Montreal filmmaker emerges from 'the fog' to find his birth mother and discover The Rock

Powerful documentary A Quiet Girl chronicling Adrian Wills’s quest to find his biological mother in Newfoundland will have its Montreal première on Friday.

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Montreal filmmaker Adrian Wills went to Newfoundland in 2019 with a couple of close friends, and knowing he was adopted and that his birth mother was from The Rock, they suggested he try to find her. Wills wasn’t that enthused by the idea.

In a recent interview in a café in N.D.G., Wills said he thought he’d do that very briefly and then he and his buddies could go off and have some fun in Newfoundland.

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“I thought, OK I’ll do it for 24 hours and then we can move on and hang out in pubs in St. John’s,” Wills said.

All he had is what in the adoption milieu they call a “non-identifying background summary,” and he ended up reading that out on Newfoundland radio. And he had a name, Wayne Cousins, that his adopted mother had been given when she received the baby in 1972, but she told Wills she thought it was the wrong name.

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They went to a couple of hospitals looking for information, and coming out empty-handed, he figured that was the end of it.

“Then we’re driving home to get some lunch and the phone rings, and she says, ‘I’ve got your records,’” Wills said. “And all of a sudden things shifted. The car screeches (to a halt) and we go back.”

And at the hospital he finally sees his name — Baby Boy Cousins. But the woman at the hospital says that by law, she can’t give him his mother’s name.

“Then I’m sitting there on the last night in St. John’s and I realized, ‘I’m a filmmaker and I should probably make a film about this,’” Wills said.

The result is A Quiet Girl, a powerful, emotionally-wrenching feature documentary that follows Wills step by step and in real time in his years-long quest to find his biological mother. The National Film Board production has its Montreal première Friday at 8 p.m. at the Cinémathèque québécoise as part of the Les Rendez-vous Québec cinéma festival.

This is the most personal film ever for Wills, whose eclectic resumé includes the Grammy Award-winning documentary All Together Now: The Beatles Love, Entre les mains de Michel Tremblay and the soccer-focused TV series 21 Thunder, which he co-created. He is currently completing the documentary Leonard Cohen: Tower of Song.

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In the film, we see Wills as he uncovers fact after fact, almost like a private detective on the trail to unravel a mystery like in an old Raymond Chandler novel. Once the folks at the NFB gave him the green light, he went back to St. John’s and took to the radio to tell his story and try to find people who may have known his mother.

“We really created the film so you go through this discovery,” Wills said. “I had no idea what the story was at any time. We didn’t know anything until the end. I really wanted people to understand what that feels like.”

According to an article in L’Actualité last December, there were 300,000 babies given up for adoption in Canada between the 1940s and 1970s, often with the parents under intense religious pressure to do so. The Facebook group Newfoundland and Labrador Adoptees has 14,000 members.

“I feel this is one story, but there are a lot of stories like it,” Wills said. “I discovered stuff that nobody else knew because I was piecing it together.”

What he and the viewers piece together is not just a Hallmark-like heartwarming story. It turns out his mother, who gave birth to him at the age of 20 in 1972, had a tough life and having to give up her son wasn’t the only rough patch along the way.

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“They have something in the adoption community, and it’s called ‘being in the fog,’” Wills said. “Which has gotta be the best metaphor since this is Newfoundland, right? Newfoundland is super foggy. And being in the fog is you don’t actually want to know.

“But what I realized when I went through this experience is that moment when I realized I’d been someone else, it’s like the fog lifted. And when the fog lifted, all of a sudden I had all these questions that I’d always had, but now finally I was going to acknowledge them. It became not about a film for me but about a quest, and I wanted to know everything I could about my birth family.”

Montreal filmmaker Adrian Wills in a scene from his documentary A Quiet Girl.
Montreal filmmaker Adrian Wills in a scene from his documentary A Quiet Girl. Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada

But it’s also a story about Wills discovering Newfoundland and its people, and realizing that’s part of him. He likens his experience to the stories behind the hit Broadway musical Come From Away, about the welcome given to the 7,000 people stuck in Gander when their planes had to land there following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“The generosity I experienced from all these people trying to help me in this quest was amazing,” Wills said. “The integrity and honesty of the Newfoundland people is kind of legendary.”

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He also quite literally discovered a new family, and now they’re exactly that, family.

“It’s crazy,” Wills said. “You go see people you don’t know and you think that you’re going to be strangers. And all of a sudden you’re sitting in their house and you feel like family. And you feel like family because you’ve read the same books. Like my aunt in Arizona, she didn’t like small talk and we got along incredibly quickly. I’ll be honest. I think I won the adoption lottery, even though it was heavy.”

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