Filmmaker Chithra Jeyaram Brings Her Poignant Adoption Story To LA Theaters

India-West News Desk

LOS ANGELES, CA – When an email inquiry about adoption turned into a six-year filming process, neither director Chithra Jeyaram nor her subject, Lakshmi Iyer, expected to uncover an extraordinary alternative to traditional adoption narratives.

That journey hits the big screen in Los Angeles for an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run at the Laemmle NoHo 7 from October 9–15: https://indiawest.com/events/

The 98-minute documentary ‘Love, Chaos, Kin’ centers on Iyer and her husband Narayanan, Chennai immigrants who moved to the U.S. in 2001 to work in IT. After struggling with fertility treatments, their Green Card status blocked them from adopting in either India or the U.S. Systemic racial dynamics added further hurdles until they unexpectedly adopted white-passing twin girls of Navajo descent. When Iyer unexpectedly became pregnant in 2014, the household expanded to three daughters.

The documentary spans 12 years to capture what happens when an adoptive family actively builds space for biological heritage instead of erasing it.

Jeyaram, a physical therapist who became a filmmaker with an MFA from UT Austin, first reached out to Iyer eight years ago while navigating life after a divorce. Wondering whether she could adopt in the U.S. while keeping her own language, culture, and religion alive, Jeyaram asked if she could shoot three days of test footage.

Those three days quickly transformed into six years of shooting and 18 months of editing. Over seven and a half years of total work on the project, Jeyaram grappled with her own reflections on parenthood, eventually choosing not to pursue adoption herself, while building this narrative around the “adoption trifecta” of children, birth parents, and adoptive families.

Reviews of ‘Love, Chaos, Kin’ have uniformly attested to it being a moving testament to the human spirit.

The documentary aligns with Jeyaram’s broader filmography, which frequently examines family, identity, and social dynamics. Her past works include the short film ‘Rags to Pads,’ which addresses social attitudes around menstruation; ‘Foreign Puzzle,’ which explores motherhood alongside a cancer diagnosis through dance; and ‘Amma’s Pride,’ a documentary on parental support for transgender rights and marriage equality in rural Tamil Nadu. She has also edited ‘Sex Work: It’s Just a Job and One Thousand and One Berber Nights.’