Grey Gardens

Grey Gardens is a 1975 American documentary directed by Albert and David Maysles together with Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, following Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, also named Edith, a reclusive mother and daughter living in genteel poverty inside a decaying East Hampton mansion. Filmed using direct cinema techniques that observe its subjects with minimal narration or staged interviews, the documentary became notable both for its intimate, unguarded portrait of its subjects and for its subjects' connection to the Bouvier and Kennedy family through Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Edith's niece. The film was selected for the United States National Film Registry in 2010 and later inspired a stage musical and a television film, an unusually broad afterlife for a documentary of its era.