Genre
Synopsis
Coffee. Cocaine. Pablo Escobar. Almost everything I know about Colombia is from the media. Since I was a teenager, I’ve wanted to find out more but was told, “it’s too dangerous.” Due to a half century of civil war, at least 220,000 people were killed and over 6 million people displaced. Life for generations of Colombian families has been extremely difficult. In 1977, 13 years into the war, a teenager left her newborn at an orphanage in Bogotá. There, the infant contracted typhoid and became dangerously malnourished. However, within a few months, she was adopted by a loving couple in America and named Hazel. International adoptions such as mine began in Colombia in the early 1970s, but why?
I was lucky to escape Colombia and to be raised in New York City with a life of relative privilege -- or was I? The conventional narrative I internalized was that my parents had saved me from a horrible life, and that questioning anything meant I was ungrateful or disloyal. Recently, I have started to see my adoption in a new light; I am coming “out of the fog,” as the adoption community calls it. With this new transracial international adoptee awareness comes phrases like “white saviors,” “micro-aggressions,” and worse, “illegal adoption” defined as those “resulting from abduction, sale, trafficking in children, fraud, and coercion”. What will I uncover about my orphanage in Bogotá? And, will there be any records to find my birth-mother? What is my real origin story? Where do I come from? Now that I’m ready to find my roots, I must face a hard truth about the entanglement between my home and my homeland; America's involvement in destabilizing Colombia may well have caused my adoption.
When I was a teenager, my parents showed me a shoebox, which contained my adoption papers. One listed my name and that of my birth-mother: they were the same. Then my parents whisked the box away for safe-keeping, and I haven’t seen it since. All these years, all I’ve had to hold onto is her –my, –our, name “Luz,” which means “light” in Spanish. FINDING LUZ (w.t.) interweaves the personal search for my birth-mother with an investigation into the history of Colombian/American adoption, while examining notions of identity, belonging, and family, revealing why we want to find the light inside of all of us.
Bio
Born in Colombia, Hazel is a NYC-based director/producer who shares the stories of women from underrepresented communities fighting to overcome intersectional injustice historically and today. Storming Caesars Palace, Hazel's first feature-length documentary, premiered as the Opening Night film at the BlackStar Film Festival in 2022 winning the coveted Shine Award, and picked up Best Documentary Feature and Best Director awards at numerous national and international festivals during its multi-year 75+ festival and impact screening run. The film broadcast nationally on PBS’s Independent Lens series on March 20, 2023 to over 1.3M viewers and was in the top 3 streamed IL episodes that season. The film also received industry recognition winning the 2023 IDA’s ABC News VideoSource Award for best use of archival material. Hazel obtained support for the film and impact campaign from ITVS, the NEH, Ford Foundation/Just Films, Black Public Media, The Better Angels Society, Fork Films, Ken Burns/Library of Congress/Levine finalist prize, Firelight Media, IDA's Sarowitz Completion Fund, Working Films, Perspective Fund, Big Sky Pitch, Film Independent, The Gotham, and Women Make Movies.
Previously, Hazel directed 10 episodes of PBS’s primetime celebrity genealogy series, Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Hazel also created and produced a 5-part, short docu-series called, My Everyday Hustle, for PBS WorldChannel. She produced Roots: A History Revealed simulcast on A&E/History/Lifetime, which was nominated for a NAACP Image Award and screened at the Bushwick Film Festival in 2016. Hazel co-produced the 6-hour PBS series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which was honored with an Emmy, a Peabody, a duPont-Columbia, and a NAACP Image award. Hazel has contributed to documentaries for I.D./Max, CNN Originals, HBO, FRONTLINE, AMC, ABC News, and A&E.
