Prodigal Sons

Sunday July 18 at 10 pm ET/PT & Saturday July 24, 2010 at 7 pm ET on CBC News Network

Film maker Kimberly Reed returns home to a small town in Montana for her high school reunion, hoping for reconciliation with her long-estranged adopted brother Marc who has always lived in her shadow and felt cheated by life. Along the way PRODIGAL SONS uncovers stunning revelations, including a blood relationship to Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, intense sibling rivalries, and unforeseeable twists of plot and gender.

You see Kim was the captain of the captain of the high school football team, class president, and valedictorian voted most likely to succeed, but she also used to be Marc's younger brother Paul. Twenty years later she returns to make a film about her brother Marc's remarkable discovery that he is the long lost grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, but she also discovers the sibling rivalry is far from over, and both she and her brother must confront their past.

Reed's rare access delicately reveals not only the most private moments during a sometimes surreal year in the life of this Montana family, but also an epic scope as the film travels from Montana to Croatia (where we meet Orson Welle's former companion), from jail cell to football field, from deaths to births and commitments of all kinds. This unflinching look at identity and the past challenges us to wonder if we can ever truly become someone new. This is the stuff of documentary legend that no script, novel or day dream can prepare you for. Free from judgment and artifice Prodigal Sons is the family soap that will ring in your ears

Directed by Kimberly Reed for Big Sky Film Productions in association with CBC News Network, BBC Stroyville, and the Sundance Channel.

Update

Prodigal Sons is the recipient of over 12 awards, (including a Fipresci at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, Jury Prizes at both Florida and Nashville Film Festivals for Bravery in Storytelling and Fearless Filmmaking, Best Documentary at Copenhagen and Tampa's LGBT Festivals and more!) and recently embarked on a US theatrical run where it screened in over 30 cities across the country.

In the run up to the theatrical & broadccast launch, filmmaker Kimberly Reed and the film received extensive media attention including a feature in Details Magazine, a feature on CNN.com and as the subject of an hour-long episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show. The interview on Oprah is scheduled to repeat July 7.

We recently learned that Kim's brother Marc, a main character in the film, passed away in his sleep on Friday June 18, 2010.