San Rafael screening followed by panel discussion on Hereditary Cancer and Genetic Testing with director Joanna Rudnick and producer Beth Iams.

Berkeley screening followed by Q&A with director Joanna Rudnick and producer Beth Iams.

Palo Alto screening followed by Q&A with producer Beth Iams.

In the Family invites us into the world of Joanna Rudnick, a filmmaker who at the age of 27 discovered that she had BRCA—a genetic mutation that is particularly high among Ashkenazi Jewish women. We join Rudnick as she struggles with an impossible decision—whether to remove her healthy breasts and ovaries preemptively or risk a staggeringly high likelihood of developing a deadly cancer. Rudnick crisscrosses the country, from family dinner tables to hospital research centers to her own private video journal, to explore the medical and emotional implications of this decision—one that thousands of women and their families face. What results is a gripping documentary that is as life-affirming as it is heartbreaking.

Rudnick, an experienced science reporter, keeps the film deeply personal as well as informative, introducing us to memorable women who have handled the knowledge of their BRCA status (or fear of it) in different ways. the trio of sisters who take their tests together, facing different results; the determined post-op survivor who embraces her post-mastectomy body; and the woman who first discovered the BRCA gene. We also meet the man who holds the lucrative patent on the diagnostic test, and women who are fighting racial and economic disparity to gain access to it.

As Rudnick turns the camera on her boyfriend and herself, revealing the toll that her looming decision is taking on their budding romance, we find ourselves understanding with deeper complexity exactly what is at stake. In the Family is a powerful meditation on what we are willing to sacrifice to survive.

—Shira Zucker

Co-presented by Jewish Family and Children's Services of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties and Breast Cancer Action