Family Life

When a 25-year-old daughter moves back in with her aging parents, the household looks perfectly ordinary from the outside. Swedish filmmaker Anna-Karin Örander, who wrote, directed and produced the short and also plays the daughter, looks past that surface to follow each member of the family into private territory: the erotic dreams they keep to themselves, their earnest attempts to hold together as a family, and their constant worry about staying healthy. Serenade Stormfalk and Ingvar Örner play the mother and father. Running about twenty minutes and made in Swedish, Family Life is a frank, intimate drama that finds both tenderness and unease in the distance between the lives people share and the ones they live inside their own heads. It is a not-so-straight portrait of a seemingly straight family.