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Movies & TV News & Features

Brawl in the Family

Life With Murder isn’t the first documentary to bring its cameras into a troubled home. Here are a few other films that showed audiences how dysfunctional – and compelling – a family study can be.

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A Married Couple (Allan King, 1969)

King’s seminal documentary – distilled from 70 hours of raw footage of a Toronto family – has the dramatic sweep of a fictional feature, tracing the disintegration of one couple’s relationship in the face of the era’s shifting social mores.

An American Family (Alan and Susan Raymond, 1973)

Produced as a 12-episode miniseries for PBS, this look at the lives of the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California, may well be the birthing pool of reality television. It has all the signifiers: high emotions, no-holds-barred arguments, dramatic storytelling. There’s even a breakout character in the Louds’ openly gay son, Lance, who refused to tone himself down for the cameras. It’s family as spectacle.

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Grey Gardens (David and Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer, 1975)

Once upon a time, Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Little Edie, were a couple of very strange women living in a shabby East Hampton mansion, subsisting on faded social connections – they were related to Jackie Kennedy – and their fabulous attitude. Then the Maysles brothers brought their cameras over and made them movie stars. Well, that’s how Edith and Little Edie see it, anyway.

Stevie (Steve James, 2002)

James, one of the co-directors of Hoop Dreams, turns his camera on himself in this moving look at the life of Stevie Fielding, whom James had mentored in a Big Brother program in southern Illinois in the early 1980s. But in the mid-90s, the adult Stevie is divorced, without prospects and arrested for allegedly molesting his eight-year-old niece. It’s searing, honest filmmaking, and it holds nothing back.

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Capturing The Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003)

Director Jarecki uses ambiguity as a narrative tool in this amazing look at the strange case of Arnold and Jesse Friedman, a Long Island father and son charged with child molestation in the late 1980s. The charges seem preposterous, including tales of improbable sex games in computer classes were the Friedmans railroaded by the recovered-memory hysteria so prevalent at the time? Or is the truth even more disturbing?

Must Read After My Death (Morgan Dews, 2007)

Dews compiled this incredible exploration of his convoluted family history entirely out of audio recordings, photographs and home movie footage left behind by his grandmother. As he plunges deeper into tales of one-sided “open relationships” that fly in the face of 1950s conformity, followed by depression, alienation and ill-considered pharmacological therapies, he resembles an archaeologist progressing ever forward through an alien culture.

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Prodigal Sons (Kimberly Reed, 2008)

You’d think transgendered filmmaker Reed would be the most interesting person in her Montana family, especially since she’s returning home for the first time as a woman to attend her high-school reunion. And then you meet her adopted brother Marc, who’s struggling with a debilitating brain injury that leaves him prone to mood swings and violent outbursts. It’s then you realize Reed’s got enough material for three movies.

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The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story (Gregory V. and Jeff Sherman, 2009)

Richard Sherman and Robert Sherman were Walt Disney’s favourite songwriters, cranking out music for The Jungle Book, Mary Poppins and plenty more. They also haven’t spoken to one another outside the office in more than three decades. This powerful documentary – which hints at the source of their split but never names it – was made by their sons, who barely knew each other until they were in their 40s.

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