This film screened 3rd June 2018. 

Albert and David Maysles justly celebrated portrait of the co-dependent mother and daughter pair, ‘Big Edie’ and ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale, cousins of Jacqueline Kennedy, is a milestone in American documentary filmmaking that has influenced a generation of directors with its elegiac tone and intimate, observational style.

By turns playful and melancholy, the film captures the eccentric pair living in squalor, surrounded by cats in a dilapidated, once-magnificent estate in the Hamptons, upstate New York. When not bickering and squabbling, they mournfully sing old show tunes and reminisce on the glory days of the past, a time of great wealth, replete with debutante balls, parties and endless champagne.

Notes by David O’Mahony