Educational Media Reviews Online

In viewing this autobiographical documentary, the reviewer found herself watching uncomfortably as members of a dysfunctional family make the most private revelations onscreen. The family includes Julia Pimsleur, her brother Marc, their mother, Beverly, and elderly great aunt Beatie. Near the end, the four hold a reunion in Aunt Beatie's tiny New York City apartment. The event is inexpressibly sad and fragile, a fleeting memory even as it is documented for all time. The four are on different wavelengths, each clinging to his or her chosen lifestyle and unable to connect it to any of the others'.

Marc, the older sibling, is the focus of the film. Son of a university professor and once a high achieving Stanford University pre-med student, he is now 32, roughly dressed and ascetic looking, immersed in the physical labor of farm life. He has been living for a decade in the Alaskan wilderness in a place called The Farm, a remote spot populated solely by members of a born-again Christian cult, to which he is committed. He has been out of touch with his sister, who lives in New York City and makes documentaries, and his widowed mother, who now lives in France. After all these years, Julia found Marc through the cult's website on the Internet, phoned him and, in an effort to understand his choices and renew family ties, has gone to visit him, arranging a trip to Alaska we see unfold.

Julia, meanwhile, deals with her own issues. She professes to be bisexual, but is now in a long-term lesbian relationship she says makes her very happy. Marc's religious beliefs are uncompromising about homosexuality. He rejects his sister's plea to try to understand her lifestyle the same way she has tried to understand his. She blurts out, "Don't pray for me to be straight." He doesn't answer, but simply shakes his head.

Julia begs Marc to express his own personal feelings and opinions about religious matters. As one who does not seem to be strongly motivated by her own Jewish religion, one suspects this is Julia's way of finding the brother she remembers behind his current face of True Believer. He demurs and tries instead to answer her questions by quoting scripture. That frustrates her and she asks again and again for him to speak in his own words, but she never succeeds. Eventually, she lets it rest and settles for spending time with him.

Marc and Julia's widowed mother appears onscreen from time to time looking stylish, but saying little. We don't learn what she does or why she lives abroad, only that she accepts both Marc's and Julia's lifestyles. When Aunt Beatie asks Marc why he doesn't want to return to the City and be closer to his family, it is mom who argues his case.

What saves this piece from being nothing more than a series of startling public declarations about matters most people keep to themselves or share only with a few intimates is that it is extraordinarily well made. Filming, pacing, sound, scenery, and color are appealing. Editing is outstanding. Family photographs and archival footage of New York, California, and Alaska are gracefully interspersed with live action interviews, conversations, and tableaux of the Pimsleurs coming to grips with their problems. Shown on PBS in its This American Life series, the film documents family dynamics and explores some aspects of religious conversion, and could be recommended for comprehensive collections supporting these subjects. It doesn't appear to show an American lifestyle followed by many people, but one never knows.