Be Merry

When documentarian Gwen Isaac was a child, her single mother made her believe it was just them against the world. But as she grew older, the unpredictable storms of living with Merrilyn — nicknamed “mad Merry” in their Far North fishing town of Kororāreka Russell — became an acute source of shame and anxiety.

Merry was a talented painter, and the life of the party, who had paranoid turns and was intermittently sectioned as a result of her bipolar disorder, a condition little understood in ‘80s Aotearoa.

Isaac’s third and most personal film to date is a vulnerably raw, honest and irreverent attempt to get to the bottom of who her mother really was, and in so doing reclaim her own narrative from a ghost that still looms large, especially now that her own daughters are entering a rebellious age.

Between obsessively filming her own family and digging out Merry’s artworks, she visits fellow misfits who knew her in the ‘80s, to sift myth from reality across varying perceptions, to understand what she inherited, and what she has disavowed. 

- Carmen Gray