Finding Christa

Duration: 55

Year Published: 1991

Creator: C. Billops

Format: 16mm

Color: Color & B&W

Sound: sound

Description: Questions of maternal responsibility and personal fulfillment are raised in this emotionally-charged film which explores the director's decision to give her four-year-old daughter Christa up for adoption and their reunion twenty-one years later. Co-mingling home movie footage, photographs and contemporary interviews, the first half of the film takes the viewer to Los Angeles where Billops and her family lived and where she made the agonizing choice. Friends and relatives confirm Billops' account concerning the limited options available to single mothers and the family's reluctance to become involved. A surreal theatrical interlude featuring Billops, playwright George C. Wolfe and Christa, provides the transition to the documentary's second part focusing on Christa's life with her adoptive mother and siblings and her present career as a singer-composer. Camille and Christa's reunion, far from idealized, is underscored by another theatrical vignette in which mother and daughter share family photographs as if they were playing cards.