‘Flood’ review: Impactful exploration of family and faith is exec produced by Laura Poitras

Dir: Katy Scoggin. USA. 2025. 76mins

There’s a bigger question lurking behind Katy Scoggin’s debut feature about her attempts to understand and find some kind of common ground with her Christian fundamentalist, creationist father. How do you talk to those whose views seem to be entirely resistant to what you consider to be logical, scientific sense? Is it better just to avoid such people entirely – or if you must interact, confine your conversation to the weather? Alas, as Scoggin predictably discovers, that can also be a dangerous topic.

An engaging study of ideological clashes within a family

In her first full-length feature, producer, editor and cameraperson Scoggin resists the easy allure of the first-person ‘confronting my demons’ documentary to create an engaging study of ideological clashes within a family. Within its compact running time, Flood traces an impactful emotional arc – one that is laced with humour as well as conflict.

Scoggin has previously worked on a handful of Laura Poitras projects; she was DoP on the director’s Oscar-winning Citizenfour, which she also co-produced. (Poitras returns the favour by stepping in here as one of five executive producers.) Playing in IDFA competition after its world premiere at the Tallgrass festival in Kansas, Flood will screen in 2026 on Independent Lens, the weekly documentary series of US public broadcaster PBS, which in the past has launched Academy Award nominees that include I Am Not Your Negro and Hale County This Morning, This Evening. With real cross-generational audience appeal, Flood may well burst out of the small-screen box in other territories.

Over a montage of home movies from her childhood together with Christian Evangelical kids’ cartoons about Noah and the Biblical flood, Scoggin’s voice-over narration fills us in on who she was back then: “We are Californians. We are young-earth creationists”. Flood then pulls back to a Kansas chalk formation that was formed millions of years ago by deposits from marine organisms. We spend some pleasant downtime with three fossil hunters as they painstakingly scrape and brush away at vertebrate skeletons imprisoned in the rock.

Scoggin – present only as a voice until late on in the film – outlines her dilemma to one of them. She no longer believes in the flood, and no longer talks to her creationist father. How should she deal with him? Rather than arming her with solid scientific counter-arguments, the fossil-hunter advises her to interview her dad, and tell him she loves him.

We are intriguingly wrong-footed here, not for the only time. The biggest surprise comes when we finally meet Marvin, the director’s dad. Firstly, he has a sense of humour. As an elementary school maths teacher, he seems genuinely kind and well-liked. But at home he can be prickly, stubborn and argumentative. As we navigate a household that is held together by Scoggin’s feisty, long-suffering mother – whose evangelical fervour has abated to the point where she defines herself as “still a Christian”, but with “a broader playing field” – it gradually becomes clear that this is a family like so many others, with issues that are as much character-based as faith-related. In that respect, Katy and her dad are not poles apart.

Finely edited and structured, Flood see-saws between tension and calm as a series of run-ins between the director and her father – or between her parents – alternate with breathing spaces in which Scoggin connects with her mother, her divorced and remarried younger sister and the latter’s adolescent son; a musician who is clearly on the same questioning journey that the director embarked on years before.

It’s left to a father-daughter road trip across America, through landscapes that each one has a different foundation story for, to bring a resolution that is all the more poignant for not being forced. Stuart Bogie’s sensitive soundtrack with its prominent breathy woodwind notes matches the film’s arc, evolving gradually from tension towards a gentle harmonic release.