The Watershed (2004) User Reviews

Powerfully Moving Family Drama!

[djdavig · 8/10 · 21 April 2004]

I saw The Watershed at the Arizona Film Festival in Tuscon last weekend and was very moved by it. A multi-year effort by a husband and wife team to chronicle the disintegration of her middle-class childhood family in the 1970's due to alcoholism and other obvious pyschological forces. Drawn from a plethora of old home movies and up close interviews with her mother, father, aunt, uncle, and six siblings this docu-drama seeks to find the truth behind the what and why of her parents break-up and the tragic aftermath. Before the rift, the seven kids were considered to be perfect children, all dressed exactly alike. As adults, the Trunks again come across as charming, intelligent, and well adjusted people who have jointly survived a tragic childhood and emerged in one piece at various levels of enlightenment as expected. The Aunt and Uncle who took them all in for a year, and then did not want to give them up, were particularly inspiring. My favorite moment...when the uncle, who had three kids of his own, and ten altogether with the Trunks, says something to the effect of "really, it was no trouble at all once we figured out a system, they were great kids", then covers his face with his hands and weeps thirty years after the fact. Mind you, he had no blood relation to them. Another, when one sister explains that she has moved on and forgiven both of her parents, that she owns her own life now, and then, when the camera is thought to stop rolling, says "Wow!!" smiles and then breaks down. It was like she had really just accepted it, finally, RIGHT THERE. My favorite image at the end was a picture of the mother, smiling broadly, surrounded by her well-dressed brood, a picture of courage, resilience, and love. Reminded me so much of my own mother. Pure therapy. Brilliant work!! I GAVE IT AN 8/10. Thank you Mary Trunk and Paul Sanchez.

Just great

[preppy-3 · 10/10 · 22 June 2004]

Powerful documentary. It's the story about a family with 7 children in the 1970s. They seem to be the model family--everybody loves them and they seem very happy. They they move from Florida to California for the father to get a new job. He looses the job and leaves his family telling his wife he never loved her. The wife basically becomes an alcoholic and spends all her days in bed drinking herself to sleep. The 7 children are left to fend for themselves. They do manage and it's just incredible how.

The movie was done by one of the daughters and she interviews her father, mother and all her brothers and sisters. What emerges is a moving portrait of a bunch of children who all manage by themselves and keep together as a family no matter what.

By turns this is funny, horrifying, moving and thoroughly engrossing. Just a great movie all around. I give it a 10!