WHAT happens to a family in the aftermath of a life-shattering event? With compassion and a desire to understand, Julia Loktev's documentary traces the impact on her own family of an accident which has left her father permanently brain damaged and her mother the perpetual care-giver.

This is not a simple tale of pain and loss. With a delicate but persistent touch Loktev probes the physical, emotional and mental changes undergone by two individuals for whom life as they knew it was terminated in an instant, and a new way of living has sprung up out of necessity. While Loktev inserts herself in the picture at times, the film is really about her heartbreakingly strong mother and the enigmatic figure of a man neither she nor her mother can reconcile with the father and husband he once was.

Leonid Loktev, a Russian immigrant to the U.S. and a computer programmer-analyst, is reduced to a wheelchair existence and permanent brain damage when a car strikes him as he crosses the street. His wife, Larisa, eventually quits her own job as a computer programmer-analyst to care for a husband who can neither speak with her nor show facial expressions. Or so it seems at first. Gradually, the man who appears a victim beyond recuperation comes into focus as an intelligent, aware being trapped in unresponsive flesh. Our image of Larisa as the one in control, and resigned to her role, also begins to crack with the weight of her loss, not just of a husband, but of the life she might have had.

What is so intriguing about this film, which was shot using Hi-8 video tape and then transferred to black and white film, is that it captures the contradictions of the mother - she says she is past missing her husband even as she wipes away a tear - and speculates about the father's will to live even as it leaves open the question of the extent of his brain damage. Most wonderfully of all, it propels the viewer into the uncomfortable position of irreconcilable reactions: sympathy and pity war with anger at what could have been for both, alongside an admiration for the life that so obviously rages in the chest of each.