The Reel World: Generational trauma
The settings and speakers in these three compassionate documentaries couldn't be more different — a young boy in a dying Ohio town, elders on the Sugarcane Reservation in British Columbia, and violent criminals in a maximum-security prison — yet the anguish in their voices is the same. These films examine the difficult work of healing from the scars of addiction, abuse and abandonment.
Curtis is the kind of kid who can tell you about rocks or bugs, or clouds in the sky. He’s going to be a lawyer when he grows up, either that or a YouTube star. Some day he might make it out of his dying river town with its dilapidated houses and empty storefronts. Some day he might escape his family’s deadly inheritance.
Meth. Heroine. Oxy. From parents to grandparents to cousins, addiction is an invasive vine that’s strangling his family tree. Foster families and overdoses, jail time and health issues; addiction reaches every corner of their lives. In a jailhouse visiting room, in a truck shooting heroine, in a dilapidated house filled with weed smokers, Curtis’s family members discuss the devastating effects the pills and needles have had on their lives with extraordinary candor.
There’s no question there is love here, love and faith and tiny sparks of hope, but Inheritance is a raw and compassionate documentary about the generational effects of addiction.
Decrepit outbuildings. An abandoned gymnasium. A small graveyard. That’s all that’s left of St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School. Just the derelict buildings and the heartbreaking memories: Here is where the students were whipped. This is how the priest abused me. This is where the incinerator burned the newborn babies.
The elders of Williams Lake First Nation are survivors. They survived molestation and whippings, rape and physical abuse at the hands of the priests, brothers and nuns at St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School. They survived the lessons of “shame and guilt” of being Indians that the white people tried to teach. They survived the governmental and ecclesiastical cover-ups of this abuse. And now they are telling their stories.
In Sugarcane writer and filmmaker Julian Brave Noisecat exposes the horrifying legacy of residential boarding schools, many run by the Catholic Church. Throughout the documentary Noisecat gradually reveals his own family’s story of generational trauma while also sharing the elders’ heartbreaking stories of life at the residential school.
At the chapel in Folsom Prison guttural shrieks rip through the air. Men sob and curse or fight to escape confining arms. All this raw emotion is encouraged, it’s necessary, it’s all part of the work.
The Work follows three outsiders, Chris, Brian and Charles, as they participate in an intensive four-day group therapy session with convicts. Sitting side by side with gang members and facilitators, the men gradually reveal the trauma and betrayals that haunt them. Fathers who weren’t there. Fathers who belittled them.
Honestly, watching The Work put me through the wringer. It’s intense, it’s uncomfortable and it’s absolutely worthwhile.
