I am a bit late in posting about it, but I had the chance to see Tara Wray’s doc at Anthology Film Archives‘ New Filmmakers Series a couple of weeks back and was really moved by her effort.

The story revolves around Tara’s relationship with her mother and their reunion in her Kansas hometown after many years apart. Their relationship is one fraught with high expectations on both sides, and as is usually the case with mothers and daughters, their expectations are rarely met.

Her mother is a woman who lives in a world all her own, and it is an alternate reality to the one that Tara and probably the majority of viewers live in. To Evie Wray, Tara and those of us like her, are wound too tightly. We bind ourselves with, dare I say, expectations, whereas Evie prefers to take life as it comes, without an eye toward the future or the past. She speaks as though she were in a perpetual dream, but when I listened closely to her and Tara trying to communicate, it was so obvious that they are living on different planes. Evie wants Tara to accept her as she is and Tara needs for her mother to come down to the earthly plane once in a while to check in, to let her know that she is safe and happy. Tara’s personality requires roots while her mother has only wings.

Of course, this is my interpretation through the lens of my own mother/daughter relationship and as was discussed on Chuck Tryon’s blog, and has often been discussed in the context of personal documentary, is it fair to assume anything about their story from seeing just a small part? Evie seems deeply disturbed by Tara’s assumption that her mother might have an undiagnosed mental health issue; even though Evie turned out to have a premonition about her life that came true, Tara still refuses to accept that her mother is a deeply sensitive woman and is continues to reel from her mother’s past erratic mood swings.

This is a film that I don’t want to go into the details about because it is in the details where the story is found. The film does a wonderful job of switching emotional directions on a subtle dime, taking us on a journey through the landscape of that aforementioned fraught mother/daughter relationship. I was identifying with each of them at different times and feeling frustration with both also.

Manhattan, Kansas is a story of nuance, emotion, turmoil, humor and life, such as it is. It reminded me of other outstanding films from this year that walked along similar lines — 51 Birch Street by Doug Block and So Much, So Fast by Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan (I’ve written about both films on the blog, so no need for more here). These three films, taken together, explore deep facets of family relationships in beautiful ways.

If you are interested, here is a link to Evie Wray’s art gallery. Pretty cool!