SERIES PASS

$85 General Admission
$50 NWFF Members

Even though the medium of film enabled people to affordably document themselves and their families as early as 1932, with the invention of the 8mm format, it wasn’t until the 1970s that the idea of autobiographical “family” filmmaking began to take root outside of the avant-garde. Groundbreaking documentary shorts like Martha Coolidge’s David: Off and On (1972) and Martin Scorsese’s Italianamerican (1974) brought directors’ family members in front of the camera for the first time, not just for personal record-keeping, but public consumption. Fifty years later, the “family film” is fully established as a branch of nonfiction filmmaking, one that’s been around long enough to have its own set of rules and clichés. This series gathers together eight efforts that exemplify the adventurousness of the subgenre as it originally developed: films that take formal, conceptual, and ethical risks in their explorations of the ties that bind.

Curated by guest programmer Brian Belovarac