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A drunk, Tomcatting father, an unfulfilled, restless mother and four children who pay the price.The family in filmmaker Morgan Dews’ Must Read After My Death could have been just another unhappy family locked away inside their Hartford, Conn. colonial. Except that Dews’ grandmother Allis channeled her frustration and abject happiness into the kind of obsessive documentation that would have done Richard Nixon proud.

Some families bequeath photo albums to the next generation, but Allis, who died in 2001 and was the architect of her family’s history throughout the 1950s and ’60s, bequeathed hours and hours of voice recordings and hundreds of 8mm home movies to her grandson Morgan Dews. He clearly saw the psychological mother lode locked inside this archeology of family. And so he did what any 21st-century documentarian would: He made a family memoir.

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