Amanda Mustard, a photojournalist, began investigating her family's history to uncover who her grandfather, William Flickinger, really was. He was a chiropractor who sexually abused countless children and women, both within and outside his family. The result of this journey was the HBO documentary 'Great Photo, Lovely Life.' During the making of the film, Mustard noticed how humans react to extremely painful situations. She realized that 'everything that had been normalized in my family was not normal.' She discovered how these family secrets, known to all but spoken of by none, 'end up rotting the roots of the family tree for generations.' By delving into archives, collecting family photos and videos, speaking with those who knew her grandfather, and contacting some of the survivors of his sexual assaults, she pieced together the profile of a pedophile who committed crimes with total impunity for decades, even after a brief jail sentence. She had long conversations not only with her sister and mother, whom Flickinger abused as children, but also with her grandfather. One day, she mustered the courage to confront him directly with a camera rolling. The documentary is an eight-year attempt to speak for the first time about the rampant abuse her family endured across three generations.
