Joanna Rudnick ponders whether to keep her breasts and ovaries in In the Family at SILVERDOCS.

If the measure of a good film is that you're still thinking about it days later, then In the Family is the best movie I've seen all year. But in no small way was this documentary, directed by filmmaker Joanna Rudnick, more or less tailor made to hit someone like me square in the jaw. Rudnick, all of 27 when she first began this film five years ago, chronicles her own personal decision making process after testing positive for one of the BRCA gene mutations -- the genes that predict an excessively high risk of developing hereditary breast and/or ovarian cancer. Rudnick's mother had ovarian cancer, her grandmother had breast cancer, and thanks to advances in medical science, she now knows she's more than likely to get one or both of those over the course of her lifetime. Many women who have tested positive for the mutation have opted to have their breasts and ovaries removed to eliminate the risk of cancer. But when you're still young, unmarried and want to have children one day, what do you do?

The film that follows is a profoundly personal account of how Rudnick deals with this devastating news. With a background in science journalism and a desire to reach out to others with the same mutation, Rudnick capably weaves in the stories of a handful of women in various stages of testing, genetic counseling, pre-surgery, post-surgery and, hardest of all, cancer treatment. But it's the video journal she keeps of what's happening in her own life that is the glue that keeps this narrative together. In scenes that play out like a potentially too-personal video blog, we watch as the filmmaker's relationship with her new boyfriend suffers under the strain of what her gene mutation means, and her desire to document it all for the film.

For all her oversharing, Rudnick is no light touch, however. In one scene, she confronts the director of the research lab that holds the patent on the gene mutation, and the $3000 test that detects it. In another, she sits with a family of three sisters who will soon find out which ones of them have inherited the gene mutation from their mother. Both scenes pack a wallop: the first for the kinds of answers she's able to get by being persistent and earnest without being confrontational, the second for the waterfall of emotions she's able to capture.

In the Family does have its lighter moments, for those of you concerned this sounds like a bit of a downer. Watching Rudnick cup the naked breast of a woman who has just received a brand new kind of breast reconstruction surgery that allowed her to keep her nipples is both hilarious and inspirational -- it's a controversial surgical option, but one that's only existed for a short period of time and is giving hope to thousands.

Since Rudnick was brave enough to overshare, I will, too. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 42, and died three years later. My grandmother died of what I think was ovarian cancer before I was born. It's always been in the back of my mind to get tested for the BRCA mutation ever since it was first discovered, but all the usual factors -- fear of losing my insurance, the cost, not being sure I wanted to know -- stopped me from doing it. With the very recent passage of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (which Rudnick helped to lobby for), the first and hopefully the second issues should disappear in the near future. As for the third, it's a testament to the sheer amount of information presented in In the Family, as well the honest portrayal of the emotional journey of testing positive for BRCA it provides, that I've now decided I want to take the test.

In the Family screens Saturday, June 21 at 2:15 p.m. at the SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival, and returns to D.C. at the Landmark E Street Cinemas on July 10 at 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. Register for the July screenings here.