Lost and Found – The business of selling children in Romania

Sold as a baby, Jessi Fraud is now on a mission to expose the truth about the market in Romanian babies.

Jessi, a vibrant young Canadian journalist, is travelling the world to expose the post-communism practice of selling Romanian babies to adoptive parents by exploring the fate of Romanian children born to families too poor to care for them.

According to the vision of former President Nicolae Ceau?escu, babies should be born to boost the communist state’s decrepit economy.

As we become absorbed in Jessi’s journalistic quest, we slowly come to realise that it is more than a professional investigation. Jessi herself was sold as a child to an adoptive family in Canada.

An estimated 30,000 children were sold to adoption brokers in post-communist Romania. International buyers and local sellers met in hotel lobbies around Romania and negotiated prices that ranged from $5,000 to $10,000 for new-born Romanians.

How did Romania become the adoption capital of the world? Can adoption for profit ever be justified? What really happened to the lost children of Romania, the unwitting victims of a bankrupt political system?

Feature length documentary: 90’

Format: HD

Book: Laurentiu Garofeanu

Director: Laurentiu Garofeanu

Producer: Laurentiu Garofeanu, MEKANISM MEDIA, Romania, Henrik Meyer, Cedar Island Films Inc., Canada, and Sylvia Nagel, SAXONIA Entertainment GmbH

Funding: MDM, HBO

Broadcaster: HBO, Deutsche Welle

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