It Goes That Quick

It Goes That Quick, a documentary feature from married filmmakers Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus, is scheduled for release on April 25, 2026.

The film is described as a family portrait assembled over the course of eight years, shot within one extended Northeastern network of relatives — aunts and uncles, parents, grandparents, adults, and newborns. That span of production time is among the most immediately striking facts about the project. Eight years is not an unusual horizon for documentary work that tracks human change — the form has a long tradition of longitudinal observation, from projects that follow children across decades to films that return to a single community at irregular intervals to measure what has shifted and what has held. What Connor and Stankus appear to have done is something somewhat different: rather than tracking a linear arc of development or crisis, they seem to have constructed what the film's description calls a mosaic, implying fragments arranged for resonance rather than a through-line built toward revelation.

Connor and Stankus are married to each other, and the family being filmed is apparently their own — or at minimum a family to which they belong by blood or marriage. That configuration raises questions the film itself will presumably have to answer about where the camera stands in relation to its subjects. Documentary filmmakers who turn the lens on their own families occupy a peculiar position: they are simultaneously insiders with access no outside filmmaker could obtain and editors whose choices about what to include and exclude carry an unusual kind of weight. The description is careful to note that the film is "neither confessional nor exposé," which suggests the filmmakers are aware of that tension and have made deliberate formal choices in response to it. The phrase "artful and intelligent self-awareness" attached to their approach points toward a film that does not pretend the camera is neutral or that the relationships on screen are unaffected by its presence.

The description characterizes the film as a "timeless mosaic of American life," which is a phrase worth pausing on. The word "timeless" in the context of a film shot across eight years of a specific family's life is a formal aspiration rather than a content claim — it suggests that the filmmakers have edited the material in a way that softens or dissolves chronological markers, allowing individual moments to float free of strict sequence. Whether that approach produces something genuinely universal or whether it risks flattening the specificity that makes family portraiture compelling is one of the more interesting open questions about this project.

Equally notable is the description's insistence that the family members "play a dramatic role that's no less constructed for being real." This is a pointed framing. It positions the film somewhere between strict observational documentary and a more shaped, authored work in which the filmmakers' decisions about structure and tone carry as much meaning as anything the subjects say or do. The word "constructed" applied to real people in a real family is an honest admission that documentary filmmaking is never simply recording — it is always also making. That the description volunteers this framing rather than obscuring it suggests the film is prepared to sit with the complexity of that position rather than paper over it.

The tone of the film is described as including humor alongside delicacy, which is worth noting because family documentaries can easily shade into either sentimentality or grim revelation. The presence of humor as a structural element rather than incidental relief implies a particular kind of distance — affectionate but not uncritical, close but not consumed. The fleet quality noted in the description ("by the end of this fleet, loving feature") suggests the film does not dwell or overstay, which is its own kind of formal choice when dealing with eight years of material. The compression required to make eight years feel fleet is considerable, and how Connor and Stankus have managed that compression — what they left out, what they returned to, what they chose to hold — will likely be central to how the film is received.

What remains genuinely unknown from available information is where and how the film will be distributed, whether it has made the festival circuit before its April 2026 date, and what formal strategies beyond the mosaic structure the filmmakers employ. The description offers a strong sense of the film's emotional register and its self-conscious approach to the ethics of filming family, but it does not describe specific episodes, formal techniques like archival or found footage, or whether there is a particular catalyzing event — a birth, a death, an illness — that provides the project with structural anchor points. Whether the film is organized around any such anchors or whether it genuinely proceeds as a series of equally weighted fragments is a meaningful distinction that will shape the experience of watching it.

The audience most likely to seek this out will include viewers drawn to documentary work that takes formal risks with intimate material, as well as those interested in how filmmaking couples navigate the ethics and aesthetics of turning the camera on themselves and the people around them. Given the eight-year production span and the described tonal range, it may also attract audiences who have followed either Connor or Stankus through earlier work and are curious how the collaborative and personal dimensions of the project have shaped what they've made together.