Must Read After My Death

Morgan Dews's grandmother Allis died in 2001. She left behind an envelope with the words must read after my death on it. Along with the envelope came fifty hours of audio, more than two hundred home movies and three hundred pages of transcripts. The family had known nothing about any of it. The recordings were the record of a marriage and of where a woman inside that marriage slowly ended up. The documentary is built entirely from that material; there is not a single outside interview, not a single expert. The husband, away travelling constantly for work, and the woman at home left each other spoken messages, and those recordings grow steadily darker over the years. What comes out is the life of a housewife in America in the fifties and sixties, how psychiatric institutions looked at a family, and how much families of the period kept hidden. Morgan Dews directed it.