Thirty years ago, when he was 10 years old, the director of this movie, Chico Colvard, accidentally shot his sister in the leg. The wound his sister sustained was not serious and would eventually heal, the event, however, killed his family. Incest is the subject of Family Affair, incest and its insidious confusion of heart and mind. Thirty years on, his documentary attempts to understand not only what happened to his three sisters at the hands of their (his) father, but to understand how and why these women, now adults, have come to ‘love' the man who sexually abused them as children. Empty is the emotional end point for all but the most enlightened that dare go here, thus the film's audiences will more likely find it on DVD or a public broadcast format. Great as it is, this is not a ticket buying kind of movie.

Chico Colvard is the son of a German-Jewish mother and African-American father. He and his sisters were Army brats principally raised in the segregated south of the late '60s and '70s. The events that lead to Chico shooting his little sister are covered in the film in detail. In any other movie they would be fodder for all sorts of considerations about society, guns and media; here, frankly, those topics are almost irrelevant. Suffice it to say, Chico shot his sister in the leg. Because she was a child and it was a dramatic event, his sister thought that she was going to die. Then Chico's eldest unburdened her juvenile conscious of the guilt she'd been carrying for years and told him what her father had been doing to her, and so their family came undone.

Ostracized, their mother left and the children were farmed out to family members and foster homes, including their father's sister, who was fiercely protective of her brother. As the family splintered and divided around these events, and years turned into decades, Chico Colvard went on to a successful career as a University professor while his sisters remained mired in the milieu of their undoing. Their father only served about a year in prison for molesting his 3 daughters and has always occupied some part of their tragic lives. In some great irony the part of the family that remained intact is the part that has juxtaposed the victims and their victimizer everyday for the last 30 years.

Colvard's film poses the question: Why?

Family Affair lives in a category of film along with the award-winning documentary Capturing The Friedmans and should resonate with audiences in the same manner. The emptiness one feels after experiencing (even through the second hand emotions offered by cinema) the deeply tragic ravages of body, mind and spirit revealed in this most personal of films is nearly more than one can bear. Yet one knows that the subjects of this documentary, principally 3 little girls who are now women, bear it everyday.

Distributor: OWN The Oprah Winfrey Network
Director: Chico Colvard
Producers: Liz Garbus and Chico Colvard
Genre: Documentary
Rating: Unrated
Running time: 80 min
Release date: July 30 LA, August 13 NY