Evidence

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The United States is built on secret plans and backroom deals, and whether one benefits or suffers from these arrangements is a roll of the dice. Lee Anne Schmitt’s fleet and intricate essay film about the Olin Corporation, a longtime manufacturer of ammunition and chemicals, considers the company’s seemingly bottomless reach in modern life and its place in her own family. Doubling as an account of modern American conservatism (from media gadflies to six Supreme Court justices), the film is punctuated with contemporaneous footage that, viewed through the lens of Olin’s misdeeds, generates the tension and shock of a genre film. Evidence functions as a confession, an exegesis on motherhood, and finally, a film about, in Schmitt’s own words, “being hurt inside your own home by the people who are supposed to take care of you.”