A Quiet Girl

How far do you go to find the truth?

“When you’re adopted, you spend your life… feeling isolated,” Montreal filmmaker Adrian Wills says in the opening scenes of his starkly moving new documentary, A Quiet Girl. Travelling from the spare beauty of Canada’s most eastern coastline to the red heat of Arizona, the film follows Wills’ two-year odyssey as he unearths the—at-times shocking—truths behind his adoption from Newfoundland in the early 1970s. Spurred on by a meager clue on his adoption documents, Wills commits to discovering everything on camera, and in real time.

The filmmaker has spent a lifetime circling “the family story,” but what Wills finally uncovers pierces into the meaning of family, revealing disquieting parallels between his own life and that of the birth mother he never knew. As an unmarried woman in a staunchly Catholic community, described by all who knew her as a “quiet girl,” her choices were brutally few. And as the filmmaker’s search exposes darker and more troubling details, Wills is driven to go deeper—leading him to confront his own vulnerabilities and what really happened following his adoption at just four months old.

In Newfoundland, Wills discovers a community spirit and generosity among hard-working men and women who put their faith in religion and each other. While this seems a world away from the urban life in Montreal that Wills was adopted into, both are steeped in long-held secrets. As author Michael Crummey tells the filmmaker, “It doesn’t matter how small a community is, the whole world is there—all the good and all the bad.”

Combining 16mm poetic footage and beautiful contemporary images with deeply personal conversations, A Quiet Girl illuminates the harsh realities of a complex life in a humane light. It transforms an urgent search for identity into a quest to give a quiet girl her voice. Ultimately, Wills honours his birth mother’s resilience and, in doing so, reveals his own.