Tarnation
Filmmaker Jonathan Caouette assembles decades of home footage to tell the story of his life and his mother's psychiatric illness and institutionalisation.
Sundance Film Festival, 2004 selection, and Cannes Directors' Fortnight
Working from home movies, answering-machine tapes, snapshots, and video diaries recorded across his life, Jonathan Caouette builds an account of his childhood in Texas, his time in foster care, and his relationship with his mother Renee, whose mental illness and repeated hospitalisations, including damaging treatment, shadow the whole family. The result is an intimate first-person collage of memory and survival.
The film is a son's reckoning with maternal mental illness, institutional harm, and the trauma passed down a family line, made from the very materials of a life. It gives a therapist a rare view of how a child metabolises a parent's breakdown over time. It was selected at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004 and screened in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes.
Details
- 2004
- United States
- English
- Documentary