Storyline

Real estate agent John Maloof explains how a trip to a local auction house, in search for old pictures to use for a history book about his neighborhood, resulted in him bidding and winning a box full of old negatives. John goes through the massive quantity of negatives, describes how impressed he is by the quality of the images, becomes quickly determined they are not reverent to his project and just puts them away. That could have very likely had been the end of the story, if the power of the images had not pushed him to fall in love with photography. John confides that his photo hobby quickly motivated him to set up a darkroom and devote large amounts of time printing. As he learned more about photography, he recognized that those negatives he had bought, then stored, were the work of a real master. In an attempt to confirm his suspicion, he selected about 100 images and put them online with the hope that the feedback would confirm his judgement as to the strength of the images.—Lane J. Lubell of Cinemashadow.com

Plot Keywords

female photographer, maid, french accent, babysitter, governess, force feeding, name in title, photograph, photography, nanny, darkroom, eccentric, investigation, brother sister relationship, paranoia, mental illness, money, year 1974, year 1967, bench

Short Review

Finding Vivian Maier never does not reveal much about the inner life of the woman at the center of the story, but it does a solid job of its more important mission: bringing Maier's rarely seen work to light.

Trailer

Streaming Service

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