JOE AND MAXI (1978) - 81:00 min
color, sound

When Maxi Cohen was 23, her mother died of cancer.  She made this film to get to know her iconoclastic father. Joe and Maxi is a feature-length documentary about Cohen’s relationship with her father and her mother’s death from cancer. Made when Cohen was twenty-three years old, Joe and Maxi is an intimate portrait of a family confronting the barriers between expressing and accepting love.

Considered groundbreaking in both form and content upon its release, the film has been noted as a major influence for preceding filmmakers and has been praised for its cinema vérité nature, with the story unfolding before the camera without a narrator. The intimacy of the film, let alone the subjectivity and the subject matter of the film, was an anomaly at the time. When the film played a festival in LA, someone asked, “Who played your father?” It was so real the man who asked thought it was fiction.

In 2021, the Museum of Modern Art created a 4k preservation copy, as the film sits in its archives. NYWIFT Women’s Film Preservation Fund awarded a preservation grant for its original 35mm print, guaranteeing access to the film for the public and future generations.

Joe and Maxi premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and was named by the press Best Film of the Rotterdam Film Festival. It was theatrically released in 1980 and televised internationally, except that it was called too controversial for television in the US. Occasionally, the film plays theatrically, most recently at the Barbican in London.