Lost andFound

The film

Synopsis

Jessi Froud spent the first two months of her life in the hospital in Călărași. Then a Canadian man she had never met carried her out of Romania wrapped in a sweater. It was 1990. Her adoptive parents paid, flew home to British Columbia, and were told she had been abandoned at birth.

She had not been abandoned. In the same town she had a mother, a father, a brother, and an address: one room, an earth floor, one bed. She had a name.

Thirty years later she comes back to find them. What she builds with the family she was taken from is real, and it holds, until her father arrives from Spain and says the thing the family had agreed never to say.

What follows is not a search for someone to blame. It is a smaller and harder question, about what happens to a person who exists in flesh and not in the record, and about a country that has never had to answer for what it sold.

Two families, one daughter

The film moves between two living rooms

Neither family knew what the other had been told. That gap is where the story lives.

Why it matters now

A file that was never written

Around 30,000 Romanian children were adopted by families abroad between 1989 and 2001. Close to 7,000 of them in the first two years alone. The images the world remembers are cots in rows and cameras in corridors. Those images were true, and they were also a frame everything else had to fit through. Some of the children taken home had never seen an institution.

Romania placed a temporary moratorium on intercountry adoption in 2001, then enacted a permanent ban under Law 273/2004, which took effect on 1 January 2005. Around a thousand adoptions were completed in between, most of them begun before the moratorium.

The practice is under scrutiny elsewhere. A study commissioned by the Swiss government examined irregular adoptions from ten countries of origin between the 1970s and the 1990s. Romania is one of the ten. In January 2025 the Swiss Federal Council said it wanted to end intercountry adoption altogether. Parliament has so far refused: the House of Representatives voted 130 to 35 to keep it, and in March 2026 rejected a compromise from the Senate. The question is still open.

On 29 September 2022, six United Nations human rights mechanisms issued a joint statement on illegal intercountry adoptions. They called on states to criminalise them, to set up independent investigative commissions, and to make sure that everyone adopted in the past can find out where they came from.

Adult adoptees searching for their Romanian families today work largely without institutional help. Records are incomplete, held across several archives, and in some cases were never created at all.

Director

Laurentiu Garofeanu

Laurentiu Garofeanu is a Romanian-British director. He came to film through fine art and photography, and still thinks in single frames. He spent twenty years as a self-shooting producer and director between London and New York, working for Barcroft, Discovery and Channel 4, before returning to Romania in 2015 and founding Mekanism Media in Bucharest.

Lost and Found is his debut feature documentary.

“The question I am asking through this film has no comfortable answer. At what point did we, as a society, agree that a child could be a commodity?”