Starboard Light (2015)

Starboard Light: Directed by Nick Fitzhugh. With Brooke Andrews, Darryl Andrews, Peter Andrews, Rebecca Andrews. Sometimes the greatest adventure is the journey home. A love letter to loss spanning five generations, Starboard Light shows us how to hold on. In Starboard Light, a family must witness the disappearance of a century of family memories when they sell their 210 year old summer home on Cape Cod. Whether it’s a small cabin deep in the woods, a primary residence that’s been handed down generation after generation or a waterfront summer getaway, there is a Starboard Light in many of our lives that we’ve struggled to keep or had to painfully let go. Vicariously through this American family, Starboard Light helps us all to immortalize the generations of memories and values baked into these shared family homes so that we may pass them on to our own children and grandchildren and begs the question: Does a family make a house? Or does a house make a family?

“Starboard Light is a love story of place and connections. The film is a poignant portrait of the people who shaped a house into a place where a family gathered for multiple generations. The small cape house in Chatham Massachusetts became a magnet that drew people to it like a moth to light. Does a family make a house or a house make a family. It is clear that it is little of both.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe archival footage that Nick Fitzhugh incorporated into the film helps to provide the history and the longevity of this old house and its importance to the family. And his filming of the house in more recent times draws you in, so that you can feel the harbor breeze and hear the floors creak. You canu0026#39;t help but want to be there and experience what he and his grandparents, his cousins, aunts and uncles, and extended family did over decades. But the energy and love that his grandparents, and great grandparents invested in this place made it come alive. Without them, there would be no gathering place. They created an ethic of caring and returning home to Chatham that would become ingrained in all of the children, and their children. u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eIt is a poem and a beautiful piece of film making that many families will identify with. Whether it is a hunting camp, a small cabin on the ocean, a multi-generational home — each begins a tradition of belonging and connecting with family. And when that place is no longer, the challenge is keeping that tradition alive. I believe that this family will succeed.”