Great Photo, Lovely Life

Amanda Mustard and Rachel Beth Anderson's 2023 documentary concerns what happened inside Mustard's own family. Working as a photojournalist, Mustard knows that her grandfather sexually abused family members and patients over decades, and she turns the camera on him. The hardest part is the face-to-face conversations with the grandfather. He moves between denial and admission while Mustard keeps asking. Those passages were debated ethically, with questions raised about a documentary giving a perpetrator space to speak on screen. The real subject is silence across generations: why the family knew and did not speak, who was protecting whom, and where the mother stood. Mustard does not leave her own reactions off the record either. Who it's for: those able to watch personal investigative documentary. Who it's not for: viewers who need to avoid accounts of sexual abuse; the documentary relays them in detail and directly.