Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Family Portrait Sittings appeared not long after the emergence of the Boston-centric movement of personal documentary in the late 1960s, a wave distinct from the efforts of earlier avant-garde filmmakers to make a personal cinema, such as Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas.

"Taking normal people, average people, people who have no power, and giving them the time to express themselves and to become more important. By making them big on the wall, it also gives them importance and light and life. So we agreed that that would be the project, to go in the magical truck from one place to another."

“We can look at Strong Island and see when your loved one dies in a vacuum, when the casual fragility of black life turns your childhood into a soap bubble—they are floating, and then they are gone. Tamir Rice was literally gone.”

By centering on Helen, the film has a feminist streak, a badly needed course corrective for a musical genre whose histories overwhelmingly stem from the perspective of men worshipping at the altar of other men.