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Family Relations

Family Relations

SOMEWHERE WITH NO BRIDGES

Director: Charles Frank

Heralded as "a celebration of life like you've never seen," Somewhere With No Bridges is a stirring, lyrical journey beneath the brusque, reticent surface of a New England fishing community.

Twenty years after a beloved local fisherman, Richie Madeiras, goes missing off the shores of Martha's Vineyard, a distant cousin locates Richie's kind, indelible spirit in the stories of family, friends, and the sweeping sea which has defined their lives.

DVD / 2022 / 58 minutes

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CIRCUS BOY

Director: L.A. Alfonso

In today's world, what is family? This question is explored in the documentary Circus Boy, about a gay man named Thomas who seeks reconciliation with his mother after he and his husband, Michael, adopt a boy he's training for circus school. Thomas is an avid believer that the circus is accessible to all people, and he takes joy from helping others find their flow by developing circus skills. He coaches 17 different circus disciplines to all age groups, with his primary love being the challenging Cyr Wheel.

When their adoptive son Ethan came into their lives, Thomas and Michael fell in love all over again. And Ethan has a natural talent for the Cyr. But now, Thomas is nervous about introducing Ethan to his visiting mother, who wants to meet Ethan's 'bio-mom' and have a chat. What emerges from this fraught situation is the story of an unconventional family that chooses an alternate path to love and parenthood. Challenging our social norms, the film embraces inclusion as we see how some can work out their problems through circus arts - and acceptance.

DVD / 2021 / 52 minutes

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DAUGHTER OF A LOST BIRD

Directed by Brooke Pepion Swaney

Kendra Mylnechuk Potter, a Native woman adopted into a white family, reconnects with her Native identity and begins to view herself as a living legacy of U.S. assimilationist policy.

"Lost birds" - a term for Native children adopted out of their tribal communities. Right after the Indian Welfare Act of 1978 became the law of the land, Kendra Mylnechuk Potter was adopted into a white family and raised with no knowledge of her Native parentage. This beautiful and intimate film follows Kendra on her journey to find her birth mother April, also a Native adoptee, and return to her Lummi homelands in Washington State. With a sensitive yet unflinching lens, director Brooke Swaney (Blackfeet/Salish) documents Kendra and April as they connect with relatives and navigate what it means to be Native, and to belong to a tribe from the outside looking in. Along the way, Kendra uncovers generations of emotional and spiritual beauty and pain and comes to the startling realization that she is a living legacy of U. S. assimilationist policy. By sharing a deeply personal experience of inherited cultural trauma, the film opens the door to broader and more complicated conversations about the erasure of Native culture and the ethics of transracial adoption.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2021 / 66 minutes

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LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES

By Ahmet Necdet Cupur

In a village in the south east of Turkey, Mahmut wants to divorce his newly-wed wife. At the same time, his sister Zeynep enrolls in an open high school and takes on a job in a factory. Against her father's wishes, she wants to leave the village and ultimately go to university. The siblings' demands become the center of conflict in their conservative family and community, who are not used to what Mahmut and Zeynep strive for in life. Intimately captured by their older brother Ahmet Necdet Cupur, who left the village twenty years ago to pursue his studies, LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES is a story of clashes between generations, between the past and the present.

DVD (Turkish, Arabic With English Subtitles, Color) / 2021 / 93 minutes

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NORTH BY CURRENT

By Angelo Madsen Minax

After the inconclusive death of his young niece, filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown, preparing to make a film about a broken criminal justice system. Instead, he pivots to excavate the depths of generational addiction, Christian fervor, and trans embodiment.

Lyrically assembled images, decades of home movies, and ethereal narration form an idiosyncratic and poetic undertow that guide a viewer through lifetimes and relationships. Like the relentless Michigan seasons, the meaning of family shifts, as Madsen, his sister, and his parents strive tirelessly to accept each other.

Poised to incite more internal searching than provide clear statements or easy answers, NORTH BY CURRENT dives head first into the challenges of creating identity, the agony of growing up, and the ever-fickle nuances of family.

DVD / 2021 / 85 minutes

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APART

Directed by Jennifer Redfearn

Against the backdrop of a Midwestern state battling industrial decline, an opioid epidemic, and rising incarceration rates, APART offers an intimate portrait of three women who return home from prison and rebuild their lives after being separated from their children for years.

Since the beginning of the War on Drugs, the number of women in U.S. prisons has increased 800%. The majority are mothers. Against the backdrop of a Midwestern state battling industrial decline and an opioid epidemic, APART (dir. Jennifer Redfearn) offers an intimate portrait of three women facing the challenge of mothering their children from prison and upon release. With the help of a unique re-entry program run by Malika, an advocate formerly incarcerated in the same prison, the women lean on each other to find the tools and resiliency needed to rebuild their lives and relationships with their children. Counselors and teachers impart skills necessary to secure jobs upon release and help to unpack the traumas of living in the wake of addiction with profound longing for distant loved ones. By highlighting the women's investment in their own futures and in one another, Apart also offers a wider indictment of incarceration in America, illuminating punitive systems that all too often prioritize discipline over healing and fail to support individuals who are determined to overcome the hardships of their pasts.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2020 / 86 minutes

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BEAUTIFUL SOMETHING LEFT BEHIND

By Katrine Philp

The heartbreaking and even funny moments in the lives of children who have recently lost parents. Participants in Good Grief, a holistic program aimed at supporting children through loss, work through questions about life and death in their open and curious minds.

DVD / 2020 / 88 minutes

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CELINE ARCHIVE, THE

By Celine Parrenas Shimizu

In 1932, Celine Navarro was buried alive by her own community in Northern California. This is an attempt to uncover the real story, revealing Navarro's feminism and resistance in a time when neither was embraced, as well as the silences that haunt Filipino-American communities to this day.

THE CELINE ARCHIVE is simultaneously an act of journalism, a journey into family and community memory and archives, a love poem, a story of grief and trauma, and a seance for the buried history of Filipino-Americans. Filmmaker and scholar Celine Parrenas Shimizu artfully weaves together her own story of grief with the story of the tragic death of Celine Navarro, which has become lore. In 1932, Navarro was buried alive by her own community of Filipino-Americans in Northern California, but the circumstances surrounding her death were and are unclear and have oft been spun, sensationalized, and dramatized. The filmmaker, a grieving mother with ties to the same community, finds resonance with Navarro's memory and long-lost story, and she sets out to first learn - and then tell - the truth about Navarro's death, ultimately portraying her as a feminist heroine.

Through animation, portraiture, site visits, archival materials, and interviews with scholars, family, and community members, the film shares the most widely circulated versions of the story. In one version, Celine Navarro committed adultery, but there is no proof beyond the accusations. In another, Navarro reported a crime committed by one the members of the fraternal organization Caballeros Dimas Alang, of which she was a part. The member ended up in San Quentin Prison, and for this she was labelled a traitor and punished. In a variation of this story, the crime she reported was one of gendered violence - rendering Celine a brave, pioneering feminist who refused to be silenced. A final version of her story, one that is documented by the Filipino American National Historical Society and believed by her family members, discloses that a community leader stalked and preyed upon her, ignoring Navarro's repeated refusal of his advances.

What does it mean to be descendants of violence, and in particular, gendered violence? How can women heal and make families whole? How can truth-telling help family members move through grief? Told with great care and respect for Navarro, her family, and her descendants, this film is a gift of love given to generations who have held Celine in heart and women fighting to have a voice in the face of violence.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2020 / 69 minutes

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EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF

By Mo Scarpelli

A young film director returns to Venezuela, inspired to make a film based on his father's life in the Amazon jungle. He casts Father to play himself.

What starts as an act of love and ambition - filmmaking to more deeply understand the self, and the other - spirals into a process which confronts Father's struggles with addiction and his life devoid of his son. EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF holds a steady lens to the way the act of cinema unearths, binds, heals and destroys.

DVD / 2020 / 105 minutes

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MAGNITUDE OF ALL THINGS, THE

By Jennifer Abbott

When Jennifer Abbott lost her sister to cancer, her sorrow opened her up to the profound gravity of climate breakdown. Abbott's new documentary The Magnitude of All Things draws intimate parallels between the experiences of grief-both personal and planetary. Stories from the frontlines of climate change merge with recollections from the filmmaker's childhood on Ontario's Georgian Bay. What do these stories have in common? The answer, surprisingly, is everything.

For the people featured, climate change is not happening in the distant future: it is kicking down the front door. Environmental activist Greta Thunberg's school strike grows from a solitary vigil to a mass movement. Battles waged, lamentations of loss, and raw testimony coalesce into an extraordinary tapestry, woven together with raw emotion and staggering beauty that transform darkness into light, grief into action.

DVD / 2020 / 85 minutes

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METAMORPHOSIS OF BIRDS, THE

By Catarina Vasconcelos

An extraordinarily beautiful and fascinating documentary that has the feel of a precious heirloom, this impressionistic yet emotionally rich film finds Portuguese filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos sifting through the memories and dreams of her ancestors.

In prismatic images, richly shot on 16mm film, we get the sense of a family's entire lineage, starting with her naval officer grandfather, Henrique, who married her grandmother, Beatriz, on her 21st birthday; he then spent extended periods at sea, leaving her with an expanding brood of children. This is the beginning of a generational saga, told in shards of memory and voiceover.

The Metamorphosis of Birds achingly evokes the natural world-the changing seasons, the play of sunlight, the ever-flowing tides, and the plant and animal life-that counterbalances and nurtures human life cycles.

DVD / 2020 / 101 minutes

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CONFUCIAN DREAM

Director: Mijie Li

Filmmaker Mijie Li's first feature (she co-produced Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert's American Factory), Confucian Dream is an observational documentary about a Chinese woman's embrace of the ancient philosophy of Confucianism and how it affects her family.

Chaoyan, a young wife and mother, believes the ancient teachings of Confucianism will restore balance, respect and morality to her home. She involves her four-year-old son in the rigorous routine of chanting daily mantras. Little Chen may not yet understand the recitations' meanings, but mom is confident she's planting a seed for the future.

Chaoyan's husband finds the daily practice excessive, and indeed many Chinese people today criticize it as feudalistic, conservative, and counter-revolutionary. While Confucianism's primary purpose is to instill peace and harmony, the opposite occurs between Chaoyan and her husband as their beliefs clash and their arguments escalate, bringing forth a gripping portrait of marital and parental crisis.

DVD (Mandarin with English Subtitles) / 2019 / 82 minutes

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FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO

Director: Daniel Karslake

FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO, a new documentary that explores the intersection of religion, sexual orientation and gender identity in current-day America.

The arrival of marriage equality was seen by many as the pinnacle achievement of the march toward full equality for LGBTQ people. But for many on the Right, it was the last straw, and their public backlash has been swift, severe and successful. In collaboration with religious conservatives, politicians are invoking both the Bible and the U.S. Constitution in their campaigns for the 'religious freedom' to legally discriminate. By telling the stories of four families struggling with these issues, the film offers healing and understanding to those caught in the crosshairs of scripture, sexuality, and identity.

DVD / 2019 / 91 minutes

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MARKIE IN MILWAUKEE

By Matt Kliegman, Larry Fessenden

A 7-foot-tall fundamentalist Baptist minister, Markie Wenzel made the decision at age 46 to come out as a transgender woman and start living as female. It was a decision that ended her 20-year marriage and estranged her from her three children. It also saw her dismissed from her church and exiled to the margins of her community.

We meet Markie in 2008 as she is putting the pieces of her life back together, employed as a TSA agent and working toward her goal of sexual reassignment surgery. But over the course of the following decade, Markie begins to question her path. She misses the births of her grandchildren, struggles to present as feminine, and starts to re-evaluate her faith. On the eve of her gender reassignment surgery, she must decide for good whether to abandon her female identity and return to living as Mark, for whom life seemed so much easier.

With over a decade of verite footage and contemporaneous interviews, filmmaker Matt Kliegman approaches the film with a Diane Arbus-like observational style that is at once intimate and voyeuristic, tragic and hopeful. Markie's aim is simple: to be a good person, and lead a simple devout life. But her struggles are emblematic of a larger conversation rooted in our country's fixation on identity-political, spiritual and personal-and the fear of those who don't fit neatly within their own communities. When those around you won't accept you for who you are, how can you accept yourself?

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 88 minutes

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SEAT 20D

Director: Jill Campbell

Suse Lowenstein lost her son Alex in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In an effort to come to terms with her grief, Suse turned to her art. She began to sculpt herself naked, frozen in the position she fell into upon hearing the news of her son's death. Creating the sculpture brought her solace, and when Suse posted about her project in the Pan Am Victims' Family Newsletter, inviting others to participate, 75 women responded.

Suse spent fifteen years completing the monumental sculpture she titled "Dark Elegy," a memorial to the victims of the brutal attack that altered American history. In her new documentary Seat 20D, director Jill Campbell explores how art cradled a mother's soul and touches all who view it.

DVD / 2019 / 70 minutes

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URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD: INTO HER OWN

By Daniel Traub

"I have been able to manipulate cedar in ways that are almost outrageous." - Ursula von Rydingsvard

The sculptures are massive, yet strangely intimate. Some feel imbued with an almost primal energy: a series of installations reminiscent of wings in New York's Battery Park, a monumental yet inviting piece outside Brooklyn's Barclays Center, the stunning "Scientia" which evokes the power of nature and the firing of brain synapses.

URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD: INTO HER OWN is an artistic biography of one of the few women in the world working in monumental sculpture. Von Rydingsvard's work has been featured in the Venice Biennale and is held in the collections of some of the world's great museums, including New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. But she may be best-known for work in public spaces - imposing pieces painstakingly crafted (usually from cedar), with complex surfaces.

In this documentary, we go behind the scenes with von Rydingsvard, as she and her collaborators - cutters, metalsmiths, and others - produce new work, including challenging commissions in copper and bronze. But the film also delves into the artist's personal life, and how it has shaped her work. Born in Poland during the Second World War, she was partly raised in a displaced persons camp and came to the US as a refugee with her nine-person family. Her younger brother shares memories of being raised by their violent, domineering father - a man whose influence von Rydingsvard continues to feel. Brought up in a blue-collar environment, she became a teacher and then, as a single mother, moved to New York in the 1970s to take up her artistic practice full-time, while making ends meet by delivering meals. There was a flowering of high-profile female artists working in the city at the time - from Yoko Ono to Cindy Sherman - and von Rydingsvard finally felt at home.

In conversations with curators, patrons, family, and fellow artists, we come to know von Rydingsvard as a driven but compassionate sculptor with a deep commitment to her art and the world around her. Speaking with her husband, the late Nobel Prize-winning brain researcher Paul Greengard, von Rydingsvard talks about how both art and science pay homage to nature. Over images of organic-looking work installed outdoors, she says, "I read a lot of things from nature. Whether it's from animals, whether it's from plants, what the clouds do, what the skies do, she's my major teacher."

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 57 minutes

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BACK TO THE FATHERLAND

Directors: Kat Rohrer, Gil Levanon

Back to the Fatherland is the story of young people leaving their home country to try their luck somewhere else… a universal tale in today's globalized world. The difference in this story is that these young people are moving from Israel to Germany and Austria - countries where their families were persecuted and killed less than a century ago.

This deeply human and revealing film explores the challenges and opportunities for reconciliation and understanding between the Third Generation on both sides of the Shoah.

DVD / 2018 / 77 minutes

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BRIDGE MASTER'S DAUGHTER, THE

Directors: Matthew Leahy & Elisa Stone

In the remote Andean highlands of Peru, Victoriano Arisapana cares for the woven footbridge that has stretched over the gorge for hundreds of years. The secrets of this bridge, the only one left from the ancient Incan empire, have been passed down by the men of Victoriano's family for 300 years. Victoriano is the Bridge Master, the one who has inherited the sacred task of weaving the bridge and of making the sacrificial offerings to the mountain spirits each year. Like his father before him, he has begun to pass on these secrets to his children.

The children in these villages walk for miles each day to reach their school, where they are given glimpses of another world, far from the adobe huts of their families. And when they reach their final year, these students each make their own choice: whether they will remain in their close-knit but very primitive communities, or whether they will follow the possibilities that await in the city.

Among those who face these crossroads are Vidal, Yuri, and Laurita, the children of the Bridge Master. To stay is to embrace a rich culture and an honored heritage, but the price is a difficult, arduous future. To go could mean a whole world of financial, relational and personal fulfillment, but Victoriano, the last Bridge Master, would be left alone.

DVD (Spanish with English Subtitles) / 2018 / 81 minutes

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CHASING PORTRAITS

Director: Elizabeth Rynecki

Moshe Rynecki (1881-1943) was a prolific Warsaw-based artist who painted scenes of the Polish-Jewish community until he was murdered at Majdanek. After the Holocaust, Moshe's wife was only able to recover a small fraction of his work, but unbeknownst to the family, many other pieces survived.

For more than a decade his great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Rynecki, has searched for the missing art, with remarkable and unexpected success. Spanning three generations, Chasing Portraits is a deeply moving narrative of the richness of one man's art, the devastation of war, and one woman's unexpected path to healing.

DVD / 2018 / 78 minutes

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COLOSSUS

Director: Jonathan Schienberg

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" - from The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus

Told through the eyes of 15-year-old Jamil Sunsin, Colossus is a modern-day immigrant tale of one family's desperate struggle after deportation leads to family separation, and the elusive search for the American dream.

Jamil is the only person in his family born in the U.S. His parents and sister came from Honduras and lived in America for a decade before Jamil's father was arrested for being undocumented. The entire family was forced to return to Honduras, a country wracked with violence. After a knife attack traumatizes Jamil, his family makes an excruciating choice to send him back to the U.S. alone.

Now 15, Jamil tries to survive without his family and fights against a broken immigration system. Back in Honduras, his sister Mirka, who would've been eligible for DACA had she remained in the U.S., hopes to someday reunite with Jamil. This intimate portrait is a rare look into the aftermath of deportation and family separation, amidst the current backlash against America's immigrants.

DVD (English, Spanish, With English Subtitles) / 2018 / 84 minutes

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THAT WAY MADNESS LIES

Director: Sandra Luckow

What do you do when your brother descends into a black hole of mental instability - starting with falling for a Nigerian email scam but eventually winding up involuntary committed into the hospital made famous by 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'?

Award-winning filmmaker Sandra Luckow unflinchingly turns her camera on her own family as they attempt to navigate the broken mental health system in an effort to save their brother, Duanne, whose iPhone video diary ultimately becomes an unfiltered look at the mind of a man with untreated schizophrenia as well as an indictment of how the system failed.

DVD / 2018 / 101 minutes

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CHILDREN OF 209 SAINT-MAUR STREET, THE

By Ruth Zylberman

209 Saint-Maur Street is a classic Haussmann building in the 10th arrondissement of Paris: Stone, built around a courtyard, shops on the bottom floor. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was home to some 300 working class people, about a third of them Jewish.

And then came the Nazi occupation. Parents rounded up and deported. Children left on their own. Neighbors hiding Jewish kids under the blankets.

THE CHILDREN OF 209 SAINT-MAUR STREET is filmmaker Ruth Zylberman's painstakingly researched reconstruction of life in the building before and during the Second World War. (At one point she wrote to every single person in France with a particular last name trying to find a resident of the building.) There's the small grocer whose husband is deported and who loses her business when it is "Aryanized." The deaf woman who eagerly writes down the names and locations of Jews so the Nazis can find them. The girl whose father hid Jews in the apartment and threatened to murder his collaborator son if anything should happen to them. And the Jewish children themselves, now elderly, many living abroad, who recall the rumors of roundups, the hiding, and the friends they played with. "I wonder if all of this was real," one of them, the son of Polish immigrants, says.

Zylberman finds Henry Osman, a 79-year-old American whose parents placed him in the care of an organization that hid Jewish children. Osman knows almost nothing about them. And he's not sure he wants to know. He's put that all behind him. But Zylberman has documents and photos. She convinces him to come to 209, where he stares at the flagstones in the courtyard, and wonders if his parents once walked on them.

Zylberman creates a living reconstruction of 209, using a drawing of the building and appending images and archival documents about individuals to it. During interviews, she sparks memories with models of everyday objects like furniture or sewing machines. Throughout the film, we also see images of daily life in the building today, as children practice music and families come and go with their groceries.

For the documentary's final scene, she invites all the now-elderly "children" who lived here to return to the building. Some come with their own descendants. It's as though the pieces of the puzzle she has spent years assembling have finally come together.

DVD (French, English, With English Subtitles, Color) / 2017 / 100 minutes

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ONLY ME GENERATION - AN INTROSPECTIVE LOOK INTO CHINA'S ONE-CHILD POLICY

The one-child policy, a part of China's family planning policy, was a population planning policy of installed by the Chinese government. It was introduced in 1979 and began to be formally phased out in 2015

"Only Me Generation" is a documentary that explores the effects of the China's "One Child Policy" from the perspective of the policy's first generation point of view.

Almost 30 years ago, the Chinese government first introduced the "one child policy" to alleviate social, economic and environmental problems. Three decades later, they are now looking at a relaxation of the policy. The result is that the babies born under the current policy are a unique population set with issues and challenges that are different from those of other Chinese generations; most notably that they grew up as "only children".

This film provides a unique look into a unprecedented government policy that changed the rules of a society, impacted far more than a generation, and can now be studied on a variety of fronts. The film raises numerous questions and serves as a wonderful launching point for discussion and debate.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of "only children" in a generation of only "only children"?

What are the pressures that these children, the results of the policy, have lived under?

How have parental expectations changes due to family limits on the number of children permitted?

What are their social experiences now that these Only Me Generation children are now adults?

What are the ramifications, if any, of relaxing the policy now after so many years?

DVD (Color) / 2016 / 58 minutes

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