Filled with haunting images of travel and displacement, Next of Kin chronicles the travails of one Peter Foster, who undergoes "video therapy" with his parents in an attempt to repair his unhappy family life. After viewing the tapes of an Armenian family who had surrendered their own infant son years before, Foster decides to take on a new familial identity by presenting himself as the long-lost child. Egoyan’s debut feature was marked by a brave commitment—unusual for those "experimental" times—to character-driven narrative, at once both conceptually complex and emotionally riveting.

A complex journey into a world of brutality and sentiment, Family Viewing, set in a nursing home, a condominium, and a telephone-sex establishment, is the story of mixed and found identities. Using a collection of video images—from the realms of television, pornography, home movies, and surveillance—the film observes the breakdown and restoration of a dislocated family.