“The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.”
― Philip Roth, ‘American Pastoral’

We can all go back to a moment in our childhood or young adult life when we realized the world could be a difficult and ugly place. Some of us discovered it when we were let down by our first love, or when a parent showed his true colors by raising his or her hands to us or maybe when a friend betrayed us and our secret.

For Sasha Joseph Neulinger that moment came early on and painfully strong.

In his documentary ‘Rewind’ Neulinger goes back to his childhood, through his father’s relentless hours of filming home videos and allows the audience, you and me, to uncover his family’s darkest secret.

The resulting film is a masterpiece of sensibility and a visual class in how to deal with a traumatic subject using a light hand, thus allowing the audience to feel like a part of the narrative along with its subjects. It’s a skillful approach, one not found frequently in such personal, intimate work in film, because often the narrator, in this case also one of the victims of this horrible circle of abuse, gets in his or her own way. Neulinger is ever present, his voice-over narration calm and to the point, yet I almost felt like he was an invisible presence throughout. It’s only in the ending shot that I realized how masterful a technique this young filmmaker possessed!

While we sit in self isolation because of this virus, working through all our personal trauma in different ways and employing individual techniques, this film becomes a must-watch for anyone who has ever been a child. I personally come from a large family on my mom’s side and yet she managed to always protect me from them for much of my life. “Remember where people’s hands have been,” she taught me as a three-year old child, to avoid having me shake hands with strangers. “Even if it’s someone your dad and I know, you’ve seen us say hello to them, they have been to our house — if they come to pick you up at school and claim your parents sent them, don’t go. Say, ‘no thank you, I’ll wait for my mom’ and walk away from them.” This was mom’s way of saying, don’t trust anyone — because danger doesn’t come from strangers necessarily, it could be someone you know.

And in the case of Neulinger it was many people he knew, and closely. It’s not “stranger danger,” it’s the family that you have to watch out for in this tale. And what a dark tale it is.

As Neulinger attempts to “put the puzzle back together to get my life back,” as he proclaims at the start of his haunting documentary, we along with him uncover secret after secret that make his kind demeanor and sunny disposition an act of courage. This child whose attitude suddenly took a turn for the worse in his early years, was brought back from the abyss by what Neulinger himself says was “ the support of a loving mother, a fearless detective, a determined prosecutor, and an esteemed child psychologist.” And the resulting film is a hard watch but a necessary work of art, full of questions and answers about life within a family nucleus.

I often wondered how peace in the world can ever be achieved when abuse is so easily passed down through families’ generations. What hope do we have to ever come out of that tunnel? And yet there are individuals like Neulinger, and someone very very close to me who say “Enough! The buck stops here. I will not continue this lineage of pain.” It is those individuals who need to be called the heroes of our days, the fighters on the side of good and the achievers of that nearly impossible dream — peace.

‘Rewind’ begins streaming on May 8th thru FilmRise and you can find all info on this website, where you can also find out how to download it on-demand. On PBS starting May 11th you may watch it as part of the Independent Lens series for free.

Initially slated to open in theaters starting on March 27th, the film’s release was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak. Neulinger addressed the issue beautifully by saying "in this time of uncertainty we are being challenged to dig deep and harness the power of our own internal light. Our resiliency is being tested, and now more than ever in the wake of COVID-19, it is important to remember just how much human beings are capable of overcoming. I’m honored to have the opportunity to share REWIND at this pivotal time.” 

While narrative features struggle to get made in this new dystopian environment, documentaries are going strong. Perhaps because we need to believe. We now, more than ever, need to find our old reality, the simple complicated embrace of real life in what we watch, hear and read.