funny to me that I have built most of my friendships with American adoptees. So I'd love to connect with fellow Canadian adoptees. So if you just share this with one fellow Canadian adoptee that you [00:49:00] know that would mean so much to me. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again soon.
