We’re ecstatic to
announce Wyatt-MacKenzie’s acquisition of WE: AN ADOPTION AND A MEMOIR by Ben Barnz for a Fall 2018
release.
Ben Barnz is an
independent film producer, and business partner with his life partner filmmaker Daniel Barnz.
Together they formed We’re Not Brothers Productions and produced the feature
films Cake (starring Jennifer Aniston, Sam Worthington, Anna Kendrick,
William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman) and Phoebe in Wonderland (starring
Elle Fanning, Patricia Clarkson, Bill Pullman and Felicity Huffman). We’re Not Brothers Productions
has most recently teamed up with Plan B’s Brad Pitt to take Ryan Wash’s
story, of an openly gay black debate champion, to the big screen.
WE: AN ADOPTION AND A MEMOIR is
universally relevant in its examination of family and belonging.
*
On September
8th my adopted daughter was born.
On September
11th two planes flew into the Twin Towers.
On September
12th my daughter’s biological father legally contested the adoption.
WE tells the story of the harrowing six-month litigation that
followed my daughter’s birth, but it’s also a memoir.
WE is about growing up in the eighties during the height of
AIDS, when to be gay felt like a death sentence, and when the concept of
same-sex families didn’t exist. It is about auditioning for my future husband’s
film in Los Angeles and eventually falling in love. It is about our commitment
ceremony because marriage was not an option. It is about the day we met a
terrified mid-Western girl who was seven months pregnant and carrying our
daughter. It is about coming up against my own moral center and having to
do what is right when what I wanted to do was wrong.
*
Every year, over two million children are adopted
in the United States alone.
WE
is one story about creating a
family, and about how much has changed in thirty years. In the 1980s,
gay fathers were invisible; in 2000, eight percent of same–sex couples
were raising
adopted children; in 2009 it was over twenty percent and “the trend line
for
same-sex couples in particular is absolutely straight up.” (Adam Pertman, E.D.
Adoption Institute)
