True/False Films

Familia

In person: director Mikael Wiström and Alberto Herskovits

Sneak preview. "Now I am going to ask you something. Be honest when you answer. Do you love me?" Over thirty years in the making, Familia is an epic look at generations of a single Peruvian family. Beautifully shot, with startling access to the family, this is documentary craft of the first order. Like the best of the "small" docs, this film brings you so close to these people's lives it is as if you're hugging them, feeling the knots of stress in their muscles and inhaling the scents of their bodies as a catalog of their successes and failures. This is the poetry of real life and the sort of film that eschews simple lecturing (about globalization, third world economies, spousal abuse) in favor of something far more powerful... a love story. (DW)

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