Performance artist Vanessa Beecroft's intention to adopt orphaned babies Madit and Mongor Akot comes under scrutiny in the film documentary The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins. (Vanessa Beecroft/Pietra Brettkelly)

The photograph is clearly meant to be a shove and a slap, and it is: A white woman in an angelic white dress, burnt along the bottom like a baked doily, nurses two black babies, one on each breast. In this portrait, the deified figures are not the babies, but the Madonna front and centre: Vanessa Beecroft, a 39-year-old Italian-British artist.

'There aren’t many people who feel lightly about Vanessa [Beecroft]. It’s either love or hate.'

— Filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly

For her, the image is a piece of reverse colonialism, an attempt to rewrite the history of wet nurses of colour enlisted in the service of white Western women. But as with all of Beecroft’s work, the photograph is also painfully personal. In 2006, she travelled to Sudan and on her first day there met Madit and Mongor Akot at an orphanage. The baby boys needed to be nursed, and Beecroft stepped in, able to do so because she was still breastfeeding her youngest son in New York. Whether she bonded intensely with the children, or had a selfish urge to live out the Angelina Jolie fantasy of salvation through adoption — perhaps a combination of both — Beecroft began efforts to formally adopt the boys.

But Sudan has no laws around adoption and, indeed, no cultural concept of it. In this way, the now-famous portrait that resulted, like the story behind it, is not merely an artistic provocation, but an outrage to many, an extension of colonialism rather than a refutation.

For 16 months, New Zealand filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly followed Beecroft around. The resulting documentary, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, has become a lightning rod for both the artist’s followers and those with strong opinions about international adoption. Echoing other reviews, a seething post on the blog of New York magazine last year read: “The doc cluster-bombs her faddish fascination with Sudanese orphans and paints Beecroft as a hypocritically self-aware, colossally colonial pomo narcissist.”

This Beecroft photo was shot in Rumbek, Sudan, in 2006. (Vanessa Beecroft/Pietra Brettkelly)

Brettkelly had no idea Beecroft was such a divisive figure when they met; in fact, she had never heard of her. The director was travelling the world working on a documentary about New Zealanders living abroad. She landed in Sudan's Darfur region, where she and her crew slept in a camp for aid workers and visitors. Amid that crowd, the strikingly beautiful Beecroft and her team of photographers and assistants stood out.

“We hooked up with her every night,” says Brettkelly, who is 42 and appears to share Beecroft’s glamorous tendencies, wearing a shimmering, floor-length black dress during an interview in a Toronto hotel room. “She said she was a performance artist and I had no idea what that meant. I thought she was just a dancer doing some wacky dancing in flowy, tie-dyed skirts.”

Brettkelly laughs now at her naïveté, but it served her well. When she discovered that Beecroft was interested in adopting, Brettkelly asked if she could film the process, and Beecroft agreed. “I kept asking why and she told me, ‘Because you know nothing about me,’” says Brettkelly.

Brettkelly only figured out she was dealing with a renowned conceptual artist when she joined Beecroft at the Venice Biennale in 2007 for a performance called VB61: Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf?. There, Beecroft delivered a variation on her signature installations, in which groups of women stand or sit without moving for hours at a time. The direct feminism of those works — Beecroft, who has had a lifelong eating disorder, is in constant conversation with the female body as object — absorbed new meaning in Venice. The documentary shows Beecroft arranging 30 African women across a white floor, trailing red paint across their still bodies.

“I was incredibly moved,” Brettkelly says. “The stuff in L.A. with white models hadn’t done much for me, but this I understood.”

Both the art and the adoption end up receding in The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins. Instead, Beecroft’s private damage moves to the forefront: Her father and mother both make appearances in the film, describing an isolated, intellectual, precocious childhood in the Italian countryside. At one point in the film, Beecroft’s husband, Greg Durkin, now a film executive, is flabbergasted that she has initiated the adoption without informing him.

When Brettkelly showed Beecroft a 3½-hour cut of the doc, her subject was initially pleased. But after viewing the edited version, Beecroft sent Brettkelly a laundry list of things she wanted changed, and eventually enlisted a lawyer. Brettkelly says she didn’t alter the film based on Beecroft’s complaints, and it certainly doesn’t feel like a vanity project. The doc is sympathetic to Beecroft, who struggles with depression, but it isn’t always flattering. In one particularly difficult scene, Beecroft is shooting the babies in a church in Sudan when a few local women pound the door, outraged that the children are being photographed naked, and accusing Beecroft’s translator of corroborating with “the whites.”

Filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly, left, together with her subject, artist Vanessa Beecroft. (Frank Micelotta/Getty Images)

Brettkelly recalls that as the screaming escalated, she considered putting down the camera and getting involved. “My camera man was beside me and I said, ‘Oh God, what do I do? What do I do? Am I going to step in here?’ But really quickly I could see these women didn’t need some white woman to step in. They knew what was right and wrong in their world, and I thought, ‘Okay, I’m fine right here, behind the camera.’ ”

Anyone who wants to write off Beecroft can zone in on her casual white privilege, especially when she bars the door to the church and mutters, “Christ, these people.” But Brettkelly’s film also constantly reminds the viewer that Beecroft is a fiercely driven artist, doing whatever it takes to produce the work she genuinely thinks will change the world. Subtly, the doc asks whether male and female artists are scrutinized or judged in the same way. Is it too simple to dismiss a fashionable, beautiful woman preoccupied by food and the female body — the former considered trivial and the latter an obsession historically left to male artists?

Of their relationship today, Brettkelly says, “It’s incredibly rough. She’s very up and down. She was tough at times, but also incredibly generous. It’s not a friendship, but it has intimacy. I’m always very careful how I am with her. She’s a woman who has achieved amazing things. She’s a brilliant artist. I can’t judge how she has to operate in that world.” Brettkelly pauses. “But to judge someone in a developing country interacting with the locals, that’s a different story.”

Despite the threatened lawsuit, Beecroft appeared at Sundance in 2008 and defended herself, and has become more famous because of the film, collaborating with Kanye West on a performance to launch his last album. She and her husband are also in the process of a divorce, according to Brettkelly.

The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins continues to divide audiences. Brettkelly describes a screening where a man stood up and said, “I find this appalling. It’s disgusting.” Another woman in the audience cut him off. “She said: ‘I completely identify with her. She thinks differently than us. She’s an artist. She’s showing us a way into issues we don’t talk about.’ There aren’t many people who feel lightly about Vanessa. It’s either love or hate.”

The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins opens in Toronto on March 20 and Vancouver on March 27, with more Canadian dates to follow.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.