- Film About a Father Who
- USA2020
- Lynne Sachs
- 74
- NR
Streaming
- February 5, 2021 through February 18, 2021
“Sachs achieves a poetic resignation about unknowability inside families, and the hidden roots never explained from looking at a family tree.”
Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times
“This is not a portrait. This is not a self-portrait. This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry.” So experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs describes her beguiling new documentary and its profoundly personal intent: to reconcile the complicated relationship between herself and her bohemian father. Blending an array of home-movie footage shot between 1984 and 2019 (a veritable showcase of evolving media formats, from 8mm to digital), Film About a Father Who offers a kaleidoscopic view of Sachs’s hippie-businessman father, onetime “Hugh Hefner of Park City, Utah,” whose knotty, often contradictory identities are slowly untangled by the documentarian and her network of equally bewildered siblings—many born from different mothers, some kept secret from each other. Throughout this candid, bravely public act of introspection, Sachs expresses conflicted empathy for the aging patriarch, a jovial but emotionally reticent man now in his eighties, and interrogates the bond implicit in father-daughter, and sibling-to-sibling, relationships. Its open-ended title is a nod to Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 study of female multiplicity, Film About a Woman Who.
This rental includes a Q&A between Lynne Sachs and film critic Ela Bittencourt.
Watch an introduction to the film from Lynne Sachs below.
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This film is available to stream in Canada only.
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“[A] brisk, prismatic, and richly psychodramatic family portrait.”
Ben Kenigsberg, New York Times
“Formidable in its candor and ambition … A chapter in a continuing stream of work by an experimental, highly personal filmmaker.”
Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily
