|
Dec. 16, 2011
The creator of Google Baby
Filmmaker wins Emmy for documentary exposing the baby trade.
ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN ISRAEL21C
Zippi Brand Frank’s pregnant belly stuck out as prominently as the golden Emmy Award in her hand at New York’s Lincoln Centre on Sept. 26. The image was particularly loaded, since the 41-year-old Israeli producer-director won the prize for Google Baby, a look at the thriving surrogate-mother industry in India.
Frank’s documentary focused on a clinic in rural Anand where poor women give birth to babies ordered over the Internet through an Israeli “pregnancy producer.” Western prospective parents click on the sperm and eggs of their choice, enter credit card details, and later travel to Anand to receive the newborn they couldn’t, or sometimes wouldn’t, conceive themselves.
“Now you can order a baby and get it nine months later, like ordering jeans from Gap,” said Frank, who was born in Tel Aviv and lives there with her husband and two girls, ages three and five. “Except children are not like jeans.”
Though Frank, whose third child was born in November, doesn’t condemn the practice entirely, she said that she hopes her film sparks regulations to avoid exploitation of the surrogate mothers and babies as the lucrative human reproduction industry steams ahead with no legal barriers in its way.
The Israeli pregnancy producer told Frank that he sees no need to screen clients. “He feels that if nature didn’t put any barriers to having children, why should he? But I think he should,” she said.
During her research, she learned of a couple who divorced before their child was born and refused to pick her up in India, sparking a three-month court case. “This is unacceptable to me,” said Frank, a former TV political reporter, investigative journalist and anchor news producer. “The [ordering parents] must be required to pick up the baby no matter what happens. You shouldn’t be able to return a baby like a T-shirt.”
The surrogate mothers often give birth via Caesarean section because it yields a better-looking newborn. This, too, raises ethical questions. “It wasn’t easy for me to watch [the births],” Frank explained, although she believes these rural women “are really well prepared to do their job and move on.” The fees they earn spell the difference between living in the street and having a roof over their families’ heads. “They seemed very feminist and very brave,” she said.
One might say the same of Frank herself. Coming from a family where current events were discussed around the dinner table, particularly her mother’s involvement with civil rights, Frank was active in Israel Scouts and served as an officer in the army’s intelligence corps. She completed a year at the Sorbonne University in Paris and earned an undergraduate degree in law and journalism from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem prior to her broadcast career.
“I was at Channel 2 since it was established in 1993,” she said. By the time she left in 2001, she was doing longer and longer pieces out of a desire to provide more depth, and that inclination naturally led to documentary filmmaking.
Her first work, She’s in the Army Now, examined Israeli women in the military. Two years later came Somebody to Love, which followed romance-searching singles against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The eight-part Wakeup Call (2005) provided a close-up look at the lives of exceptionally motivated people.
In 2004, Frank married a former Israeli fighter pilot working in the United States. After she completed a Neiman Fellowship in journalism at Harvard University, the couple came back to Israel.
“My husband had a position at AT&T, which bought part of his company, and we could have stayed there a lifetime,” she said, “but we decided we were ready to return. We’re more comfortable here in Israel, and it’s the right place to raise our kids.” She is inspired by the example of her maternal grandmother, she said, who came to Israel as a widow from Libya and raised seven children.
However, Israel isn’t the easiest milieu for independent filmmakers. “There aren’t many outlets or budgets, which I didn’t realize when I started,” she admitted. To save money on Google Baby, she did all the post-production work herself.
The film, executive produced by Sheila Nevins and Yona Wiesenthal, made its debut in Israel in 2009. It was broadcast on Britain’s Channel 4 and won first prize at DocAviv, the annual Tel Aviv documentary film festival, as well as the Magnolia Golden Award in Shanghai for best documentary. Then it was purchased by the American cable network HBO, the network that represented it at the Emmy Awards.
One of Frank’s current projects examines mega-wealthy clients paying big bucks to purchase anti-aging treatments at clinics in South Korea, China and Ukraine using leftover frozen embryos. The other is an Israeli TV series about “extreme parenthood,” documenting people who go to unusual lengths to have children.
Israel21C is a nonprofit educational foundation with a mission to focus media and public attention on the 21st-century Israel that exists beyond the conflict. For more, or to donate, visit israel21c.org.
^TOP
|
