'51 Birch Street': Hitting Home

Filmmaker Unlocks the Dark Secrets Behind His Parents' 54-Year Marriage

Appearances can be deceiving: The Blocks in 1973 (from left, Mike, Ellen, Doug, Karen and Mina). Decades later, "51 Birch Street" reveals unseen fracture lines. (Washington Jewish Film Festival Photos)

When filmmaker Doug Block began shooting video footage in the basement of his family home in suburban New York three years ago, he thought he was simply preserving a piece of his past -- his mother had died a year and a half earlier -- before his father moved two weeks later to Florida.

But as he began talking with his father from behind the camera, Block soon realized that something more profound was taking shape and that darker secrets were about to be revealed. "Dad was talking about Mom for the first time," Block recalled in a recent telephone conversation, "and he had never talked about her when she was alive. . . . All the events that had come in rapid succession suddenly got me thinking: Who are you?"

"51 Birch Street" answers that question in progressively more shocking detail, as it focuses on the 54-year marriage of Block's parents, Mike and Mina. (The film will be shown tomorrow as part of the Washington Jewish Film Festival.)

Through conversations with his father and reading his late mother's copious journals, Block creates a home movie that plays like one part social history and one part psychological thriller, as buried secrets come to light, long-held assumptions are upended and, perhaps most explosively, Block (now 53) finally confronts the truth of who his parents were -- especially his father, a hitherto distant and emotionally disengaged presence.

"It's all there on the screen," Block said of the transformation of his relationship with his father. "That two-week period completely changed how we dealt with each other, and we could never have done it without the camera. I had to be in the role of professional to ask some of those questions."

Those questions -- about sex, extramarital affairs, feelings about family -- were perhaps the most difficult for an adult child to ask a parent. Without his mother there to provide her side of the story, Block relied on the journals she kept for more than 30 years, and where in crabbed handwriting she wrote down her innermost disappointments and transgressive desires.

Still, putting Mina's diaries in a home movie is one thing, sharing them with the rest of the world in a documentary that has played in nearly 30 festivals internationally is another. Block grapples with those ethical questions in "51 Birch Street," consulting a young rabbi and finally his mother's best friend, Natasha, who provides some of the most honest and poignant moments in the film. After a very long pause, she finally tells Block that Mina would have wanted the diaries to come out. "She would be delighted," Natasha says after grappling with the question. "What a relief for someone, to really be known."

Block decided to use only the portion of his mother's journals written between 1968 and 1973, which she had typed up as preparation for a novel. "Those were the prime diary years," Block noted. "Plus that was a pretty pivotal era in the culture." The pages often read like a microcosm of the burgeoning feminist movement, when women, as Natasha recalls in "51 Birch Street," realized there was more to life than keeping the house clean. She notes dryly, "That's when houses got dirty."

Rabbi Jonathan Blake, whom Block consults regarding issues of his mother's privacy, says in the film that he's not sure he would endorse "broadcasting the diaries to the entire world." But now, having seen the film, he feels that Block did the right thing. The most objective evidence, he said, are the diaries themselves, "35 years' worth of books where she's trying to express the real Mina. And I think Doug really portrays that accurately and sensitively."

If Mina wasn't around to decide what was said or shown about her, Mike early on ceded control over his image in "51 Birch Street." When his son told him he wanted to make a full-blown film of the family's troubled history, "I said, 'If you want to make it, Doug, I would trust you to do it right,' " Mike Block recalled recently from his home in Florida. "I gave him a free hand. I never wanted to censor the film."

Mike Block admitted that the film "was difficult to watch the first few times, but I got used to it." Most important, he said, is that it shows audiences the importance of asking questions of their children and parents, and then being willing to hear the answers. "I recognize now, it's an educational film," he said, "a call for more exchange, for more conversation to go on. Rather than burying [conflict] and walking away from it, it's advantageous to go after it and see if it can be settled in some meaningful way."

51 Birch Street will be shown at 2:15 p.m. tomorrow at the Avalon Theatre, 5612 Connecticut Ave. NW. Call 202-777-3248 or visit http://www.wjff.org.