(Unfortunately) based on a true story, Max Capacity begins with a discovery that I would have been perfectly happy going the rest of my life without making.

While packing, I find my mom’s sex box + a nude centerfold of my deceased father. On its face, that’s the joke; there are few events more immediate-therapy-inducing than finding these two things. But what interested me even more, and what ultimately made me want to turn my experience into a film, was everything that came after the initial urge to gouge my eyes out.

Growing up, we tend to experience our parents mostly through the role they play in our own lives. They’re “Mom” and “Dad,” not “Pam” and “Max.” While we intellectually know they had lives before us, it still feels like those lives began somewhere around the time ours did. Actually being confronted with evidence of who they were before you can be strangely destabilizing.

For my character, that realization is complicated by her relationship with her father. As she got older, he became increasingly critical of her, especially of her appearance and how she presented herself. Then she finds the magazine, and he’s conveniently dead and unavailable for follow-up questions. The hypocrisy is funny, but also incredibly painful. Death has made their fraught relationship permanent, but the magazine makes her understanding of him less certain.

This film isn’t about redeeming a shitty parent, because better understanding someone doesn’t erase the ways they hurt you. It’s about the unsettling realization that your parent had an entire life before you knew them, one full of desires, contradictions, and choices that you may never understand.

For me, that tension is where Max Capacity lives, between absurdity and grief. You can appreciate someone and resent them at the same time. Sometimes seeing your parent as a complete human being, regrettably, means seeing all of your parent.

— April Yanko