A String of Pearls

A filmmaker reunites with the daughter she gave up for adoption twenty years later.

This poignant documentary profiles a young black woman's struggle to confront the legacy of a physically abusive father and her headlong flight into drug abuse. Suzanne, after years of physical and psychological abuse, is compelled to understand her father's violence and her mother's passive complicity, who suffered at her husband's hands as well, as the keys to her own self-destruction. After years of silence, Suzanne and her mother are finally able to share their painful experiences with each other in an intensely moving moment of truth.

Using interviews and dramatizations, this film achieves a touching and often humorous look at social attitudes towards relationships between older women and younger men. The filmmakers are involved on both sides of the camera as they direct their multi-racial cast in an insightful profile of older-younger relationships. Their subjects are candid and comfortable discussing the joys and problems of loving someone of a different generation.

Write Billops and Hatch: "Even as late as a hundred years ago, discrimination on the basis of race was considered a natural and even desirable trait for humans to possess. We Americans have tried to ignore it, deny it, suppress it, to contain it, tolerate it, legislate it, mock it, exploit it." Billops and Hatch are catalysts at the center of the film, and like a modern Virgil and Dante, they drive, cajole and lead the film's cast through a tour of the contemporary landscape of racism.