Trama

In 1975, the Maysles brothers, armed with a film camera and a tape recorder recorded the fascinating mother-daughter relationship between Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie, the eccentric aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Ghosts of Grey Gardens is a 30th anniversary homage to this groundbreaking documentary, Grey Gardens. In 2001, the then-19 year old director, Greenfield-Sanders, saw Grey Gardens and began this project. Ghosts of Grey Gardens is both a documentary on a documentary and one fan's three-year quest to glean additional information about the Maysles' subjects and capture the reason for their enormous impact on so many creative people. Greenfield-Sanders interviews the original co-director, Albert Maysles, as well as the fashion designer Todd Oldham, the writer Beauregard Houston-Montgomery, and the performance artist Johanna Went about the continuing legacy of Grey Gardens. She also interviews the current owners of the Grey Gardens estate, Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, and films a tour of the house and grounds as they look today. Mixing her own footage with Grey Gardens footage, performance art with interviews, and monologue with dialogue, the filmmaker tells the story of the past and present of Grey Gardens.—Liliana Greenfield-Sanders