Director Chico Colvard's film Family Affair documents his family's attempts to come to terms with his abusive father. The film was selected for this year's Sundance Film Festival and will also screen in Wasserman Cinematheque on Monday as part of the Sundeis Film Festival.JustArts: How did you decide to pursue this topic?

Chico Colvard: I always thought that it was possible, but it wasn't until my first year out of law school that I began pursuing this project before I knew I was actually pursuing a project. I really was setting up an interview by being a lawyer with a camera and taking an anthropological perspective. I could use this device, this medium, to capture what I was witnessing-my sisters coming together and almost immediately falling back into these roles of little girls and blaming each other for things that were happening to them when they were five and 10 years old. I thought that if somehow I could capture it in a way that would allow them to objectively see what I was witnessing, then it would have a healing effect and it would bring all of us closer together and on a path towards recovery.

JA: At what point did you see there was potential for a film, and when did you decide to turn it into the film that it is today?

CC: It's such a gradual process; we are talking about the course of eight years. In some ways, it is easy to imagine that because the film is getting some attention and now has a life out there in the world that it was sort of inevitable and it was all by design. But it really is a very organic process, and taking it from the original stages and not planning to make a film to having it premiere at Sundance and acquired by Oprah is quite a journey. It's one edit at a time, one adviser at a time, one conversation at a time, one contract being negotiated at a time. It's all of those things, and it's about embracing the ambiguities and embracing the questions that [I] don't really have answers to. Until Sundance came along, I wasn't quite sure if this film was going to have a life out there in the world. I can now say that I can call myself a filmmaker.

JA: What was it like for you to revisit these difficult moments from both a personal level and as a filmmaker?

CC: A lot of parts of it are really terrifying, but there is a lot of humor in the film. I learned along the way that humor really is a key component of what constitutes survival and resilience. There definitely were some good times getting together with my sisters and hanging out, and I tried to capture that, but there were some real frightening moments as well: when I found myself hiding behind the camera, using it as a buffer between me and having to deal head-on with some really scary issues. Part of it was I initially kept thinking that I was afraid of the response, the reaction that I might get for asking a question or when certain memories would unfold, but in time I realized that it was more about asking the questions than whether my mother would open the door or my father lashing out, and that took some courage but was also really liberating.

JA: What message that your film incorporates do you hope to impart onto the Brandeis community?

CC: Well, the key message of the film has to do with ... the issue of betrayal. This is a story about being betrayed by parents, the person that we as children bestow so much trust in, faith in, and look to for guidance to keep them safe. When they breach that trust it's the ultimate betrayal. These people now find themselves as students and/or adults complacent in some degree, shielding and cloaking this person in a veil of normalcy when there is nothing normal about the relationship at all and they feel like they are stuck in this charade. This film, at a minimum, gives people permission to be courageous and talk about their own issues and family crises.