It’s you I was waiting for invites you to follow 4 moving trajectories to better understand adoption. Its director Stéphanie Pillonca told us about this documentary, conducted as an investigation, which required a very long research effort.
What is it about ?
It is you I was waiting for plunges us into the intimacy of couples who wish to adopt a child and impatiently await the call that will change their lives. But it is also the story of Alexandra who searches by all means for her son born under X, or Sylvian who fights every day to find his biological mother. Life courses rich in emotion that question us about the quest for identity and about love …
C’est toi que j’attendais, documentary directed by Stéphanie Pillonca, co-written with Astrid de Lauzanne. Released on December 22, 2021
The long journey of adoption
Fruit of meticulous work, It is you that I was waiting for is a documentary taking the form of an investigation to talk about adoption in the broad sense.
“It is a subject that is much broader and combines different elements. I wanted to speak freely about the adoption and not to make a documentary too reductive, entrusted to us its director Stéphanie Pillonca. I didn’t want to be one-sided either and only talk about couples who want to become parents. Address different points of view, different inputs, different drivers“. It was about having an approach.”like a detective movie“, with the aim of making”a little different object “.
Four personal trajectories are thus highlighted: two adoptive couples, a woman who gave birth under X and a man born under X. To find his protagonists, a long preparatory work was necessary, in particular for the young woman who gave birth under X. Leaving through a lot of empathy for each of them, the director says she did a casting “with a choice that comes from the heart”. “I have to be good with them, and let them be good with us”.
For the woman who gave birth under X, Stéphanie Pillonca explains: “These are figures that we know little about but there is often the precariousness, the environment and lives made of violence behind these girls who give birth under X. There is also the question of rape, drugs, great precariousness … All that disturbed me a lot, to see to what extent our society cannot support a woman in a woman’s life project.“
And to add: “Most women who give birth under X really regret it. They have two months to retract but it is a question that will haunt them until the last day of their life. I have met 100 people and for all of them there is not a day when she does not think of their baby. I wasn’t expecting all of that, and that’s also why I chose girls who weren’t French. I didn’t want to file them, I didn’t want them to be singled out, especially since most of them were quite young. “
The director chose a 45-year-old Briton: “Tout was reunited with the woman I found, the remoteness, her age therefore with a more free and fulfilling life. The distance allowed us to put a little distance between us, plus the language barrier, a small veil“.
And to conclude: “there were happy coincidences and it was the choice of the witnesses who wrote the scenario“.
The emotion of the film also goes through the music composed by Aurélie Saada (half of the duo Brigitte), which Stéphanie Pillonca describes as “warm, organic and sensual“.
