2015 Directed by Karen Guthrie
Scottish director Karen Guthrie’s intimate documentary is a vivid chronicle of her coming to terms with a twofold loss, one past—of her nuclear family shattered years before by her father’s departure to Africa—and one present, when her mother, the family anchor, suffers a stroke. Full of surprising revelations, Guthrie’s personal story becomes an affecting and resonant look at post-colonialism and the complicated bonds of family.
Canada
Canada
Watched this at the oxen park cinema club- local to me, and local to the director who was there for a q&a- it’s an intense documentary that doesn’t toy with the audience, you are thrown curveballs, but they play out naturally instead of used as obvious plot points, and everyone in the doc is so calm, you feel calm, despite a deluge of emotion.
Also, the way the dad finishes his drink in the restaurant and just plonks it on the empty table behind him is IT. Exactly him in a nutshell.
Indulgence and obscure interpersonal concerns are always a potential pitfall of those who opt to turn a camera on the lives of their own immediate family. Director Karen Guthrie has decided to get extremely intimate with her own in The Closer We Get, a film which suggests that the presence of a camera can bring out the best and worst in people. The film is intended as a piece of auto-therapy, an attempt to cut through the smiling façade of her parents’ lives, and the film itself is employed as a tool for confession, self-reflection and post-event analysis...
