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Have you ever thought about the waste disposal nightmare that results from the distribution of motion pictures? For starters…

How about enough celluloid to stretch across 33,453,000 football fields every year?

In this new “Inconvenient Truth” era, we seem to be bombarded with images of melting glaciers and predictions of imminent environmental doom. It has become rather impossible not to consider alternatives to our current strains on Mother Nature.

Here’s where Gigantic Digital diverges from the status quo. The Gigantic Digital “moviegoing” experience is inherently green-conscious. Since it enables screening from home, it requires no transportation to reach a bricks-and-mortar cinema. Ticket transactions, all via internet and email, are completely paperless. Any food or drinks consumed during a Gigantic Digital screening can be enjoyed using washable dinnerware or recyclable paperware- on the moviegoer’s own terms! Any heat or air conditioning would likely be present regardless of whether or not someone was screening a film so no significant toll increase on the power grid. From a behind-the-scenes industry perspective, a digital film also eliminates the hours and wattage that go into creating 35 mm film prints for each exhibiting theater not to mention the planes, trains and buses necessary to transport those prints across the country.

While we are certainly not advocating for the extinction of traditional movie theaters, alternative models like Gigantic Digital can help minimize the movie industry’s carbon footprint.

Though Kermit the Frog once said, “It’s not easy being green,” we at Gigantic Digital would like to think that it’s never been simpler… or more entertaining.

There is a moment in everyone's life where we realize the truth of our family.

Sometimes, this truth is devastating. It may be borne out of years of crossed communications, broken relationships, life failures and shattered dreams.

Just as often, however, this truth is a truth worth celebrating. We discover it when we are ready to embrace a different reality, a perception perhaps very different than that which we've long accepted. We may, in fact, discover love where we long recognized only dysfunction.

Then, on occasion, we are gifted with a very different truth about family. It is neither good nor bad, a truth neither to be grieved not celebrated. Sometimes, we learn, family simply is.

The beauty of "Must Read After My Death," a documentary founded upon the long hidden truths of the real life family of filmmaker Morgan Dews, is that these truths are not grieved nor celebrated, dramatized nor stylized. Utilizing an extensive collection of dictaphone tapes, home videos and photographs that he acquired after the death of his grandmother, Allis, Dews has crafted a searingly honest and intimate portrait of a family, his family, that is simultaneously mesmerizing, heartbreaking and yet strangely, eerily, even a bit comfortably familiar.

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Morgan Dews’ documentary “Must Read After My Death” is so unique that I can't compare it to anything else I've seen. The subject matter in and of itself is far from unique; it’s essentially a portrait of a troubled marriage and a family on the verge of emotional collapse. Compelling and heart wrenching, but hardly unheard of. The way the film is edited, however, is another matter entirely; Dews constructs a narration track from a comprehensive series of Dictaphone letters, phonograph messages, and reel-to-reel diaries, most recorded by his grandmother, Allis, throughout the 1960s. There are no interviews with family members, friends, or associates, nor are there instances of people in the present day looking back on their lives; in spite of the fact that the audio recordings are spliced together, Allis is essentially allowed to tell her own story, and she does so in the moment.

The film begins with phonograph messages, which were recorded as a way for Allis and her husband, Charley, to communicate during his extended business trips to Australia. What they say to each other is surprisingly candid, more so, I suspect, than many married couples could tolerate. Both are unflinchingly honest about their extramarital affairs; “You probably don’t really quite agree with my philosophy on love and sex,” Charley says early on, not seeming to care one way or the other about how his wife feels. Allis, meanwhile, is stuck in her Hartford, Connecticut home with four children. She loves them, certainly, but by her own admission, she was never the domestic type. It makes you wonder, then, why she wanted to get married and have children in the first place.

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'Fascinating! Wacko!" is how Jean-Pierre Rehm, general delegate of the Marseille International Documentary Festival, described Morgan Dews's "Must Read After My Death," the winner of the International Competition's Grand Prix. This first film is also the first American film to be awarded the prize since Frederick Wiseman's "Public Housing" won in 1998.

Marseille is a festival that goes for gutsy gestures, a place for the iconoclastic. This year, a retrospective on the radical American filmmaker Robert Kramer showed his kind of personal documentary, from the way he captured post-Vietnam America in "Milestones" to "Our Nazi," shot on video. Today, many filmmakers find their incendiary matter at the core of family life.

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If Tolstoy had lived in our time, he might have expanded on his famed quote from Anna Karenina to note that happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way ... and that's demonstrated through their documentary. Following in the archival-confessional mold of such documentaries as Tarnation and Capturing the Friedmans, filmmaker Morgan Dews has created Must Read After My Death -- or, rather, assembled it, from decades of photographs and home movies and Dictaphone recordings found in his grandmother's home after her passing. Dews doesn't interject himself into this material; at the same time, he's made the decisions that shape it -- the inclusions, the deletions, the things we linger on, the things elided over.

Must Read After My Death is, first and foremost, a portrait of the marriage between Allis and Charlie. Allis is a mother and home maker, but the need to be perfect chances at her, chokes her; Charley travels for work, a charmer and hearty man's man whose easy charm makes it entirely too easy to ignore his family. Hoping to make Charley's distance more tolerable -- or, at least, more entertaining -- the family purchased a Dictaphone, and sent audio recordings back and forth. These recordings -- made in quiet contemplation or moments of anger, some heavy with things unsaid, some thick with the sounds of rage and desperation -- are the aching heart and wounded soul of the film.

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Morgan Dews' documentary "Must Read After My Death" is as plainly beautiful and unsparing in its intimacy as it is painfully tragic and compelling. All of the undiluted behaviors of human beings are paraded with such a dignified nakedness. Dirty laundry is aired out to dry and the stench of much of it is suffocating. The documentary is a compilation of hundreds of hours of home videos and hundreds of letters by Allis (last name not revealed) about her marriage to Charley, an adulterer who for many months at a time is in Australia doing business and dancing the months away with a variety of women whom he forges intimacies with. It just so happens that Allis, who lives in a big house in Connecticut also has her and Charley's four children (Bruce, Anne, Doug and Chuck) to take care of. " . . . I'm not a person to sit around and sew and decorate and paint and do things like that. I am not a housewife. I have never been a housewife", words from Allis that begin the documentary, which follows her vivid recordings from 1961 right through to the 1990's.

We learn much more than we hope to about the trials and turmoil of what is clearly a wretched family life for all involved, especially Allis. Sometimes shrill, other times sobering but most times rarely tender or saccharine-feeling as its distant feature film cousin "Revolutionary Road", "Must Read" is always electric viewing if not an enjoyable experience. Mr. Dews pares down the hundreds of hours of recordings into a slender 76 minutes. Many of the recordings hadn't been officially or fully disclosed to Allis's family members until just after Allis's death in 2001. The tapes detail an eldest child who runs away, a developmentally-disabled son, an angry and vengeful older son, and a mother who just wants to fly the coup for ten minutes of freedom. As we watch we feel that we ought not be witnesses -- perhaps the voyeuristic intrusion on the family's personal affairs is a little too much for most, but we are forced to be introspective about the nature and fragility of our own family household structure. "Must Read", which opened today in New York City at the Quad Cinema and nationwide in the U.S. via Gigantic Digital, online at (www.giganticdigital.com), opens next Friday in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Sunset 5.

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Spellbinding, voyeuristic and frequently disturbing, Morgan Dews' documentary is almost entirely composed of archival material left behind by his grandmother Allis after her death. The mosaic that emerges is not one of the stereotypical white suburban family of 50's and 60's America. Instead it's an indictment of our society's whitewashed memories of that time. Following Allis's lead the family dedicated itself to documenting itself, using dictaphone "letters," reel-to-reel tape recordings (of monologues and family meetings), home movies and snapshots.

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The proper definition of “indie cinema” has been the buzz debate at The Times BFI 52nd London Film Festival. Once upon a time these two noble words heralded an experimental director in charge of his destiny. Now the phrase is Hollywood shorthand for a $10 million to $20 million studio drama with an Oscar-nominated performance and a serious box-office campaign.

Last week I pitched up at the NFT for a seminar called Indiewood is Dead . . . Long Live the New, True Indies, featuring five young American film-makers. It was almost impossible not to cheer. American indie directors still lead the way. They have an innate ability to pick up a camera as naturally as we would a book. This generation of thirtysomethings has absolutely no cash, but it does have a militant desire to make the next great film, come hell or high water.

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Fans of the fascinating documentary "Capturing the Friedmans" might want to take a gander at "Must Read After My Death," which is in competition at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Like that earlier film, this one incorporates a wealth of home movies and audio tapes to document the behavior of a dysfunctional family over a period of years. The secrets revealed here are not quite as shocking as the hints of child molestation captured in "Friedmans." Still, this is an equally intriguing and unsettling look at the turmoil hidden behind the white picket fences of suburbia.

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After his grandmother died in 2001, filmmaker Morgan Dews discovered an old treasure trove of home movies and audio tapes she made with her husband, documenting their shockingly dysfunctional relationship. Instead of burying the family secret, he artfully assembled it all into an absorbing and deeply moving film, called "Must Read After My Death." Strong-willed Allis and her boozy, philandering husband Charley narrate the tragic "Must Read After My Death," as they confess everything into their tape recorder during the 1950s and 60s. The enthralling "Must Read After My Death" is a raw, riveting and brutally honest documentary film.

JEFF CRAIG, SIXTY SECOND PREVIEW