AllMovie

Filmmaker Don Diego Ramirez directs and narrates this deeply intimate documentary detailing a intensely turbulent three-year period in which his family was forced to contend with a terminal illness, a brutal murder, and the unexpectedly difficult birth of the director's firstborn child. In early May of 2004, Ramirez's elderly grandmother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. As the grandmother's health rapidly deteriorates at the same time that the director's wife prepares to give birth, the never-ending cycle of life is vividly detailed through the family's emotional reaction to the events on each side of the spectrum. Shortly after the death of Ramirez's grandmother, the family is devastated to learn that the grieving husband of the recently deceased has become the victim of a vicious homicide. When the filmmaker's youngest sister and her boyfriend are singled out as the prime suspects in the crime, emotions quickly come to a head. Through it all, unguarded interviews with the family members and home-movie footage from happier times highlight the means by which prejudice, poverty, and drug addiction can tear a typical rural American family apart at the seams.