Family Portrait Sittings traces the history of the filmmaker’s family from their origins in the Abruzzi region of Italy, through immigration to the United States early in the 20th century, their struggles to become established, understand the world, and raise children. It focuses mainly on two generations, the grandparents who immigrated and their children, who grew up as Americans in the years of the Depression and the Second World War, but also touches on the filmmaker’s own generation, who grew up during the fifties. The family members speak not only about what happened to them in their lives but about values, religion, politics, and education. It is a film about how people struggle to make sense of their lives, how they shape it into stories, and how these stories convey what the family is. Family Portrait Sittings is not only about individuals and all that they accomplished, lost, and rejoiced in, but about how things endure and change as one generation gives way to the next.