Getting Personal
A camera can be used to document the world but it can also be a mirror or a microscope, even a time machine. In this selection of up-close-and-personal works, filmmakers turn their cameras on themselves, their friends, or their family members, often in search of connection across generations, or at least a means of measuring the gap—whether it be psychological, lingual, or geographical. Parents prove prickly and resistant to containment in Lynne Sachs’s "Film About a Father Who" (2020), while Dónal Foreman processes the absence of his documentarian dad in "The Image You Missed" (2018). The artist subjects of "Apolonia, Apolonia" (2022) and "I’m Not Everything I Want to Be" (2024), meanwhile, practice a radical openness that is perhaps a special corollary of their youth.
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Finding Christa
Directed by Camille Billops and James Hatch | 55 mins | 1991
An affecting yet unsentimental portrait of motherhood, Camille Billops’s collaboration with husband James Hatch captures her reunion with the daughter she was forced to give up for adoption in 1961, combining candid interviews and archi... -
Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun?
Directed by Travis Wilkerson | 90 mins | 2017
A particularly lacerating take on the “home movie,” Wilkerson’s film excavates the buried story of his own great-grandfather’s murder of a Black man in c. 1946 Dothan, Alabama, an inquest that puts him in conflict with contemporary residents of the to... -
Jaddoland
Directed by Nadia Shihab | 88 mins | 2018
“I don’t make art to make pretty things,” Lahib Jaddo tells her daughter, filmmaker Nadia Shihab. “I make it because it helps me understand my life.” In "Jaddoland," Shihab searches for deeper understanding of the diasporic experience of home through the ... -
The Image You Missed
Directed by Dónal Foreman | 74 mins | 2018
An otherwise impossible conversation between two men of different generations, both filmmakers, is instigated via cinema itself in this probing and achingly personal essay film. Dónal Foreman grew up in Dublin, estranged from his father, the documentaria... -
Film About a Father Who
Directed by Lynne Sachs | 74 mins | 2020
One man, Ira Sachs Sr., refracted through a host of familial voices and a variety of film formats, the technology evolving over the course of 25 years of shooting. As one of the numerous children he sired with different women—with not all of his progeny kn... -
The Metamorphosis of Birds
Directed by Catarina Vasconcelos | 101 mins | 2020
A metaphor-rich magic realist metafiction memoir, Vasconcelos’s hybrid documentary debut feature tells the story of the filmmaker’s family history—in particular, her grandparents’ love affair and her commiseration with her father over the early l... -
Apolonia, Apolonia
Directed by Lea Glob | 116 mins | 2022
With her intense gaze and assured manner, the artist who gives Lea Glob’s documentary its title, a French painter born into the Parisian counterculture, is a figure of considerable magnetism. Filmed over the course of 13 years, from Apolonia’s early twenties... -
Joonam
Directed by Sierra Urich | 100 mins | 2023
Sierra Urich has never been to Iran, nor can she speak Farsi. Her mother Mitra fled her native country in 1979, on the cusp of the revolution, eventually settling in rural Vermont. Mitra’s own mother followed 16 years later; still, she speaks very little... -
I'm Not Everything I Want to Be
Directed by Klára Tasovská | 90 mins | 2024
Oft referred to as the Nan Goldin of Czechoslovakia, Libuše Jarcovjáková chronicled after-dark Prague in the 1970s and ’80s, her photographs of let-it-all-hang-out gay clubs, factory hands working the third shift, and clandestine parties giving a pictur...
