Teat for two.

When acclaimed artist Vanessa Beecroft splatters blood red paint over 30 topless female models who lie sprawled on a canvas, she weds Pollock’s drip-paint method to a genocide motif. It’s disturbing to see, but the models are adults and they will shower the paint off and a provocative sort of large-scale human sculpture has been created. But when Beecroft impetuously decides to adopt twins she encounters during a photo shoot in the Sudan, art meets life in a disturbing way that can’t just be washed away.

Pietra Brettkelly discomfiting documentary, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, doggedly traces Beecroft’s African adoption odyssey. The children are living in an orphanage, but they have a father and extended family. Authorities are understandably wary of this intense white woman with serious depression and OCD issues who wants to adopt the twins and move them to New York. Beecroft gives the family thousand-dollar bills as incentive to let her take the children, and this money allows the clan to bring the boys home and raise them in a healthy environment. But Beecroft doesn’t seem to notice that she could be more helpful to the children with small cash gifts to their relatives because her mission has more to do with her dubious needs than the twins’ real ones.

When Beecroft’s exasperated husband acknowledges that his wife is obsessed with the controversial adoptions of African children by Angelina Jolie and Madonna, a revulsion sets in. And since Beecroft travels extensively and often has others raising her birth children, you just feel happy that her spouse isn’t going along with the adoption plans. Brettkelly’s film isn’t easy to watch, but it’s an insightful documentary that stubbornly paints an extreme psychological portrait.