When the coronavirus pandemic first gripped the United States, in March, 2020, a surge of introspection overtook Sydney Bowie Linden. Quarantining at her mother’s house, in Newport Beach, California, surrounded by relics from her childhood, Linden, who is twenty-nine and an M.F.A. student at Stanford, considered making a documentary about her relationship with her sister, Paige. She began sifting through old home videos for ideas. Linden had never before watched the family-movie collection in its entirety, but, after the last tape rolled, it dawned on her that the videos stopped when she was eight years old and Paige was six. (They also have a brother, Blake, now twenty-six.) She had a feeling she knew why. “I realized that, to make a film about my relationship with my sister, I would have to address growing up in a household with a parent who struggled with addiction,” she told me.
Linden’s atmospheric, dreamlike documentary short “The Space Between” stitches together moments from the grainy home videos—idyllic stretches of beach in Orange County; closeups of horses surrounded by mountains, bathed in sunlight; bouncy towheaded children playing while their mother talks and sings to them from behind the camera—with video and audio recorded in April, 2020, of herself, Paige, and their mother, Tracy. “I wanted it to feel like the past and present were in dialogue with each other,” Linden said. The film’s central drama, unseen but deeply felt, is Tracy’s battle with alcoholism, which unfolded after the home movies stopped.
“I feel like there’s a lot of films about addiction, but very few that address how the family dynamics and relationships change,” Linden said. “So that was really what I wanted to be the focus.” She also wanted her family’s healing, the product of years of hard work, to be apparent, and perhaps to provide some hope to those reckoning with their own family trauma. The film underscores the healing power of talking: although her mother had been sober for more than a decade when Linden started work on the documentary, the conversations that make up the film brought about family revelations. Linden learned of the resentment that her sister had felt over what she saw as Linden’s judgment of their mother. “In your mind, it was cut and dry, it was black and white, it was, like, ‘You’re not sober ’cause you’re not trying hard enough and you don’t care enough about its impact on us,’ ” Paige says in the film.
Dysfunction can lead children to step into new roles as a coping mechanism, Linden observed. In the case of her relationship with her younger sister, those shifts created a strain. Paige “was sort of the classic middle child,” Linden explained. “She was the problem-solver and the emotional supporter—and I really closed myself off emotionally from my mom, to protect myself from the disappointment of another relapse.”
In her darkest days, Tracy couldn’t watch the home videos that she had so lovingly shot; it was too painful to think back on those happy times. But in “The Space Between” we see the Tracy of today, self-possessed as she lifts her camera to snap a photo of her daughters, now grown. That the archival footage is repurposed in the film is in part a metaphor for the complexity and poignancy of the passing of time. But Linden also sought to celebrate the memories for what they are: happy, pure, shot through with the warm glow of love. In one scene, from behind the camera, Tracy sings the playful half-note progressions of Jack Owens’s mid-century “The Hukilau Song,” encouraging a tiny, smiling Linden to dance on the coffee table in her bathing suit. The trust and ease of their rapport is palpable. “That’s who I think of as my mother,” Linden said.
