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Paper Orphans
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Paper Orphans

2013 · 26 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
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Nepal sends roughly sixty children a year into adoption in the United States and Europe, and Belgian charity worker Jurgen Conings has spent years finding out how many of them still have parents looking for them. The system is built to be gamed: a photograph runs once in a Nepali newspaper, and if no one responds within the legal window, the child can be certified an orphan and placed for adoption abroad. Conings tracks the case of Arjun, adopted six years earlier from the Krishna Balmandir orphanage by an American couple, after his biological mother Khanchi contacts him, having never learned what became of her son. The film confronts Sabitra, the orphanage director who processed Arjun's paperwork, and finds records showing the same pattern repeated for hundreds of other children, often with the biological parents' names and contact details still on file. Interviews with Khanchi and Conings sit alongside that documentary evidence, tracing how orphanages profit from foreign adoption fees while parents are told their children are only being educated, not given away.