Great Photo, Lovely Life: Facing a Family's Secrets

Couldnt take my eyes off it!! I recommend this to people who haven't been sexually abused, so we can learn how very deeply it affects people's lives. Also, to sexually abused people so they can feel understood, validated...(?) At first it seems as if they support their grandpa, then it gets deeper into the whole ripple effect that he caused. He made me nauseous when he said his victims "enjoyed" it..

Excellent. What an incredibly honest family.

Really got to raw emotions, showed failure of people to confront their wrong doings, but in the end made the world a little better just by attempting to get people to talk to about those secrets.

Amanda Mustard is one to watch!

It felt exploitive and a misuse of a documentary trying to settle the filmmakers personal vendetta against their own family. This is a massively important subject that could've been handled more tactfully. Instead it ended up exploiting victims and trying to settle a score no one asked them to do publicly. This film will be very triggering for some and may indeed be quite powerful for many but the filmmaker made it feel cheap and I don't know if anyone except the filmmaker got any resolve from this.

What a difficult movie to make it through. I hate to say it but it genuinely feels like this movie was made as an opportunistic endeavor for the filmmaker. In the end, the only person really served was whoever sold this awful story to HBO. The victims weren't made whole, the family just seemed to take joy in serving up whatever punishment they felt they could serve to him. I certainly don't feel sympathy to the grandfather...we live in a hyperbolic society where if you're critical of one angle then you must be embracing the other angle and that's not what's going on. I just think the process of making this film drudged up lots of pain for everyone in the family from the victims to those who felt like victims just for being related to him. They also seemed to define themselves by his crimes so it's no wonder the pain lingered and hung over all of them. And again, I wager to say that no pain was relieved by making this documentary. It certainly didn't seem like it. Was just such an awful scene when after he died the granddaughter seemed so giddy about him dying alone and having his body donated. She wasn't even a victim so I guess it's hard to imagine feeling some kind of pleasurable rush or relief from hearing about your grandfather dying alone in a nursing home, only stopping by to get some footage of his suffering. Just sad all around, told a story about an awful human and the family who seemed to hang themselves on the cross for his sins and how they seemed to define themselves by the horrible crimes he committed. Just sad all around...no real catharsis, no real justice, no real anything but exposing a family's pain and suffering and kind of twisting the knife for whatever pain they feel they deserve for being related to him.

This documentary is not like most films surrounding sexual abuse in the sense that there is no satisfaction of true justice, transformative healing, or accountability. Unfortunately, this is a realistic depiction of what many abuse survivors' journeys look like.

The whole film felt extremely self-serving and nonproductive. Nobody was held accountable for their disgusting actions. Retraumatizing the victims for no real purpose other than allowing the photojournalist to explore herself and her family. A terribly misguided effort in filmmaking.

Hard to watch. Very well done. Telling the truth for the endless families who can't/won't

It's raw...abuse spans generations in this family. I watch and wonder how they have the strength to even approach the subject of this incalculable atrocious tragedy that has affected the Mustard family. Nobody has the right to judge the strength or weaknesses of reporting the abuse to the authorities! These are murky waters, it's like being part of a cult. Better keep this to yourself. However, we do learn that two generations later, this kind of behavior cannot be condoned anymore. Whether we have parents and grandparents that lived in a society that allowed or kept quiet about sexual abuse, the reality is that the folks who have been affected by sexual abuse through a family member, are extremely vulnerable and have, by choice, no counseling to guide them through the traumatic events that took place. I can only imagine how hard that must be for the victim mother of the film maker who became an unwilling perpetrator herself, and all because of the cultish denial she found herself in. I wish them all the best and to find the time and space to heal from this life changing experience!!!