The documentary Unlocking the Heart of Adoption will screen at the Adoption Connections Training Institute: OneWorld Neighborhood - 3rd International Conference on Post Adoption Services, February 19-21, 2007, at the Hotel Marlowe, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ACTION has begun to establish a network that will exchange ideas, knowledge, models, and resources to provide the best possible services for all members of the extended "Family of Adoption." For information and registration visit:
http://www.kinnect.org/training.html#ACTION

The 56 minute film Unlocking the Heart of Adoption bridges the gap between birth and adoptive families through diverse personal stories of adult adoptees, birthparents and adoptive parents in both same race and transracial adoptions. They stirringly reveal the enormous complexity in the lives of normal people when impacted by adoption. In the process, they explain what the universal issues of 'loss' 'identity' and 'needing to know the truth' mean to them. Many candid snapshots touchingly enrich each story. Historical footage is threaded through the film and serves as an illuminating background. Unlocking the Heart of Adoption gives the viewer a powerful way to understand what 'adoption as a lifelong process' means today.

Filmmaker and birthmother, Sheila Ganz, is a recipient of the 2006 Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute's Angels in Adoption Award for her documentary film and grassroots work for openness and honesty in adoption.

For more information visit: http://www.unlockingtheheart.com Here is what a few people have to say about the film:

"Sheila Ganz's documentary provides compelling, profound insights into people whom most of us hardly understand at all. I wish everyone could see this film and learn from it. Adoption -- and our culture -- would certainly become more compassionate and enlightened if they did." Adam Pertman, Executive Director, Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, adoptive father and author of Adoption Nation

"Sheila Ganz's Unlocking the Heart of Adoption is a superb teaching tool for courses on adoption. This elegantly constructed documentary film introduces U.S. adoption's recent history and basic themes and provides a dramatic and moving perspective on the powerful emotions adoption can arouse. Tracing several adoption stories among triad members and across the life-span, through interviews that honor all points of view, the film leads viewers into a richly dimensional understanding of the conflicts, joys, and sorrows of adoption. My students were very glad to have seen Ganz's film; it launched a fine discussion to which we will return again and again." Margaret Homans, Professor of English and of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Yale University

The goal of this 2007 ACTION conference is to have a conversation about what we are doing well, what we can share, what we can do better for the families, and most of all, the children in adoption. Through this conference, CFFC, Center for Family Connections, is creating a distance-learning institute for dissemination and best practices worldwide.