Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949-2012) was an independent filmmaker who gave new and melancholy meaning to the term. For to call Robertson's cinema "independent" is to recognize not only the minimum financial or institutional support given to her work, but also the ways her films speak with poignant directness to her own extreme independence as an artist and woman who lived and worked largely alone. Indeed, Robertson's struggles with loneliness and clinically diagnosed manic depression were integrally woven into the complex fabric of her films, most especially her magnum opus, Five Year Diary, a thirty-six hour chronicle of her life begun in 1981 and completed sixteen years later.