Like many of her written works, this explores the damage done by the abuse inflicted on Angot as an adolescent by her father.

French writer Christine Angot has written many books, but Incest (1999) is arguably the one she is most famous for. Variously defined by Angot and others as a novel but also a work of autobiographical non-fiction (some call it “autofiction”), it features a protagonist also named Christine who, just like Angot, has a daughter named Leonore, an ex-husband named Claude, and a biological father who started raping Christine on weekends and holidays when she was 13 years old. The tome, quite experimental in places, triggered a contentious reception in the French literary world and was not translated into English until 2017, but it’s seen as a hugely influential contribution to the discourse all over the world about sexual trauma, especially in childhood, and especially where incest is involved.

Made with artistic collaboration, per the end credits, from storied cinematographer Caroline Champetier (Holy Motors), A Family returns to the foundational trauma addressed in Incest and in a sense brings the story up to date. One couldn’t exactly say it brings closure. But by the end, we observe Angot and her daughter Leonore processing how much what Angot’s father did reverberated throughout Angot’s life thereafter. Leonore apologizes in an empathic sense for what her mother went through, and there is a feeling that a page is slowly turning or even a chapter finishing.

But Angot remembers what happened when she was 13, and as she describes the hotel where the abuse first took place, the film runs footage of Christine with Leonore as a baby, being fed, toddling on a lawn, playing with her father, Angot’s ex, Claude. Clearly, Angot has a lot of home movies, shot on VHS, from Leonore’s early years and, throughout, she interweaves this sweet, anodyne footage mostly shot by Claude with scenes where she confronts various key figures from her life.

The first is her stepmother Elizabeth Weber, whom Angot and her film crew effectlvely doorstep, insisting that she lets them in to have it out. Reluctantly, Elizabeth complies, and the two women have a very heated but ultimately rational conversation about the past. An elegant older woman with a severely color-coordinated house full of paintings and haute bourgeois tchotchkes, Elizabeth politely insists that she does not recognize the portrait Angot paints in her writings of her father as the same man to whom she was married. She doesn’t ever deny what Christine accuses him of; she just insists that it’s hard for her to reconcile it all.

That’s not really good enough for Angot though. Clearly extremely agitated by the situation, she bridles at just about everything Elizabeth says, from the maladroit “I pity you” to her even describing what went on between father and daughter as a “relationship.” No, they did not have a relationship, she responds, it was rape, or rather a series of rapes that kept happening, even when she was an adult.

Other viewers may beg to differ, of course, but like Angot’s writing, the film as a whole has a magic mirror quality, like so many abuse stories; everyone sees something slightly different reflected in the surface, depending on their own experience.