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Filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi has had a front row seat to her mother Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) political career, and she’s complied the footage into an upcoming documentary that will debut on HBO this week. She shared a preview of the documentary, Pelosi in the House, with John Dickerson on CBS Sunday Morning.

“I grew up two feet behind Nancy Pelosi, so I got to see how everyone behaved in front of her, and everything they said the minute she walked away,” Alexandra said, recalling how she began filming her mother in the 1980s with a small disposable camera.

“If you want to understand her, you have to watch her work,” she added. “So, I watched her work. For decades I watched her work. She invited us to everything. ‘We’re passing this bill. Come on down.’ That’s family time for us. My kids grew up in the Capitol. That’s how my children spent time with their grandmother, was watching her pass healthcare.”

In one clip from the film, Alexandra can be seen telling the Speaker that she is “impossible to crack.”

“Even you can’t catch her off-guard?” asked Dickerson.

“No, there’s no catching her off-guard,” Alexandra replied. “My life’s work has been trying to get her to go off-guard. But it doesn’

t happen. She eats nails for breakfast!”

The documentary culminates with the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Previously released footage shot by Alexandra showed the Speaker reacting during the riot — including memorable clips in which she muses aloud that she hoped President Donald Trump would come to the Capitol so she could “punch him out” and warns Vice President Mike Pence to keep his location secret.

Both Pence and Speaker Pelosi were targeted by the Capitol rioters, and Alexandra shared some of the family’s anxieties over her mother’s high-profile role :

“On January 6th, my 16-year-old son was asking me, ‘Why do all these people want to kill MiMi?’ We call her MiMi. And I think for me, the hardest part now is trying to explain to my children, who are teenagers, they saw the Oath Keepers trial, that they went to the Capitol and said they wanted to hang Nancy Pelosi from a lamp post. They get news alerts on their phone about that. So, trying to make peace with the fact that my mother says that public service is a noble calling, and my kids don’t understand why people want to kill her – for what? What did she do, pass healthcare?”I still haven’t been able to give them a good answer to that question.”

The October attack on her father, Paul Pelosi, was a “

really tough” experience for the family, Alexandra said. Her father was “getting better every day,” she added, and the physical scars were healing (although she did say he “looks like Frankenstein”), but she worried that the emotional scars might not ever heal.

“I don’t think it’s OK for an 82-year-old man to be attacked in his home in the middle of the night because of whatever his wife does for work,” she said, and lambasted those who mocked or sought to politicize the attack.

“I haven’t slept since the night my father was attacked,” she said. “What happened to him is one thing; what the outside world did with that for their own political fodder, is what’s much harder for us to handle as a family. I don’t care who you are and who you vote for. Nobody should think it is funny that an 82-year-old man got attacked in his home. And yet, like, a sitting governor and a wannabe governor and members of Congress were laughing about it.”

Her father’s commitment to his wife and her political career remains unwavering, Alexandra said. “I don’t know that it was worth it. I’m wrestling with whether or not any of this was worth it. But my father, still, says it was worth it, that she got to live

her dreams, and that for him, that was worth it. Even after everything he’s been through, he still says it was worth it.”

Watch the video above, via CBS Sunday Morning.

Tags: Alexandra Pelosi, documentary, Jan. 6, Nancy Pelosi, Paul Pelosi, Pelosi in the House