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I’m not sure where you spent this past weekend but I’ve just returned from an invigorating trip to the future. That’s right. The bad news? Still no flying cars. The good news? Independent film is alive and well though most of the new releases don’t open at your local cineplex. They open on your computer.

Recently an e-mail caught my eye. It was from a former Miramax distribution head by the name of Mark Lipsky and its subject line read “R.I.P. Independent Film.” “Unless a film is overstuffed with movie stars or the director is internationally renowned or the distributor is backed by tens of millions in marketing dollars or the film has won the Palme D’or at Cannes,” Mr. Lipsky lamented, an independent production stands little chance of finding an audience any longer.

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Shortly after 89-year-old grandmother Allis' death in 2001, filmmaker Morgan Dews came upon a staggering archive of audio diaries, transcripts and dictaphone letters that she and the rest of her family had kept throughout the 1960s. Listening to them revealed a piece of his grandmother's life that he had never been made privy of. Integrating these eye-opening tapes with a collage of typically upbeat photographs and home movies, Dews weaves together a chilling, devastating portrait of a family whose happy-go-lucky facade masks six lives in a state of unbearable turmoil and decay. "Must Read After My Death" reminds of 2008's "Revolutionary Road" in its themes of marital strife and the struggle against conformity in a conformist era, but its emotions, all of them painfully real, run far, far deeper than anything found in that Hollywood-produced melodrama.

Allis begins her recordings after her family's move to the idyllic suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut. Left alone to care for their house and children Anne, Chuck, Bruce and Douglas while husband Charley's work takes him to Australia for four months out of the year, Allis makes it clear from the start that she was not made to be a submissive homemaker. The life she once knew vanished before her eyes—she, like Charley, was married once before, and, unlike Charley, had attended college—Allis is left trapped in a situation she does not know how to get out of. She loves her kids, to be sure, and struggles to stay in contact with Charley via dictaphone whenever he is gone, but none of it seems to ever be enough for a man who drinks too much and expects those around him to bow to his whims. Gradually, the viewer learns that their marriage is an open one; Charley makes no bones about romancing women overseas, and Allis, at least once, goes on a trip to New York City with a male suitor. Conversations heard between them are so nonchalant on the matter that one hardly believes it at first.

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If someone had a recording of the dissolution of a seemingly perfect family, would you listen? What would you learn from it? You can test your answer to these questions with the riveting “Must Read After My Death,” a fly-on-the-wall documentary using only silent home movies and audio recordings of a family in steep, depressing decline.

Filmmaker Morgan Dews was always close to his grandmother Allis, but he had no idea about the dark past that barely preceded his existence. In the ’60s, Allis lived a dark life with husband Charley and kids Anne, Chuck, Douglas, and Bruce. And they recorded all of it on a Dictaphone that they used as a friend, game, confessor, and shrink.

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Good things can always be salvaged from even the worst of circumstances, and that has seldom been more true than in the case of documentarian Morgan Dews. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1968 after his mother had run away from a troubled family situation to get married. He grew up oblivious to the difficult circumstances from which his mother had escaped, and then attended Rutgers University, where he studied History, graduating in 1990. Subsequently, he decamped to Spain where he became active in numerous and wide-ranging creative pursuits: he founded the arts magazine Snack and the performance space The Banana Factory, was a member of the electronica band Easy (for whom he also directed music videos), and worked as a commercial director. In addition, he also acted, wrote poetry, journalism and short stories, and created installations, for which he won the Moebius Interactive Art Prize. In 2005, after Dews moved back to the U.S., his short film Elke's Visit premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

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Who owns this devastating documentary portrait of domestic misery in early-1960s suburban America? Charley, the angry, tidiness-obsessed father whose careless updates about his multiple infidelities to his wife, Allis, sound less like confessions than salt rubbed carefully into the wounds of her alleged insufficiencies? Allis, who is heard confiding her escalating unhappiness into a crackly Dictaphone originally purchased to narrow the gulf between her and her husband, whose work took him away from home for long stretches? The shrink, who bullied and tranquilized her into taking the blame for her husband's peccadilloes and her children's difficulties?

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Subtly rebuking Tolstoy’s assertion that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Morgan Dews’s austere, wrenching found-material doc pivots on bitter verbal (and occasionally physical) sparring that would likely be familiar to any American who grew up at the ragged end of the Eisenhower dream. Using a staggeringly thorough collection of audio recordings, home movies and photographs left behind by his maternal grandmother (most of which were inaccessible until after her death in 2001), the filmmaker pieces together a fascinating chronicle of a 1960s nuclear family coming apart at the seams, abetted by psychotherapeutic fads, institutionalized sexism and the looming countercultural A-bomb.

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If ever there were an argument for the urgency of preserving and studying home movies and record-machine greetings, it must lie in a newly opening documentary piece called Must Read after My Death, from filmmaker Morgan Dews.

The film might even be revolutionary, in one way or another. As unusual as its household-diary subject matter is its method of distribution — a theatrical opening on Feb. 20 in New York, coinciding with an Internet debut available to anyone with a broadband account.

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More bitter than sweet, director Morgan Dews' painstaking documentary about his grandmother Allis' troubled married life raising four children in Hartford, Connecticut--that she documented with endless Dictaphone recordings, home movies, and photos--is as much a time capsule of the Eastern Seaboard's '50s and '60s era fascination with psychiatrists and questioning of social constraints as it is about a failed attempt at carrying on an open marriage. Dews discovered the materials, labeled by Allis with the film's title, after her death in 2001 and set about learning the intimate details of Allis' unconventional marriage to a temperamental insurance executive named Charley, of whom she never spoke after his death. Allis and Charley were both married to other people when they met, and their mutual adultery set the stage for a disconnected union maintained via recordings that the couple would send back and forth while Charley traveled abroad on business and pleasure.

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That tumult and unhappiness often lurk behind cheery suburban facades is a well-worn cliché, resurrected every few years by Hollywood in a manner that implies revelation. Though already deducible to anyone over the age of ten, American Beauty and its myriad ilk (including this past year’s Revolutionary Road) have now definitively established that – to use a relevant hackneyed saying – books cannot be judged by their covers, since outward appearances mainly reveal what a given subject wishes to project about itself. Yet if this truism is no longer an epiphany capable of shattering one’s sheltered worldview, it nonetheless can, when conveyed on a micro rather than macro scale, be quietly devastating, as evidenced by Morgan Dews’ Must Read After My Death. Revolutionary in neither form nor content, Dews’ documentary is – in a manner similar to Capturing the Friedmans and last year’s Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father – a non-fiction archival-elements collage, one that wields its trove of home movies, audio recordings, and still photographs to investigate the past, confess sins, and intimately, poetically evoke the banal tragedies of one family’s 1960s Hartford, CT life.

The first words heard in Must Read After My Death are those of Allis: “I am not a housewife.” It’s a statement of desperate defiance, as Allis is most surely a homemaker, married to insurance salesman Charlie, who drinks, has low self-esteem, and a mania about his domicile’s cleanliness. Allis, college-educated, married once before and fluent in four languages, gave up professional aspirations because she wanted to bear Charlie’s children. This she did – four in all, each one traumatically affected by their parents’ constant, vicious fighting, which drove more than one into therapy and which was brought on at least in part through their joint, troublesome decision (revealed obliquely by director Dews through snippets of Charlie and Allis’ Dictaphone recordings to each other) to have an open marriage. This thorny history is conveyed via a collection of 8mm films, transcripts, and audio tapes made by Allis, Charlie and their children which Dews first came upon after Allis’ 2001 death, and which he affectingly assembles into a haunting portrait of white-picket-fence familial disintegration. Echoes from an earlier age, his speakers’ tormented voices and images’ flickering appearance lend empathetic consideration to a tale of personal and parental hopes and failings, the director’s depiction given added resonance by nimble editorial overlapping and juxtapositions that evoke the depth of Allis and Charlie’s fury, resentment, doubt and self-loathing.

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When Morgan Dews’ grandmother Allis died in 2001at the age of 89, over the years of her marriage, she compiled a chronicle of her family in crisis. She recorded 50 hours of audio recordings, 201 home movies, and over 300 pages of personal documents as a sad commentary of her fractured marriage to an Insurance executive.

Allis’ husband Charley would spend 8 months a year in Australia on company business. There he openly engaged in extramarital affairs and sent Allis 8 mm movies of his dancing and carousing with other women. In his selfish mind, Charley thought that Allis would share his libertine views on infidelity. He said he loved her but he loved other women as well. Not surprisingly, Allis could not reconcile Charley’s absurd rationalization with her jealously and emotional turmoil.

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