"I don't know who my child will be, but I want to. I want to know everything about her. I want to finally know someone who shares my DNA."

THE STORY:

When she discovers that her casual friends-with-benefits relationship has resulted in an unplanned pregnancy, Summer's 5-year-plan and her visions for her future are destroyed. Like many other college students like her, she's worried about graduating on time, becoming financially stable, and achieving success in an impressive career. She is not ready to be a mom.

As an adoptee, however, Summer has a much less clear-cut decision ahead of her. Despite having never seriously considered her own transition into motherhood before, Summer must now decide whether to put a hold on her life to have and raise this child or to either abort or opt for adoption knowing she's consciously giving away what would be her only known kin.

Unplanned Parenthood was developed collaboratively between writer, Stephanie McAdams; director, Leah Sherman-Weiner; and producer, Alastair Mecke. The three women have worked as a writer-director-producer trio for all three major student films produced during their time at Chapman University: their Sophomore Year intermediate production, Junior Year cornerstone advanced production, and now their Senior Year capstone/thesis production. Each coming from a different coastal state in the US (NorCal, Texas, and New York, respectively) the three women bring enormously different personal experiences to their friendship with each other as well as to the characters in this story. Regarding her immediate future after college and then life beyond that, Stephanie is currently torn between following the career path she's dreamed about and worked towards for most of her life, and a job opportunity as a [head counselor] at a Girl Scouts camp where she's found both tremendous stress and infinite self-fulfillment. One of Alastair's best friends had an unplanned pregnancy during her college years and had to make a similar choice about how she wanted to continue with her life. Leah is an adoptee from China and has contemplated this very dilemma over and over in her head as she careens towards the start of her career and the rest of her life.

A WORD FROM THE DIRECTOR:

I was adopted from China into a small, American family living in Texas. My adoption has always been a central part of my life, and while it's always been celebrated and normalized in my family, I still felt very ostracized in my community. There were very few stories or films that depicted adoptees, and none that I'd encountered where the adoptee filled the role of the parent rather than the child in a parent-child relationship. It just wasn't talked about. I had dreamed about raising my own kids one day, but because I hadn't seen any "real life" examples of adoptees becoming parents, it felt out of reach to me.

I wanted to tell the story of a young adoptee making the transition from childhood to motherhood because, for me, my experiences as an adoptee have drastically affected how I view family and the importance I place on starting a family of my own. I wanted to show how such changes in perspective affect the decisions one makes in their lives, both big and small. The significance of Summer's dilemma is hard to explain, but the closest thing that I can relate it to is when someone with a rough or complicated relationship with their birth parents find familial bonds and support in their "found family"—or people that aren't necessarily related to them by blood but provide the unconditional love that is generally expected to come from one's family. For Summer, despite feeling an indescribable love for her adopted family, there is an inherent yearning or curiosity about her birth parents and a sort of lacking that comes with not knowing—and maybe not ever knowing—them. Summer's familiarity with this sort of emptiness is the main push behind her need to keep her daughter in her life, regardless of the personal cost, as it's a feeling she would never wish upon her daughter, even if relinquishing custody of her daughter to another family could possibly secure her daughter's overall future stability and happiness.

Until very recently with the release of movies like Crazy Rich Asians and The Farewell, I had only ever seen movies featuring Asian characters in which they practiced some form of martial arts or were there for comedic effect, or the movie was making a point about Asians in relation to another race or culture (“us vs them”). I haven't seen very many movies, especially from Hollywood, where Asians were just regular humans living human lives and making human mistakes. I have discovered the same lack of representation for adoptees; with recent examples including things such as the movie, Lion, and the TV series, This is Us. While I could extract universal lessons from a character regardless of their identity, it still lacked a distinct, specific-to-my-culture/experiences nuance. And so, Unplanned Parenthood is not only a film from my heart that I want to tell audiences both like me and not, but also a story that I wish I could have shown my younger self.

If our story or our cause speaks to you, we would be so honored to gain your support in helping us to produce and share it with audiences in our community and beyond! 

Thank you for believing in our vision,

Leah Sherman-Weiner