America ReFramed

Unbroken Glass

By Dinesh Das Sabu

When he was six, filmmaker Dinesh Sabu became an orphan when his father died of cancer and his mother committed suicide. Two decades later, worried that he had so few memories of his parents, he turns a camera on his four older brothers and sisters, trying to understand their parent’s lives and tragic deaths.

Not everyone in the family is prepared to reopen these wounds. The older children raised the younger ones, depending only on each other and also making a family pact: "We kept our past a secret from everyone around us, and by not talking about it, kept it a secret from ourselves.”

To break that secret, Sabu makes a trip to India, a country he barely knows, attending a family wedding and visiting his grandmother's village. It's a journey that forces him to think about the schizophrenia that runs in his family. The trip unlocks memories, some of them deeply painful, and raises new questions about love, anger, mental illness, and forgiveness.