Sightlines · a viewing thread

Families Made and Unmade

A run of intimate domestic portraits — watch these together and feel marriages dissolve, mothers improvise, and love keep redrawing the shape of a family across sixty years.

Anchored by broadly-loved canon (Kramer vs. Kramer) and film-school touchstones (Varda, Desert Hearts) with a fresh French deep-cut, this is a warm, mostly accessible run that rewards attention more than it demands endurance.

• Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
• 20th Century Women (2016)
• Happiness (1965)
• Desert Hearts (1985)
• Love Letters (2025)
• One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977) — The Varda deep-cut that rhymes with Happiness on your list — two women's friendship braided across twenty years of motherhood, abortion, and improvised feminist family, warm and songful where you'd expect polemic.
• Beautiful Thing (1996) — If Desert Hearts and 20th Century Women landed, this is the under-seen one to finally pull down — a South London estate heatwave where two boys fall in love and a single mother quietly redraws the family around them.
• Young Mothers (2025) — The recent film to pull down next if the improvised, redrawn motherhood of One Sings, the Other Doesn't and 20th Century Women landed — the Dardennes trailing five girls learning to mother in a Liège shelter, families breaking and being remade in the same warm, close-watched register.