October 2001

Filmmaker Patti Obrow White brings her film, If I Could (119 minutes), to the festival, telling the story of a Denver woman, Tracy, and her battle to save her troubled son James from being consumed by the legal system.

In 1979, White produced the television documentary "Wagon Train Trail" for CBS, the story of four so-called juvenile delinquents assigned to a character-building wagon train journey called VisionQuest. One of the participants was an angry and defiant Tracy, then 14 years old. Twenty years later she is the single mother of four children and her son James is following the familiar route of anger and defiance, in trouble and in placement since age 6. Tracy turns to VisionQuest and her mentor in recovery, father figure Bob Burton, to help with James. The film chronicles a year in their lives when James struggles to exorcise his demons and Tracy struggles to build a self-sufficient and honorable life for herself and her family.

If I Could bravely reveals, in explicit detail, the extended family's repeated patterns of abuse and documents many painful confrontations among family members. Neither Tracy's growth nor James' comes easy and the filmmaker hangs in through some harrowing circumstances.