Josh Weigel, the director of the upcoming movie, Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot, spoke to Breitbart News Saturday about the story the movie is based on, and said he hopes “people get involved” in the foster care system and adoption after seeing the movie, and described adoption as being “needed,” while also being “difficult and rewarding.”
The movie, which will be out in theaters on July 4, is “based on a story that happened in East Texas,” where Reverend Martin and his wife Donna started adopting children who were in the foster care system and went on to inspire “their church to join them, and by the end, 22 families ended up adopting 77 kids out of the foster system,” Weigel explained.
“Another to thing to point out is they asked for the hardest kids to place, so they weren’t asking for little babies. They really were interested in doing whatever it took to change the lives of kids that were really, really in need. That meant some kids who were abused heavily. There were a lot of sibling sets, larger sets of kids, three, four, five, kids that they didn’t want to split up. And sometimes it meant teenagers. They did this within probably just a few years as well, once they started; by the time all of the kids had been placed in the homes, it was in a very short period of time,” Weigel said.
“What’s really interesting and powerful about the story is that this is a little community that’s not specially trained. They’re like everybody else. It’s actually not even a town, it’s like a little region and if you drove through it you’d hardly know it. It’s one of those places that’s very common in the south. It’s remarkable that they banded together and said, ‘This is something that’s happening and we need to do something about it.’ They didn’t really overthink it, or say yes or no based on what they thought their skill set was,” Weigel added.
When asked what he hopes the audience takes away from the movie, Weigel said he hopes that “people get involved” and realize that “the foster system is the leading driver of child trafficking in America.”
“There’s a lot of different things we were looking for when we’re choosing stories. My wife and I work together, we wrote and produced this. We’re really hoping, of course, that people get involved. One of the first things we would like to see happen is people get involved, and there’s a foster crisis happening in America that people don’t know about usually. It’s not something — we all kind of know about the foster system, but we don’t really realize or give it a lot of thought. And right now there’s 400,000 kids in the foster system, and there’s 100,000 kids that need homes. It sounds like a big number. This is a story about a church, and if you think about just even all the churches in America, there’s 400,000 churches, so one in four could adopt one child and we would not have a problem anymore,” Weigel said.
“Another important thing I want people to know and take away is that the foster system is the leading driver of child trafficking in America. Anywhere between 70 and 90 percent of the children who are trafficked are coming from the — or have spent time in — the U.S. foster system. There’s a lot to come away with; there’s a lot that we want people to understand and be aware of and then hopefully, connect in a way that compels them to get involved. We don’t necessarily mean, ‘Go adopt and foster a child.’ Not everyone can do that. I hope everyone considers it, but we know that’s not necessarily for everybody. There’s a lot of other ways you can get involved and we’re going to connect people at the end of the movie through a website where it’ll explain how you can get involved in that care or even just helping meet needs for families so that they can be reunited with their kids or not lose their kids to the system.”
Weigel spoke about how his personal experience of adopting two children was a “big part of the passion” behind feeling “compelled” to make the movie.
“We adopted two of our kids and that happened before this movie came into our lives. It was definitely a big part of the passion behind it. I don’t remember how many years had gone by, but not too many. We were kind of fresh in it. We knew a little bit about this story. We heard some things. But, after meeting Reverend Martin and hearing more about what these kids had gone through themselves, the ones that were adopted in Possum Trot, and then our own experiences, it’s just something that took over. It really felt like we were compelled to do this. It had all the ingredients for a great movie. It took a while to work that out, figure out how to get that on the page, but it had all the things it needed for a great movie,” Weigel added.
“We don’t ever want to make a movie that doesn’t have a chance to change something and impact people. We drew a lot from our own experience, and I think that brought a level of authenticity to a lot of things as well. Authenticity was a huge priority for us and value for us when we were doing this. We’re not really interested in the typical kind of film you might think of when you think of adoption, something really soft and sweet. It’s a needed, powerful thing that is difficult and rewarding, and there’s a lot to it. There’s a lot of nuance, there’s a lot of difficulty. We know it’s so important for people to understand it well and respond, that you do need to be honest about what it is like, and I think there’s when you can really get people to commit in a long-term sense,” Weigel said.
WATCH: Sound Of Hope: The Story Of Possum Trot | Official Trailer | Angel Studios
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