A significant part of artist Gay Block’s creative existence has been devoted to painstakingly documenting the actions, words, and bodily transfigurations of her mother Bertha Alyce. Combining her own photographed and filmed imagery with preexisting family pictures and home movies, Block unabashedly portrays her mother in the most unfavorable, disturbing light. Yet for all of the emotional betrayal and hurt that is on display, one senses that for the filmmaker and her maternal muse there is redemptive power in living one’s life fully, without regrets, and justice in exposing life’s truths, wrinkles and all.  RP