Film Screening
Date: Saturday, December 14, 2024
Time: 2:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Invite only/private screening.
On Saturday, December 14 the Center will host a private screening of the documentary Reckoning with The Primal Wound, followed by a discussion with the film’s creator, Rebecca Autumn Sansom, as well as Dr. Gonda Von Steen, Dr. Amanda Baden, Demetria Kalodimos, and Lisa Coppola.
This is a private event, for more information please contact info@reckoningwiththeprimalwound.com.
About the Film
Reckoning with The Primal Wound is a new documentary about reckoning with relinquishment trauma and the cultural phenomenon that is author Nancy Verrier’s landmark book The Primal Wound. It is the only film about this critical topic produced by an adoptee and first mother that features Verrier herself, psychologist Dr. David Brodzinsky and Dr. Amanda Baden.
This award-winning documentary has been deemed by child welfare workers, therapists, psychologists, and adoption professionals (including adoptees, natural mothers, and adoptive parents) the latest recommended resource for anyone interested in better understanding adopted individuals.
Post-viewing outcomes have ranged from unexpected apologies from family members and friends to healed relationships between adoptees and their adoptive and biological families. Most importantly, adoptees feel less alone. The film aims to influence positive legislative change in the future.
This film has been a grassroots effort, but hopes to go mainstream and bring healing to as many adoptees and birth mothers as possible. It premiered at The Catalina Film Festival on September 22, 2022 in Los Angeles and is now available to rent via VimeOTT and on the reckoning with the primal wound website.
Speakers
Amanda Baden received her doctorate in counseling psychology from Michigan State University and is currently a Professor in the Counseling Program and the Doctoral Program Director of the Ph.D. in Counseling Program at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey.
Dr. Baden has both personal and professional experience with adoption. She was adopted from Hong Kong and raised in a transracially adoptive family. She is an expert in the film.
Lisa Coppola is a writer and licensed mental health counselor (LMHC) as well as the creator and program director of the Voices Unheard Storytelling Program for Adult Adoptees through Boston Post Adoption Resources (BPAR). Lisa typically writes on themes related to trauma, adoption and addiction. Lisa has been published in Severance Magazine, The Fix, and in Adoptees Voices. In 2022 she authored the workbook; Voices Unheard: a Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees.
Demetria Kalodimos, producer of the film, is a longtime broadcast journalist, filmmaker and former primary anchor in Nashville, TN. Now, Kalodimos is the executive producer of the nonprofit: The Nashville Banner.
Gonda Van Steen earned a BA and MA degree in Classics in Belgium and a Ph.D. degree in Classics and Hellenic Studies from Princeton University. Her research and teaching interests include Greek language and literature through Byzantine and Modern Greek, Western travelers to Greece and the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth and twentieth-century receptions of the classics and especially of ancient theatre, and modern Greek intellectual and social history.
Her latest book, entitled Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? (2019), has taken her into the new, uncharted terrain of Greek adoption stories that become paradigmatic of Cold War politics and history.