In this movie, intimate scenes in which two sisters discuss their mother alternate with home-movie footage and an epistolary narrative expressing the tension in mother-daughter relations. The three channels converge to denounce the conspiratorial silences that confined sexual violence to the private sphere. Through a thoughtful, critical use of film strategies (documentary and home-movie footage), this classic feminist film questions the naiveté traditionally associated with family movies and enlightens the audience on the truthfulness of filmmaking and family union.
Festivals
Berlin International Film Festival 1980
The Milky Way, European Festival of Women's Culture, Amsterdam 1979
Edinburgh International Film Festival 1979
Michelle Citron has made numerous media pieces including the CD- ROMs As American As Apple Pie, Cocktails and Appetizers, and Mixed Greens, and the films What You Take for Granted and Daughter Rite. Her work has been shown at museums and film festivals around the World including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, The Kennedy Center, the American Film Institute and the New Directors, Berlin, London, and Edinburgh film festivals. Her films are distributed worldwide and are in over 200 permanent collections.
Selected filmography
Daughter Rite (1979)
What You Take for Granted (1983)