Take This Heart

For the nearly one million American children who are compelled – often for their own safety – to live in foster care, daily life in a forbidding venture. Cast adrift at an early age, dispossessed of everyone they have known or loved (often the very adults who abused or abandoned them), they are left to grow up in a world that has proven profoundly unreliable, with strangers who may or may not offer comfort and protection. “Take This Heart” is the story of three boys who struggle to make sense of their harsh fates, each in his own way. Robert, Jamil and Joaquim have been passed from one foster home to the next, eventually landing in the care of Tess Thomas, a state-funded foster mother. Thomas sees her work with children as “God´s purpose for me”, and although she never proselytizes, it is clear that her commitment derives from a serene and fierce spirit. The film begins as ten-year-old Robert arrives at Thomas´ home carring only a garbage bag of belongings. Lost and frightened he is strangely inured to the traumas of being handed off without fanfare into the custody of strangers. The eighty-seven minute documentary follows Robert as his anger and fears slowly gives way to a tentative consolation, allowing Thomas into his life. Celebrating his fourteenth birthday during the course of the film, Jamil walks a precarious little line between an abiding, conflicted love for his birth mother, a heroin addict, and his desire for stability in the Thomas home. “Take This Heart” documents his wrenching visits with his mother and his sullen yearning for a place to call home. Joaquim is a seventeen-year-old survivor of sexual abuse who is at the threshold of emancipation from the state foster care system, after five years in the Thomas household. Despite his deep sense of gratitude for the refuge Thomas has provided, he tries to shore himself up against the anguish of their inevitable separation. “I love her but I can´t embrace her... Because one day I´m going to be gone, or she´s going to be gone; we won´t be there for each other”. “Take This Heart” is crafted from the modest and ordinary events of daily life, when small moments become dramatic, illuminating the dark sense of loss and emptiness borne by these children. Their stories reveal the remarkable reesiliency and tough-minded will with which these boys go on with their lives, not utterly consoled, but not broken, either. Unsentimental and restrained, the film is ever watchful for the gestures which signal a child´s tentative sense of belonging. “Take This Heart” explores the experiences of a few children otherwise consigned to silence at the margins of society.