“At a certain point in adulthood, you realize your parents aren’t going to be around forever. I had always wanted to either make a film about marriage or about my parents and their circle,” says Naomi Guttman, BFA 85.
“Love, compromise and a miracle.” Concordia alumna Naomi Guttman, BFA 85, heard this formula for a happy marriage from her now late mother, Herta Guttman, as she chronicled her parents’ 64-year marriage on film.
“The mystery of why you can find one person with all their faults so appealing and so satisfying — that’s the miracle,” confides Herta in this award-winning, 30-minute documentary.
A native Montrealer, Naomi Guttman is a professor of literature and creative writing at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and the author of three prize-winning poetry books.
More Than You Can Know: A Marriage Story is her first film. An official selection at 11 North American film festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival, the LA Sun Film Fest, the Boston Indie Film Festival, it was named “best documentary” at the Toronto Indie Shorts Festival in 2024.
‘A grand institution’
Gutman’s time at Concordia proved vital since it paved the way for her career as a writer and filmmaker. “I do believe in Concordia, and I think it’s become such a grand institution,” she says. Although her major was music, it was her minor in creative writing and an unforgettable film course that laid the groundwork for her present-day success.
Professors like Terence Byrnes in the creative writing program and Thomas Waugh in film studies left a lasting impression. “Forty-four years later, I still remember those classes and workshops,” says Guttman.
Fast forward to the present and her award-winning film. The idea for More Than You Can Know: A Marriage Story came to her when her parents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary in 2013.
“At a certain point in adulthood, you realize your parents aren’t going to be around forever. I had always wanted to either make a film about marriage or about my parents and their circle,” says Guttman. “They were part of a tiny, very specific, Montreal Jewish-Anglo community. Because of their anniversary and because I knew my mother was sick, I started filming them.”
When love is unstoppable
Herta and Frank began dating in the spring of 1952, when they were 18 and 21 years old respectively, and married the following year.
During a series of interviews with her parents, surprising details about their decades-long relationship resurfaced, including a box of the letters they had exchanged during their long-distance courtship.
This transatlantic correspondence between Montreal and Geneva, Switzerland, where Frank was studying medicine, set the foundation for what would be a winding path that, despite challenges, always led the couple back to each other.
“It was touching to read their young voices and their kind of bravado and flirtatiousness,” says Guttman. “They had so much faith in the world.”
Fidelity, feminism and parenthood
Taped conversations with her parents revealed sometimes uncomfortable aspects of their marriage, exploring fidelity, feminism and parenthood.
At the time of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s, Herta worked full-time as a psychiatrist and was ahead of her time in many ways. “They struggled as a couple under the time constraints and pressures of my mother’s career,” says Guttman. “I view their marriage as a long trip that was bound to have times where it was better than others, but I think it ended up pretty well.”
“The film also became an archival project. I had all these home movies and photographs, and it was very satisfying to be able to shape them into a narrative,” she says. “My dad loved being behind the camera and he loved making home movies, so it’s a nice tribute to him.”
Guttman’s parents have since passed away, Herta in 2018 and Frank in 2020. The couple’s unique story of enduring love would otherwise have gone untold, yet the film has brought it to life not only for their immediate family, but for North American audiences from coast to coast.