Pacific Cinematheque
1131 Howe Street
Vancouver.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Time:7:00pm

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Must Read After My Death
Nonfiction Features of 2008
(USA, 2007, 74 mins)
HDCam
Directed By: Morgan Dews
EXEC PROD: Alison Palmer Bourke
PROD/SCR/ED: Morgan Dews
MUS: Paul Damian Hodge

www.mustreadaftermydeath.com

When The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, a woman named Allis was living out the reality in suburban Connecticut. A typical 1960s couple, Allis and her husband Charley had four kids, a white picket fence and a host of problems. What began as an experiment (the couple recorded Dictaphone messages for each other while apart) soon morphed into an unholy documentation of a family imploding. Soon enough, Allis was taping everything including screaming fights, post-psychiatric sessions and endless self-analysis. This familial dissolution, helped along by psychiatrists, an open marriage and experimental therapies spiraled into chaos and death. Through it all, Alice talked, describing her frustration with her prescribed role as a wife and a mother, her fears for her children, and her rage and pain.

What emerged from the wreckage was a singular and resolute depiction of a woman fighting hard to retain her sense of self. Despite the fact that almost all of the then socially sanctioned authorities (in the form of doctors, husbands and specialists) were ranged against her, Allis retained her stubborn faith in her own judgment. Her memento mori for her family is alternately infuriating, pathetic and courageous. Director Morgan Dews brings a remarkable eye to bear, shaping his grandmother's cache of letters, sound recordings and home movies into something greater than the sum of its parts. The result is an evisceration of sexual politics, and a startling evocation of a time and place when a woman's role, in the words of The Feminine Mystique, was to find fulfillment in "sexual passivity, male domination and nurturing maternal love."