Plot summary

The film opens up cutting between footage of a handful of people, each in their home, and each pensively waiting to be interviewed. The brief snippets shown clarify that each will be speaking about their recollections of the same woman, as a part of finding insight into the mystery. Switch to the filmmaker,John Maloof explaining how a trip to a local auction house, in search for old pictures to use for a book history of 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 was by the quality of the images, quickly determined they were not relevant to his project and just put 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 shooting. 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. He got his confirmation!Mr. Maloof had the artistic vision and business savvy to go back to that auction house, track-down others that had bought Vivian's negatives that day and buy them all, returning the collection to whole. The amount of images was truly astounding, and total over 100,000, and unlike today's digital world, she was shooting primarily with a Rolleiflex Camera, a roll of 120 film holds 12 images.In addition to the film, John found receipts, notes and just enough information to attempt to find out who was this prolific mystery woman. Interestingly, it was not that difficult to discover who she was and people that knew her, the secret was that she had been a masterful artist. Everyone knew her as the slightly odd, but rather nice nanny.Lane J. Lubell of Cinemashadow.com