Kingdom of Us

The Shanks family lost their father to suicide. What was left was Vikie, the mother, and seven children, along with a large absence and a heavy debt. Years later the documentary sits down with the family and looks back: how the children remember that day, who saw what, who understood what, who spent years asking what. The same event stands in seven separate memories in seven separate forms. Lucy Cohen's film uses home video from the family archive alongside the conversations of the present; the footage the father shot himself is the hardest part of it. The telling does not try to find a cause and does not look for somebody to blame. Several members of the family being autistic makes the different ways each of them processes the loss additionally visible. The film is about how grief splits a family apart and puts it back together.