In Halving the Bones, filmmaker Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury attests to loving to poke around in the past and to imagine the future. Her mother, however, prefers to live in the present, which is one reason Lounsbury has been hesitant to give her a tin holding some of her grandmother's bones. They have been the skeleton in Ruth's closet for five years, ever since she attended her grandmother's funeral in Japan in her mother's stead. It is time, she decides, to pay her mother a visit. Using home movies, personal musings, propaganda footage, and interviews with her mother, Lounsbury contemplates the oft-repeated family stories of her grandmother's picture-bride marriage to an artist living in Hawaii and the unusual circumstances of her mother's birth, as well as her own childhood as a "half" in a Connecticut suburb. Although Lounsbury has clearly inherited her grandfather's interest in photography, her grandmother's skill at tinting photographs is also wittily evident in her imaginings of the past. In Japanese her name Ruth means "not at home, absent," a state shared by the three women whose stories are beautifully presented in Halving the Bones.-Kathy Geritz