“She took her camera everywhere and took photos and movies everywhere.”įrom the beginning, Russo-Young saw those images as a way to understand herself and her world. “It was a real appendage,” Russo said during a joint video call with Young. She began chronicling her family and friends obsessively. These were the same years that she discovered cameras - first a Polaroid, then a Pentax, then a camcorder. The case had persisted for more than three years, beginning when Russo-Young was 9, ending when she was 13. Steel never enforced his visitation right and he and Russo spoke only once more before he died. It felt, she said, like an intense threat. “It merely adds to the complement of people who are loving of and involved with Ry.” But to Russo-Young, a dreamy child who loved dress-up and imaginative play, the suit didn’t feel like love. “It’s a win for all of us - not just me,” he told a reporter at the time. “Or all the films I’ve been making in my whole life have led up to this film.” “It feels like this is my first film,” Russo-Young said during a recent video call. Though Steel died in 1998, she speaks to his friends and to the son of his partner in an attempt to understand his version. Russo-Young excavates her family history with the help of home movies, archived photos and extensive interviews with her mothers and her sister, Cade Russo-Young. She tells it again in “ Nuclear Family,” a three-part documentary that premieres on HBO on Sunday, with subsequent episodes airing weekly. It is a story she has been trying to tell - through multimedia projects, through independent films, through mainstream teen movies - ever since. The story had to be clear, it had to be credible. In the room with the psychiatrist, Russo-Young had to tell the story of her family and the story to herself. In 1991, Thomas Steel, the man who had donated the sperm for Russo-Young’s conception, sued her mothers for standing as her father and for immediate visitation.
Russo-Young is the younger daughter of Sandy Russo and Robin Young. Ry Russo-Young was 9 years old the first time she told this story, for an audience of one: the psychiatrist appointed to her case.
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