A documentary by Pietra Brettkelly. Rated PG. Opens Friday, March 27, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

The photograph is enough to stop you dead in your tracks: a pale woman, dressed in flowing white robes, nurses two naked black babies at her exposed breasts. A combustible mix of religious iconography and colonial overtones, it makes you think of Madonna—and not just the one who’s announced she’s trying to adopt another Malawian child.

Pietra Brettkelly’s documentary The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins is every bit as provocative and unforgettable as the image it centres around. Her brutally honest and often unflattering portrait of artist Vanessa Beecroft’s misguided drive to adopt two African babies is both infuriating and fascinating.

For Beecroft, art is inseparable from life, and so she orchestrates the startling portrait in Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region while trying to adopt the twins from an orphanage. For 16 months, Brett-kelly follows Beecroft, adeptly contrasting the glamorous world of her high-society performance-art installations in Italy and the dusty settlements of rural Africa.

In the latter, the idealistic notion of “saving” the twins becomes complicated: there’s the appearance of their father; local customs that say children should be passed to the nearest relatives; and the fact that Beecroft’s husband, social anthropologist Greg Durkin, is holding down an already neglected little household outside New York City and doesn’t know what she’s up to.

Beecroft’s attempts to shoot her perfect Madonna-and-children portrait are often cringe-inducing. She “borrows” the twins from the orphanage, but at one point the facility’s staff members frantically interrupt a photo session because Beecroft is holding the babies naked in a church—something deeply offensive to locals.

“I feel like I’m manipulating, objectifying, and using them,” Beecroft worries at one point. So why continue? Artistic obsession? Or is she just another example of westerners’ sense of entitlement in the developing world?

What the locals must think of Beecroft’s travelling gong show—an entourage that includes an assistant and hired photographer—is anyone’s guess. And yet it’s hard to deny her genius as an artist: in Italy, one shocking ode to the ignored carnage in Darfur, the work VB61 Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf? finds her splattering blood-red paint, Jackson Pollock–like, over the sprawled bodies of African models.

Beyond the art star, Brett-kelly reveals a woman with a troubled past who comes close to divorce and mental breakdown. But by the time the circus ends, there is a kind of resolution, a sense of enlightenment after the madness—and a message that throws the celebrity-adoption frenzy into a complicated new light.