"When we adopted each other"

Founder of Adoção Tardia and producer of its closing documentary on older-child adoption

CREDITS
Production & Screenwritting: Adoção Tardia - Simone Uriartt & Melissa Pozatti
Coproduction: Camba Filmes
Direction & Edition: Thiago Lazeri
Photography direction: Eduardo Rosa
Audio Recording: Cleverton Borges & Fábio Chaves
Electrician and Transport: Will Tech
Original Music and Audio Mixing: Mariano Telles
Editing and Color Grading: Thiago Lázeri
Assistant Director: Natalia Debeluck Plentz
Additional Footage: Thiago Lázeri
Art Direction: Joana Heck Motion
Motion Designer / Opening Titles: Ricardo Drehmer
Public Relations: Clara Allyegra Lira
Subtitles: Ana Letícia Prado de Campos

FAMILIES
Suzi, Luciana, Andriele e Luiz Denise, Rafael, Felipe e Vitor Juliana e Bianca Peterson e Lucas Lizianne, José Alberto, Carolina, Gabriela e Pedro

EXPERTS
Rita de Cássia Lima Krás - Lar Esperança
Graziela Milani Leal - Coordenadoria da Infância e Juventude do Rio Grande do Sul
Giana Frizzo - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Biel Gomes (Bloco Filmes)
To all the friends, family members, and adoption activists who helped us, directly or indirectly, to make this documentary a reality. EMEF Ana Beatriz Lemos – Montenegro – RS

SPONSOR
Sicredi

PARTNERS
Elo
Lar Esperança

More information at adocaotardia.com
2024 - Brasil

I founded Adoção Tardia in 2015 to change the way Brazil talks about adoption, and especially about older children and adolescents, who wait the longest and are chosen the least. Nearly a decade later, this documentary became the project's golden close: the culmination of everything we built, and the work I consider my biggest contribution to society.

The film opens an honest conversation with five families formed through adoption. Each shares its own experience of becoming a family, from the joys to the harder moments and the slow, real work of building affection. Around their stories are the people who shape the process from the outside: professionals from the child protection system who explain the legal path, and psychologists and specialists from shelter institutions who speak to why a child's earlier history matters. The children and adolescents speak for themselves too, about what it means to bond with a new family.

I produced the documentary with Melissa Pozatti, carrying it from first idea to its premiere. The aim was to demystify, letting prospective parents and the wider public see older-child adoption as it truly is, in all its difficulty and tenderness, and to widen the belief that a family can be built by choice and by love.

From the premiere at the National Meeting of Adoption Support Groups, hosted by Elo in Porto Alegre, June 2023.

What viewers said after watching

For a project made to shift how people see older-child adoption, these comments are our biggest source of pride and achievement.

Backstage

The documentary grew naturally out of the Adoção Tardia YouTube channel, where the project began. Several of these families had already appeared on the channel, and the film was the chance to go deeper into their stories and to bring in three specialists for the legal and psychological perspective.

The families helped shape the script themselves. Before filming, each kept a digital diary for five days, sharing moments of their daily life with us over WhatsApp. Those entries became raw material for the narrative and made sure the story was told in their own voices. One thing was non-negotiable for us: the families had to reflect a real diversity of configurations, and the film had to be as inclusive as possible.

Challenges:

We started shooting in March 2019, and then the pandemic interrupted us. It pushed the rest of the filming back by more than a year and strained both the schedule and the budget.
Our ambition grew as we filmed, and the initial budget, a donation from Sicredi, fell short. Many of the people involved, from the illustrator to the motion designer, worked for a symbolic fee or pro bono to see it through.
As first-time documentary makers, we made the classic beginner's mistake of shooting too much. Melissa and I spent long hours selecting and prioritising before handing a cut to Thiago.

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“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her chains are very different from my own.” Marielle Franco