Having travelled and worked in numerous developing countries including Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, Romania and Russia, the signs of growth in international adoptions has become more and more apparent. Adoption agency advertising at airports, foreign couples carrying racially different babies on the streets of Hanoi or Mexico City.

As an explorer of relationships and stories, it interested me – the concept of family, of maternal and paternal love across cultures. And whether as the supposed privileged in the world – the West – this was the way we could help those countries in need.

Or is international adoption a form of colonialism?

I first met Vanessa Beecroft in February 2006 in South Sudan. I was making a documentary on landmines. Vanessa was exploring the Sudan. In a town called Rumbek the foreigners – largely UN workers, Non-Government Organisations and private security – could rent a tent by the night. And in this settlement around a tree each evening the foreigners would meet to drink beer and eat popcorn and discuss the country with ink barely dry on a peace agreement, Sudan having just come out of a 21 year civil war.

Around the bar one night my team spotted her team. Vanessa was with Alexa her German-assistant, Matthu her New York photographer and Paul a local who Vanessa was funding through university in Nairobi. They did not wear the uniform of other foreigners – khakis and a satellite mobile phone. I recall she told me she was a performance artist. I had no idea what that meant. In fact I remember going on about my childhood training in ballet, such was my ignorance of performance art.

My team and I left a few days later for the Ethiopian border. We swapped email addresses with Vanessa’s team, and she told me she was thinking of adopting a set of twins currently living at the local orphanage. A few days later I emailed Vanessa and said I would like to follow her on the adoption journey if she agreed.

She said she was leaving Africa but would be back in about a month and would be open to the documentary.

For the next sixteen months I filmed Vanessa. And what is for me the fascination of documentary-making came to the fore – the initial story became so much more complex as I filmed one of the world’s top contemporary artists, and the power of South Sudan increasingly informing her work, and her private life.

I was blessed with a willingness in the people in Vanessa’s life – her staff, her parents, her husband and her dealers. And in her husband, Greg Durkin and her father, Andrew Beecroft were two eloquent interview subjects with strong views on international adoptions.

My Director of Photography, Jake Bryant and I went to nine overseas destinations to film and piece together the story, twice travelling to Sudan.

Vanessa had never allowed cameras such access before. But I’ve been flattered by her willingness to be honest - usually brutally so - creating a film of incredible intimacy and revelation that will hopefully provoke further discussion not just on international adoptions but on the licence of creatives, of a genius at work, of notions of family. And where family stems from.