The private preserve of family life, a world of secrets and closed doors, of guarded relationships and unattractive truths is blown wide open in Andrew Jarecki′s documentary Capturing the Friedmans. A complex, ambivalent and absolutely engrossing video portrait, it introduces a seemingly typical upper-middle-class Jewish family whose world is transformed when the father and his youngest son are arrested for shocking and horrible crimes. Caught up in the hysteria of their local community in rural New York State, the family undergoes a media onslaught. But they shot the most interesting footage themselves, meaning that this film constantly changes perspective, defying all expectations and keeping the audience′s perceptions continually in a state of flux. Probing, not just into the life of a family, but into a community, a legal system, and an era, Capturing the Friedmans is an amazing revelation because it does exactly what the title promises: capturing a family on film.