The Boyle family, as seen in Anonymous Sister (Long Shot Factory)

When Jordan Boyle recalls her younger sister Jamie taking away her Oxycontin and pushing her to go to rehab, she recalls, “thinking you were taking the only thing left” in her life. In their younger years, Jordan was Jamie’s protector within their loving Colorado family. Now, Jamie, the documentary’s director, has assembled 30 years of footage to document how opioid addiction decimated her family and how it almost snuffed the light and the life out of her sister as well as her mother.

The title, Anonymous Sister, refers to Jamie, who, as she points the camera at her family, is rarely in front of it. There are even moments when, as a young child, she would cap the camera when it turns on her. She was also the teenager desperately trying to get her family to see the problem that was obvious: The drugs that doctors were prescribing were killing her sister and mother.

Jamie uses her family as an avatar for all who have experienced the opioid epidemic. This family had a specific set of issues that led to addiction: Jordan’s repetitive stress injury due to her competitive figure skating career and her mother’s mysterious ailment, which may or may not be rheumatoid arthritis. One woman at a protest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where the Sackler family, who profited very handsomely off opioids, are a major donor), relates how her teenage son had a knee injury playing football, was prescribed pain-killing medication, and now is dead. Jamie interviews a young woman who was prescribed Oxycontin as a teen and has been addicted ever since. The filmmaker receives a letter later on that, after four months of being clean, the woman died. The drug had destroyed her heart.

Jaime also interviews a former sales rep for Purdue Pharma, who details how she was rewarded for selling more potent doses. As it turns out, those taking opioids for pain management build a tolerance toward them, which means that they end up in more pain, meaning they need higher doses. So, the addicts end up in a vicious cycle, egged on by their doctors, most of whom believed they were seeing to their patients’ best interests.

But the focus, the clear focus, is on Jamie’s family and the painstaking process of watching two incredibly vibrant people funnel down the hole of addiction. The director does not flinch in showing her sister barely able to move, being shepherded into her house by her mother, who wears a Fentanyl patch. Even as they finally get Jordan into rehab, the mom is now fully addicted. She insists she will get clean, but she has to help her daughter first.

Anonymous Sister is an artful, searing portrayal of how ordinary people were deluded and betrayed and pushed to addiction, and also how sometimes the only support system they had was a family member begging them to get help. This is not a film easily forgotten.