Lineage: A Moving Drama of the Genealogy of Abuse and Change

Michelle West’s 24-minute Lineage is a true story of intergenerational trauma and oppression set in Depression-era California. Centering the three oldest women in a family of six, the film is an accomplished work whose main draw is its uncommonly good cast. 

It is 1933, smack in the middle of the Great Depression. By Nana’s (Christopher Callen) account, they have been evicted multiple times already before Hazel (West), her daughter-in-law, found work as the only housekeeper in the estate of an arrogant man (Circus-Szalewski as Charles Hoover) who exploits not just women’s labour but also their bodies. Betty (Cailin Peluso) is thirteen, already tasting the hardships that have made home in the lives of her mother and grandmother. 

The three women have their specific roles. While Hazel works and keeps the family running, Nana softens the edges of every threat to the delicate balance they have managed to put in place. Betty, the eldest daughter, the reader, already tasked with keeping the ones after her in line, is now the latest to come up against the order of the world and learn that it is designed against her. 

Betty is the ideal subject to conceptualise the very notion of change for the generations of women before her. The beginning of it is innocent, seeded in children’s literature and read with conviction about every possibility of magic. It is what allows Betty to discover a relic of trauma and immediately see wonder in it. 

The scope of Lineage does not overwhelm it. The story is metonymically presented with abortion as its chief plot point, bringing the various faces of male oppression as well as women’s private lives into a coherent matrix. The writing might be somewhat uneven, but nearly every other aspect of the film, especially the performances and editing, makes up for it outstandingly.

In fact, the film is erected on the sheer power of its three heroines and each of the three actresses stuns in their turn. West as Hazel with her hardened stoicism and resultant coldness; Callen’s perfection of the grandmother’s pragmatic but no less weary acceptance of the harshness dealt to working class women; Peluso performing the teenager’s new resistance, burgeoning out of the friction of being a child in a big, poor family. 

As decades of shelved hurt is excavated out of their dark recesses and away from the intrusion of abusive men, Betty finds herself the captain of this ship, taking up the responsibility of effecting change. And what does she fall back on? The magic and wonder of children’s literature, aglow even in the bleakest of times.

Watch Lineage Short Film Trailer