Alina Marazzi's mother died in 1972, when she was just seven years old. Drawing on her mother's journals and letters and her grandfather's stunning home movies from the twenties until the seventies, Marazzi lovingly explores the life of the mother she barely knew. Even as a teenager, Luisa Marazzi Hoepli, the daughter of an affluent Italian publishing family, was an insightful chronicler of her inner life. Later, after happily marrying and having three children, she suffered from depression, and her letters to her husband and sister confide her efforts to understand herself and her parents' limitations, and tell of her criticisms of the treatment she receives. In this lyrical and haunting work, cinema is revealed as the conscientious guardian of a lifetime.