Sunshine
An unplanned pregnancy for an unplanned girl sets off SUNSHINE, a playful, yet ultimately stirring self-portrait of an adopted woman driven to search for answers through reconnection with her biological mother.
In this compelling documentary, filmmaker Karen Skloss explores the meaning of family through a personal journey to understand both the legacy of her birth and the non-traditional family she created by co-parenting with her ex-boyfriend. As an unwed teenager, Skloss's mother went to a home for unwed mothers and gave her up for adoption in 1975. Now as the pair reconnects, as Karen contemplates her relationship with her own daughter, Jasmine. Young, pregnant, single and unprepared, the daughter/director struggles with the incredible ironies of the family—that history somehow repeated itself, and that the most strenuous efforts to protect the idea of family can actually do the most to pull families apartÂ.
Woven together from over 10 years of super 8 and video home movies, intimate family interviews, shimmering dance sequences and stylized reenactments, SUNSHINE offers a refreshingly rare glimpse on the current day transformations taking place within our most sacred of institutions, the family.