Documentary: “Imaginary Mothers” UPDATED

“Jacqueline Arias Thompson’s reunion with her biological mother 11 years ago provided the answers she had been seeking for much of her life, but it also raised new questions about adoption practices in her native Costa Rica.

Arias Thompson, a 1989 graduate of Unioto High School, has since met a number of women in the Central American country who had their children taken from them without their consent and adopted out to families in the U.S.

Now she’s putting the finishing touches on a feature-length documentary about five splintered families, including her own. “Imaginary Mothers” looks at international adoption through the eyes of the mothers who lost their children.

“What happened to my mother happened to many women in Latin America,” Arias Thompson said. “She worked two jobs. She was very poor. Social services came in and took (me and two of my three siblings) from the home. She thought they were putting us into temporary housing.”

Angela Arias, an unwed mother of four, made frequent trips to the orphanage to visit her children until one day they were gone.

“She was told she had lost custody, but I’ve since learned that, because we had been there so long (possibly up to a year), they declared us abandoned and a judge allowed us to be adopted,“ Arias Thompson said.

Arias Thompson and her brother Johnnie were adopted by a couple from Ross County who were stationed in the Panama Canal Zone. Their adoptive parents knew nothing of the circumstances that led to them being put up for adoption.

Their sister Jeannette Friend was raised by a school teacher in Panama. Authorities in Panama would not allow the teacher — a single mother — to adopt a boy and refused to split up the two younger children.

The three siblings reunited in 1986, and years later, Arias Thompson moved to Florida to be closer to her sister.

“I had always had this creative side, and my adoptive parents didn’t understand it and always encouraged me to be more practical, so for a long time, I was fighting that creative side of myself and trying to do other things,“ she said.

But while taking photos of her pregnant sister, Arias Thompson, then in her late 20s, indulged her creative streak and tapped into her passion for the visual arts.

She would go on to earn a bachelor’s degree in photography from Parsons The New School for Design in New York City and embark on a career as a photographer, experimental filmmaker and media arts teacher.

“People always told me I should write a book or make a film about my life, but I’ve never been a public person, so I never wanted to be in front of the camera,“ she said. “I like staying hidden behind the camera.”

Arias Thompson decided to make an experimental film about her life, but after doing more research on adoption, she learned about the corruption of the adoption process in Latin America in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. She turned her focus toward making a documentary.

“There was a whole generation of women who lost their kids. … The story was bigger than my own,” she said.

Now 43, Arias Thompson first spoke with her mother by phone when she was 28 and finally met her in Costa Rica when she was 32.

“My sister was ready. She called me one day and said she really wanted to find our family in Costa Rica. It was heavy on her heart,” she said. “I happened to be working for a private investigator at the time, and he was friends with another private investigator who was from Costa Rica. It only took him two weeks to find our family.”

Arias Thompson first met her eldest sister, who was 13 when her younger siblings were adopted. She had fed them and changed their diapers.

“I was a bit worried about what our family would be like. I had trepidations about what we might find,” she said. “When I first heard her (sister Mayela’s) voice, I was relieved. It was so sweet and sincere. Then I heard my mother’s voice, and she was sweet as well.”

It turns out Arias Thompson’s mother had been looking for her children for years. She had hired private investigators and even appeared on a local news channel pleading for information on where they might be.

“They never stopped looking for us,” she said. “I felt bad for them. … I felt their loss.”

That sense of loss is precisely what “Imaginary Mothers” is all about, she said.

Not only did the women have their children taken from them, she said, but they also were made to feel as if they had done something wrong.

“They were being judged for having premarital sex and were not only shamed by society but ostracized by their families,” she said, explaining how women in Costa Rica did not receive sex education.

Arias Thompson has been working on the largely self-funded project for the past five years. She recently launched a fundraising campaign through Kickstarter, an online platform that allows artists and entrepreneurs to pursue crowdsource funding for their projects.

If she’s successful in meeting her $20,000 goal, she plans to put the money toward post-production and promotional materials.

“I could cobble it together myself, but I want people to see it. I think these women deserve to be heard,” she said.

Arias Thompson’s adoptive mother died two years ago and she’s estranged from her adoptive father. She credited them for how they portrayed her birth mother when she was growing up.

“They told us she was really poor and couldn’t afford to take care of us. It was a kind narrative about our mother, and that really helped us,” she said.

Despite being separated from her family without her mother’s consent, Arias Thompson said she’s not anti-adoption.

“I think, when done right, it can be a good and necessary thing,” she said.”

Unioto grad filming documentary on international adoption[Chillico The Gazette 4/30/14 by David Berman]

Check out the people and KickStarter campaign here: http://imaginarymothers.com/

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Update: I Am Adopted Blog has a review of Imaginary Mothers here