“Anonymous Sister” is one filmmaker’s effort to tell the story of America’s “man-made”/Purdue Pharma engineered opioid epidemic simply by the impact on her family.

Writer-director Jamie Boyle tells the story of growing up during the birth of the opioid crisis and how it almost consumed her sister and her mother and the toll that took on a tightnit group, a toll that they’re still feeling today.

Boyle profiles and interviews her sister Jordan, siblings so tight that Jordan describes younger sister Jamie as “the other piece of my heart” pretty from birth. She intereviews her mother Julie and details their lives before, during and after her and Jordan’s addiction to Oxycontin, Vicadin and the opium-based pain pills America’s doctors were mad to prescribe from the ’90s to very recently.

She interviews other addicts, a Purdue Pharma rep, and a doctor who is one of the leading experts on this “epidemic,” its cause and its effects. She uses archival news coverage, old home movies and the years of family video about this struggle, including snippets from a student film about her mother and sister, to paint a personal portrait of a national tragedy created by marketing so pervasive it changed our notion of “pain tolerance” and “pain management” to suit the needs of Purdue and the Sackler family that controls it.

The film is both touching and infuriating as Boyle shows us as direct a cause-and-effect in an addiction case as any documentary ever.

Home movies capture pre-school Jamie begging her dad to let her do the video recording, the girls’ early fascination with figure skating after seeing Kristi Yamaguchi win Olympic gold in 1996, and Jordan’s body-and-soul commitment to the sport, with her parents detailing the staggering cost of training, equipping and supporting her. Mother Julie took on a cleaning job just to cover that.

Driven and perhaps guilt-ridden over the cost of her obsession, Jordan skates until she gets nerve damage in her feet. That pain leads her down the road to Oxy, in ever-growing doses.

“I will never be able to stop this,” Jordan recalls thinking as her elevated, “happy” state set in. The drug made her “so much better at my life.” What could be the harm?

Her mother travels her own chronic pain to Oxy/Vicadin path. And her husband and especially Jamie are witnesses to and eventual interveners in a years-unfolding family disaster brought on by drugs whose maker insisted were “not addictive.”

Julie Boyle notes that the “drugs alter your reality,” that “it didn’t feel like a ‘high.’ I’ve been high.”

This was an expensive, destructive new “normal” that grew more dangerous as tolerances built up and higher doses were required.

“Anonymous Sister” recounts the Oxy scandal that blew up just as the Bush Recession set in, and how little changed despite the admissions of lying, manipulation of public opinion and government complicity in this lax oversight of “prescription heroin.”

The Boyles are straight-up middle-class suburbanites, so there’s no “Hillbilly Heroin” labeling as “something poor fall into” here. This could happen to just about anybody.

The inclusion of extensive home movies and deep-embedded background that Jamie Boyle’s direct witnessing of all this lends “Anonymous Sister” an authenticity and personal investment that few films on this subject could match.

And the presence of experts and decades of news coverage — first hailing this “breakthrough” on “pain,” then decrying the rampant profiteering that turned whole states into mass-death Oxy Zones, the greed and cynicism that that made the Sacklers rich and almost consequence free — make one hope that “Anonymous Sister” will not simply be lost in a video market flooded with documentaries.

It should play on cable news network as a first person account of a major story, and programming that’s a lot less embarassing and repetitive than the standard fare on most of those services.

Are you listening, CNN?

Rating: drug abuse subject matter, some profanity

Cast: Jordan Boyle, Jamie Boyle, Julie Boyle, John Boyle and Dr. Andrew Kolodny

Credits: Directed by Jamie Boyle. A Long Shot Factory release.

Running time: 1:33