Silence Is a Falling Body (2017)

I wish Silence Is a Falling Body were better. It’s a home-video movie about the filmmaker’s father and his life as a gay man before he married the filmmaker's mother, but the director doesn’t have quite enough footage to fill out her exploration of her father’s life. To make matters more complex, she avoids two pieces of the narrative puzzle that would have made the film more intriguing and compelling: she doesn’t interview her mother and she doesn’t analyze her own gaze at all critically. What does she want to find looking at these images, sifting through these stories? Comedi never actually asks that question in the film. And that’s a let-down.