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?