Oscar-Nominated Adoption Short Film: Raju

Raju, a student film, has been nominated in the Live Action Shorts category for the 84th Academy Awards. See the website here. We could not get the trailer to run, but it does provide interesting details of the movie including a listing of all the awards it already has received.

Raju is about India adoptions, the illegality of some of them and the desperate means that PAPs go through to obtain a child. Max Zähle was unfamiliar with adoption trafficking prior to researching the subject.

An interesting interview with Max can be read at From the Classroom to the Kodak Theatre
[MovieMaker 2/16/12 by Rebecca Pahle]

Excerpts:
“In Raju, Möhring and Richter star as a German couple who travel to India to adopt a child, only to become entangled in the illegal adoption epidemic—where children are stolen from their parents and sold to couples through phony adoption agencies—that plagues the country.”

“MM: How did you learn about the issue of illegal adoption that serves as the centerpiece of Raju? And what about that issue made you want to make a film about it?

MZ:
I was researching [topics for my] film and found out about a situation where children get stolen out of the country. The [foster parents adopting them] want to do something good, but it’s bad, it’s illegal. So I started to research, and I found out about this global, massive, child-trafficking illegal adoption problem, and it really touched me. How far is a couple willing to go to get a child? On the other hand, who has the right to have a child? Those were the questions that really interested me as a filmmaker, finding out how far a person would go, what the moral order of a person is if they want to have a child [so badly].

MM: And if they knew where the child had come from, would they do the right thing in returning it to its real parents? I thought was one of the most interesting parts of Raju, how the wife didn’t want to give the child up, but the husband did.

MZ:
That was actually the whole drama. Because even the woman, she’s not a bad person. It’s heartbreaking, because she doesn’t want to do anything bad, but they just want the child so badly that it gives them this moral dilemma. ”

REFORM Puzzle Piece