In 1998, Tessa Blake pointed a camera at her own father and asked him to explain himself. He would not. Her first narrative feature is about a 12-year-old boy who cannot get a single adult to tell him the truth, and until this conversation she had never put those two films side by side.
The film opens on a boy whose mother comes home with a black eye and a busted lip, and on a house full of adults who decide, one by one, that he is better off not knowing. Tessa explains why she will not call any of them wrong, and points to the scene she is proudest of, where two characters collide and both of them are right. She talks about the difference between building something of her own and stepping into a show that existed before she arrived and will keep going after she leaves, which is the job she has taken a sacred oath to do for twenty years. She walks through the feature she shot long before this one, financed badly, never finished, caught in that odd window after film and before HD, and why she thinks she can finally let it go. She also gets candid about what a child’s point of view does to a story that adults keep calling too complicated to explain.
An essential watch for anyone who was ever a kid in a house where the adults had already decided you did not need to know.
