It’s a potent psychodrama, pitting Marianne’s reality against the one Fassaert is documenting
A Family Affair
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Netherlands, Denmark, South Africa · 2015
Rated G · 1h 50m
Director Tom Fassaert
Starring Marianne Hertz, Robert Fassaert, René Fassaert, Madeleine Fassaert
Genre Documentary
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One day, Tom receives a letter from South Africa. His long forgotten 95-year old grandmother Mariann, asks him to come and help her with her will, so he sets off to South Africa and decides to bring his camera. This spurs a journey for the filmmaker and his grandmother, as she looks back at her life and he tries to understand his own.
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What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
The film is much more about the way in which people perceive one another than about the way people really are.
Screen International by Fionnuala Halligan
A Family Affair is by turns fascinating and futile, running the risk that by exposing the heartbreak of one family it will repel all those with their own unresolvable family sadness.
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
By the jaw-dropping climax (an argument over a family portrait), and the film’s not-entirely unpredictable denouement, you aren’t sure whether you are witnessing an investigative family chronicle or an act of revenge.
This deceptively artless, journal-style film has no need for any carefully sculpted twists; rather, it’s the sheer unpredictable perversity of human nature that takes the breath away at key points in Fassaert’s unsettling, perhaps unsolvable, inquiry.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Crust
Tom gradually chips away at the preening facade to seemingly unmask a complex woman whose self-image was largely shaped by her appearance-obsessed father. However, the deeper he digs, the more elusive his subject becomes.
Throughout A Family Affair, time is continually collapsed to the point where events separated by many years bleed into one another.
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