‘You Have His Eyes’: A powerful documentary on adoption and mental health
Published:Sunday | February 20, 2022 | 12:10 AMDebra Edwards - Assistant Online and Lifestyle Editor
Adopted at three months old, actor, model, and basketball player Christopher Wilson wanted for nothing while growing up with his loving parents in the United States, yet, he still had a curiosity to identify his roots and find out who his biological parents were. On a mission to unearth his ancestry, he discovers his birth father is Lionel Scott, a green and hazel-eyed Jamaican man who set the national record for the steeplechase in 1985 and then seemingly disappeared.
His quest to find Scott prompts him to create a powerful feature-length documentary titled You Have His Eyes that chronicles his search from the US to Jamaica, where he finds Scott, who has unfortunately fallen on hard times, is suffering from mental health issues and is now a derelict living in Manchester.
“I had known as a kid that I had Jamaican roots, but that’s about all I knew. I had one tiny little picture of Lionel that was black and white,” says Wilson, who notes that most people that he spoke to while in search of Scott had told him that he was most likely dead.
With the help of family members, Wilson serendipitously finds Scott, a seemingly sage-like individual who is no longer the man from the black and white photo taken in his younger days. Instead, Scott is now heavily bearded with unkempt locks and is living in the bushes mere steps away from his childhood home in Mandeville.
“God is real,” says Wilson of how he found Scott. Immediately hopping out of the car and walking towards his biological father, Wilson tells him, “I’m your first son.” To which Scott, in a soft-spoken tone, replies, “Oh really?”
With Scott’s mental state, he is not sure who to trust and what is reality versus illusion, but does acknowledge that Wilson looks like “the self of me of during past,” and viewers finally get a chance to see the side-by-side resemblance. Wilson does indeed have Scott’s eyes.
Regardless of Scott’s mental condition, Wilson says, “I am still proud to this day about him. I love that people say I look like him. It fills me up. He is a beautiful soul inside and out. It was so gratifying to meet him and to have a face-to-face experience with him. I see him being a unique individual in the way he sees the world. The way he communicates and chooses to live. A part of me just deeply respects him.”
FILM’S RESURGENCE
While Wilson admits he hasn’t seen Scott since 2016 (he’s been living in Europe for the past five years), which is the same year You Have His Eyes came out on the film festival circuit and was lauded by many, including Oscar-winning actress Viola Davis and husband Julius Tennon as one to watch. The film’s resurgence recently happened when Wilson’s spirit led him to place a snippet of the documentary on social media platform Instagram and boost it for more to see. This led local charitable organisation PD Thanxx Foundation which feeds and helps to clothe homeless people in the Manchester environs, to get in contact to let him know that Scott is still alive and that the organisation has been feeding him every Sunday for the past two years.
The Sunday Gleaner reached out to Paul Davis, founder of PD Thanxx Foundation, who let us know that the mild-tempered Scott is liked and is not violent, and said while “Lionel has fans,” he doesn’t trust many people and is not in the best shape. Davis is recommending the relevant health authorities help to give Scott the medical attention he desperately needs.
Wilson acknowledges that he has heard that Scott is not in the best shape, but is also hopeful that he can get help. “It’s very delicate because you can’t force things upon him.” And while Wilson reminisces about his love for Jamaica, “I didn’t want to leave. The country is very beautiful and has an energy,” and his love for escoveitched fish and coco bread, but up to press time, he didn’t have a set date to come back for a visit.
With interest brewing for a major film adaptation of the documentary, we ask Wilson how he would like to move forward with Scott. “I don’t have any expectations. I never did. In the adoption community, there is a lot of pain and anger and resentment towards biological parents, and I don’t have any of that,” he says. “I want him to just be as healthy and as comfortable as he can be and as he wants to be.”