The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins (2008) User Reviews

Trophy Kids

[groggo · 8/10 · 7 December 2009]

New Zealand documentary filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly has produced a vivid portrait of a flaky, if not downright neurotic, Italian-British-American performance artist (Vanessa Beecroft) who expends an obsessive, inhuman amount of time and excruciating effort trying to adopt two Sudanese twin children uprooted by war and other atrocities in Darfur Region(south-west Sudan).

Brettkelly reveals New York-based Beecroft as yet another of those well-heeled white women (see Angelina Jolie, Madonna) who feel compelled to 'save' children when their own biological children back home are being raised in relative luxury by a succession of nannies and other caregivers. In this film, the viewer can either feel repulsed by Beecroft or harbour sympathy for her questionable motives. Even Beecroft's husband is at odds with her.

At two years old, Beecroft's mother, who is herself unstable, abandons her marriage and takes her child back to Italy to be raised. Decades later, Beecroft's British father admits to not understanding his daughter and her quest to bring Sudanese children to an unlikely place -- the art world of far-off New York City. He suggests that Beecroft is more interested in serving her own emotional 'needs' while ignoring the source of the problem -- there are hundreds of thousands of other parentless children in disastrous Darfur.

Beecroft doesn't seem to really understand the huge cultural differences that exist in Darfur, nor does she seem to understand the many years of savage war and loss of life (about 600,000) that have devastated that region. She instead insists on only seeing two 'adorable' children who need to be 'saved' by her.

This is a powerful film that lets emotions linger on its sleeve. As outstanding documentary filmmakers tend to do, Brettkelly lets you make up your own mind about Beecroft, based on the cinematic evidence she provides.

Interesting documentary.

[andy_n_johansen · 8/10 · 10 November 2008]

During the COPENHAGEN DOX festival i went to see this not knowing what it was about. I was pleasantly surprised by the presentation of the themes in this documentary. The story revolves around the concept artist Vanessa Beecroft and her plans of adopting two Sudanese twin kids. Vanessa Beecroft is an artist who has been known for staging art shows with naked people in groups standing up for so long in a room that eventually the models get tired and sits down one by one. On one of her projects in Sudan, she comes across two children she wants to adopt. The mother is dead, and the father does not have money for raising them. The documentary partly follows the process of Vanessas struggle for adopting the children, and partly (for the most part) it is also the story of the eccentric artist that Vanessa Beecroft is. The viewer is presented to fragments from Vanessas art shows, stories from her husband, mother, and father, how she works within the art world, and so on. The more we get to know about Vanessa, the more interesting it becomes. Vanessa turns out to be a very flimsy person whose eccentric fits makes her create chaotic situations where she goes. And she does it intentionally. Apparently she is an artist that thinks that creativeness comes from chaos. I will not reveal more about this documentary, but just say it is an interesting way of portraying a person. At the screening, the director of the movie was there, and it was very nice to get some further background information about the doc. That talk was a nice supplement to the film. As the film actually leaves a lot of questions unanswered. But it is actually not the purpose of the film to answer everything, but just to state that we are dealing with some complicated issues that involves a complicated person.