This is a small sampling of well known tales and films in the Orphan/Adoptee genre.
Most are made by non-adoptees.
Community outsiders who often have little to no personal connection to actual adoptees, or the community, often leading to skewed and offensive misrepresentations.
Tropes such as:
- The Evil Orphan
- The Magical Orphan / Orphans Have Superpowers
- The Cursed Orphan
- The Troublemaker Orphan
- The Orphan is Secret Royalty
- The White Savior
- The Drug Addict Birth Parents
- Orphans should be Grateful
- Found on a Doorstep
- The Cute Orphan
- Orphans Never Grow Up
It’s called the “Orphan trope,” but nobody would say the “Asian trope” or “woman trope” to describe other aspects of my identity. The fact that my identity is reduced to a TV trope is extremely frustrating.
Our community has been misrepresented so badly that it impacts our lives every day as most people assume that the flawed stories told by community outsiders reflect our real lives.
FORK MOUNTAIN is an opportunity to replace the “Orphan trope” with Adoptee Community Culture.
AUTHORSHIP + AUTHENTICITY
When our stories are told by community outsiders, they sometimes miss the mark. While these stories do sometimes resonate with the adoptee community and adoptees are not a monolith, the fact that these tales are told by non-adoptees means that filmmakers are bound to make mistakes, whether those mistakes are insensitive, misguided, or factually wrong.
