Flood

For her first feature-length documentary, Katy Scoggin returns to her childhood home to strengthen her bond with her religious father. He has devoted much of his life to emphatically refuting the theory of evolution, while she has embraced science since her student days. She packs her camera and returns home to the Inland Empire of Southern California, where her parents settled as full-time missionaries before she was born. Katy films her father, Marvin, teaching his fourth-grade class. In his science classroom, he is affable, charismatic, and beloved, while at home he appears isolated as the sole evangelical left in the family. His wife, Katy's mother, has shifted to a progressive church, and his younger daughter, Katy's sister, is raising her own children to push back against orthodoxy. Despite growing disagreements, the family remains closely knit and prepares for a family move across the country. Katy's sister's family is moving back East, and her parents are coming along for the ride. As the family packs everything they own into boxes, Katy examines her parents' missionary past, her sister's decision to leave Christianity, her nephew's ambivalence, and her own radical change over time. The starkest divide seems to exist between her family's original members: her parents. As Katy and Marvin delve into their disparate beliefs about heaven, earth, creation, and marriage, Katy realizes that she can turn away from her father's beliefs without turning away from him. As they pack their lives into boxes, the dynamics between Katy's father, mother, sister, and nephew reveal how complex the relationships between people of different generations and different religious beliefs can be, even when their lives are deeply intertwined.