All in the Family: A Review of the New York and Montreal Film Festivals 2001

It was a fine resolution. Thematics be damned, I thought. This year, my article on the Montreal and New York Festivals would eschew such academic armature and venture forth into non-linear, non-narrative experimentation. Of course, that was before I realised that a good 75 per cent of all the films I had seen were about the same thing – family. Okay, it's a biggie, hard to miss; lots of the films were, are, and will be about families. That's no reason to abandon a fine modernist abstract palette in favour of shopworn auteurist figurations. But I was curious. Why family? How family? What family? Soon the notion of family wound itself around all the films I'd seen, until I had no choice.