01/24/2020

Salt Lake Dirt

An Interview with Filmmaker Lynne Sachs

By Kyler Bingham

Lynne Sachs new documentary film entitled Film About a Father Who premieres at Slamdance 2020 on the opening night of the festival. It is a thirty year labor of love that chronicles the complex life of her father Ira Sachs. Her new book of poetry Year by Year was also recently released on Tender Buttons Press. Lynne was kind enough to take time out of her busy schedule to discuss the film and her process as a filmmaker and writer.

Salt Lake Dirt: The film is excellent. I really found myself feeling part of your family, it was quite remarkable.

Lynne Sachs: That makes me happy. I’ll just say something that happened today. This woman I had not seen for twenty-five years wrote to me. She’s a fiction writer and she just kind of bared her soul about her own life and things that had happened in her life. She had even written a novel about it. Relating to her relationship with her father and she had some siblings that she didn’t know about and it was very cathartic for both of us. I did not actually predict that that kind of thing would happen. It’s already happened a couple of times so who knows where this is going to go.

SLD: I think you’ll get a lot of that up there in Park City this coming week. So the footage goes back to the 80s?

LS: It actually goes back to the 60s.

SLD: Does it really?

LS: In the beginning of the film you see some Super 8 footage of my brother. He looks like he is a few months old,so it must be the end of 1965 or the beginning of ‘66. My parents only shot a total of twelve minutes of home movies and I have mined every frame of it for various film projects. But that’s Ira as a baby and you see my dad holding us up at the very beginning. Then the footage jumped to 1984. That is when I was first getting interested in film. I was shooting Super 8 but also video. I shot in Bali with my dad. So it kind of jumps. But the very earliest footage is from the end of ‘65 or the beginning of ‘66.

SLD: Wow. So its a real labor of love and you said that you committed to making it into a documentary in the early 90s.

LS: That’s right.

SLD: That’s coming up on 30 years. What made you stick with it that long?

LS: I have two answers. One is that I was kind of intimidated by it and so everytime someone in my family would say, “Lynne, when are you going to finish that movie about dad?” I’d just say, “I’m still shooting.” And mostly, when you have long term projects the only person that really cares about it is you. If you dropped it nobody is going to say, “Whatever happened to…” But they were curious because I was so consistent. I always had a camera but it was like “maybe she is just collecting this.” There is also a tendency that it’s so much easier to shoot than to watch. You watch it and you have nostalgia. Or you have regret or a given omniscience. You know what happened to this person and that person and you know how those two people really feel about each other. Like an all-knowing narrator and then you kind of don’t want to pretend that you do have that omniscience. So I kept collecting footage or shooting footage but not watching it. And then about two years ago I said, “I really have to start going through this.” I could see my dad getting older. But I’m getting older at exactly the same rate and so are you.

SLD: Right, right.

LS: So there just comes a point where you say, “If I’m going to do this, I have to devote myself to actually seeing what I have.” So I spent about a year working with my friend who is my assistant and also became the editor while she was learning how to become an editor for books. She is a former student, Rebecca Shapass, and that was a breakthrough. A total breakthrough because instead of it just being my collection of material on my family it became another kind of story that both needed context and also didn’t need context. That became more of a story that people could enter without knowing every single detail. Because I was always wondering how much do people really need to know? How much do I have to flesh this out?

SLD: The film is just over an hour but it felt like you covered quite a bit of ground in that 70-75 minutes. You can tell the editing was done extremely well.

LS: I really didn’t want to do it just chronologically.

SLD: I loved the way you did that. You kind of jumped around, it was beautiful.

LS: I really appreciate that. I edited with Rebecca twelve experimental films (which became the final film) and we let them stand on their own. Then we spent another year trying to figure out the transitions. The structure was not obvious. The structure had to come through a lot of themes and a lot of associations. It couldn’t just be plot driven or life driven or reality driven. So I needed the kinds of relationships, whether it was about love, or rage or forgiveness or all those different kinds of things. I also wanted each of those episodes to kind of function like a little parable in a sense. Like the story of my father having two Cadillac convertibles that were exactly the same. I didn’t understand that that was a really great story until I started putting it together. Because it was like a funny family story. Dad always had those two convertibles, why did he paint them the same color?

SLD: That was hilarious.

LS: Even when you have a story that has a lot of darkness or pain it’s also the hilarious of recognition. Ah, yeah, I could see somebody in my family doing that. Not laughing at, but kind of with.

SLD: That was kind of early on and at that point it hooked me. I was like, “Who is this guy? I want to know more.”

LS: Oh good, yay!

SLD: You’ve done quite a bit of filmmaking over the decades, especially with documentary. I always like to ask filmmakers this question. How do you know when a documentary is done? When is it time to move forward, start structuring it to the final piece?

LS: I make films in probably quite a different way than most people. Rarely do I have a production phase and then a post production phase. I will shoot and then I’ll start to edit. I usually edit from the middle backwards and forwards. So I have to climb my way out of the center of it or of a scene that I know works. Sometime in my films I actually don’t know the ending until the editing stops because that keeps me interested. The process remains really alive. It’s exciting to me if I can keep myself both confused and committed. I don’t really know what this is about. I always say, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever made, and this film I can definitely say that. It’s really like a desperate look for structure. In a lot of documentaries, especially character driven documentaries, people say I have to find the character and then we’ll apply something that comes from literature like a storyline with characters and then a conflict and then a resolution. But I don’t really edit that way or shape things that way.

SLD: That’s really cool. Such an interesting approach.

LS: I actually think the downfall of so many documentaries has been that people impose the expectations and the paradigms of fiction films and I think that is oppressive. It shouldn’t be that.

SLD: That makes a lot of sense. One last question. You’ll be doing a reading at Dolly’s Bookstore on Sunday the 26th.

LS: Thank you for mentioning that!

SLD: The book is called Year by Year. The synopsis sounded fascinating to me. Maybe you could just talk a bit about that.

LS: So I have this new book, its my first book because I’ve been making films for a long time, but I actually have been writing poetry much longer. A lot of my films include writing that comes from my poetry. When I turned fifty I decided to write a poem for every year of my life. I was really interested in that intersection between very public events that you can’t control or some kind of crisis that is beyond your domestic universe or your psyche and when that punctures your private world. So I went back. I was born in ‘61 so I looked at every year between ‘61 and and 2011 and tried to imagine. And also use Wikipedia (laughing), because Wikipedia is extremely helpful. You type 1993 and Wikipedia will tell you every popular song from ‘93, what was going on politically both in the United States and abroad. So when you read those things all of a sudden your memories just come flowing. Most people will say, oh that was the year I graduated from high school, but that’s not necessarily the thing or event that shaped who you are. Like I could tell you that I graduated from high school in ‘79, it was no big deal. But my prom was very interesting because my school was half black and half white and we voted on which band we would have. There were more black students so it was a black band and none of the white kids went, but I went anyway. So that was a big event for me. I’m interested in how that outside dialectic or tension enters your head. I have a poem about the Columbine shooting in ‘99 and a poem about national health care. I have a poem about when Martin Luther King was killed because I was in Memphis and I was just a little child. So that’s how I wrote each one. It does connect to my films because so many of my films deal with history and that intersection with the personal and the public. One of the directors of Slamdance, Paul Rachman, suggested it. He said that there is a bookstore, Dolly’s, that’s really beloved in Park City and its right in the center of town on Main Street, why don’t you do one of your readings while you are here for the festival?

SLD: Thank you so much for your time. I’m looking forward to the premiere and to the reading this weekend.

LS: Thanks for spending time watching it!

https://saltlakedirt.com/f/an-interview-with-filmmaker-lynne-sachs

 

 

 

01/23/2020

The Movable Fest

Slamdance 2020 Interview: Lynne Sachs on a Subject Close Enough to Feel Far in “Film About a Father Who”

By Stephen Saito

Little did the moderator of a documentary panel that Lynne Sachs once sat on think that they were stating something controversial, but opening up the discussion by saying, “Well, let’s start by saying that all great documentaries start by finding a character,” but if they wanted a lively conversation, the experimental filmmaker was going to give them one.

“I said, ‘I totally disagree,’” laughs Sachs, still incredulous at the presumption. “You shouldn’t have to go out and search for a character in order to construct your narrative.”

Sachs could speak from experience since she never had to look far physically to make “Film About a Father Who,” but in telling the story of Ira Sachs Sr., she could never be quite sure that she actually found him, even when he’s introduced sitting in her apartment getting his long, flowing grey mane unknotted in the opening frames of her latest film. While it is no wonder that Sachs Sr., a great raconteur, gave birth to a number of storytellers including “Frankie” director Ira Sachs and “The Secret of the Nightingale Palace” author Dana Sachs, he can be seen as a mystery throughout Lynne’s fragmentary biography, compiled over 30 years, as he would come to have nine children with six different partners.

Although Sachs Sr. could afford to keep all in good shape financially, building a successful business as a developer in Park City, Utah, time was naturally far more difficult to be spread around to his various family members living in different parts of the country and Sachs creates a narrative as alternately slippery and memorable as her central character, giving brief glimpses of her own life with her father as well as her siblings and half-siblings and letting questions of his responsibility towards them linger in the air for the entirety of the picture and beyond. As a story that spans generations, “Film About a Father Who” is also conscious of how one era of a family can messily overlap with another, as Sachs probes her grandmother’s hold on her father after leaving her family to maintain her sense of independence and sees how he’s left others behind to preserve his, and the director’s aesthetic adventurousness truly captures such intangible qualities as influence and support, or lack thereof, in ways that can be deeply felt with voiceover that’s occasionally whispered and images that are superimposed over one another at times.

Remarkably, “Film About a Father Who” will be premiering later this week where it all began in Park City as the opening night selection of the Slamdance Film Festival en route to a New York bow at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight in February. Shortly before, Sachs spoke of the project that’s consumed the better part of her life in any number of ways, working with the technology that’s been available to her over the years to create such a tactile mosaic and turning what she couldn’t bring herself to say into the language of the film.

I know you spent decades collecting footage of this. Were you always conscious of the form you wanted it to take?

Actually, the very first images that I shot in it were the first year I even felt I was a filmmaker. That was in 1984. I was just right out of college. But I made a couple of short films and then I made my first longer form documentary and then in 1991, I said to myself, “I want to make a film about my dad.” And I thought it would take me a year or two. [laughs] I made it with the interest in what extent you could ever understand another human being, so I thought at the time I would make this triptych – I would make a film about a total stranger, and then I’d make a film about a very distant cousin of mine who had been a survivor of the Holocaust and ended up in the remotest Brazil. Those two films were very challenging, but not as hard as making a film about my dad.

I was describing this film to a woman and she said, “Oh you just got together a bunch of home movies, right?” But almost every shot of this movie, I shot with the intention of being in this movie, so I always thought it had a direction to it, not just going into my closet. Also, my brother Ira, who’s a filmmaker, shot some of the footage because there were times when my dad was maybe more comfortable in this kind of guy-guy thing, which is funny, but he may not have revealed as much with me. And then there’s actually quite a bit of the footage that he just shot himself and I would actually call [those] home movies when you have the perspective from him.

How much did you want his presence to be in the film when he’s somewhat of an elusive character?

It was a constant effort and he was a cooperative subject, more so than most people would be, so he didn’t mind my traipsing around with whatever girlfriend he happened to be with. He was quite happy about [filming] in a sense because it gave us a purpose, so he would say, “Are we shooting my movie?” Or he would say, laughing, “We’re losing light” or “It’s magic hour,” these expressions he knew about filmmaking like it was a big production, so in that way, there was enthusiasm, but also kind of a performance side. In conventional documentaries, you sit someone down and ask them questions and then they reflect and they deliver it back, as demanded. That wasn’t the way I was able to capture most of the material from my dad.

Were there epiphanies in placing footage from, let’s say, 1986 next to something from 2012?

That is one of the most exciting parts. I spent the last couple of years shooting and my dad is getting older, so he would actually come and stay with me for two weeks, so all the footage of my dad collecting trash and walking around on the sidewalk is what he does all the time. He’s now not as capable as he was to do that even a year ago, but he loves coming to big ol’ New York City and picking up trash and feeling like he’s tidying up, so there would be points where I thought, “How could I show my father doing things that mean something to him other than [being] out for dinner or my sitting and asking him questions, so then I’d say, “Okay, dad, we’re going to go outside and I’m going to follow you.”

I was able to use this gadget that I could attach to my cell phone so I could follow him and have a really smooth shot. It’s hard to shoot with someone walking by them on the sidewalk, so modern-day consumer technology rose to the occasion. As I kept making this movie with my father, I kept carrying cameras, but I had to keep up with the technology. Film hasn’t changed very much since 16mm, so I was always shooting 16mm and it’s really funny, that was some of the easiest material to work with because the technology wasn’t just disappearing. But the very first footage I shot was on a VHS camcorder and [eventually] I shot in Hi 8 and MiniDV and that’s challenging to then digitize.

Were you conscious of how this would come together aesthetically throughout? Some of the most interesting footage in the film was when you were talking to Diana and Mallory, two of the exes…

Yeah, it’s funny you bring that up because that was shot in 16mm and it looks kind of beautiful, doesn’t it? The camera is kind of my brush, so I’m always aware, but there’s a shot of Mallory, and the first time I shot it, she came out in silhouettes and with the new technology, you can bring out detail, so that’s actually been a really positive thing because I never bring in additional lights. [That shot] uses natural light, which I just think is so much more beautiful. I always like to use what’s available and I like profiles – I actually don’t think people shoot profiles enough. And my husband Mark Street, who’s a filmmaker too, did the sound recording on that with Nagra, the quarter-inch tapes [like you see] in “The Conversation” and all the famous movies where they show people recording sound, so it’s running through a little quarter-inch machine reel to reel and the sound quality was pretty good because it’s right onto the decent audio material and then luckily I took good care of the original 16mm negatives.

One of the strongest through lines of the film becomes the relationship between your father and his mother. Was that evident from the start?

It was always a big part and something that we always wondered [about]. My dad had a pretty difficult childhood being shuffled back and forth between divorced parents, and I don’t mean to be psychoanalytic, but people do things their whole life to apologize for what happened when they were children to reckon with it or to find a sense of closure, and we always wondered if she was trying to make amends. They were tough amends, but I tried to suggest that there was a layering to those relationships [that extended into the present] and my grandmother died at 103, so [it was unusual when] most adult men in their seventies don’t have a chance to still deal with their mothers. [laughs]

I imagine there was always the sense you could film more. Did you know there was the right time to wrap this up?

This was the kind of movie where certain people who knew me well from family members to really good friends who had seen all my movies, they’d say, “Lynne, okay, when are you going to finish the ‘Dad’ film?” The most pat line that I had — but it doesn’t work anymore — was that it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done and [when] anything gets in my way, absolutely anything, I would keep shooting.

But I don’t know how you feel about all the photographs you take or videos you shoot in your life, but I don’t actually necessarily like going back and looking at them. You get sad because you miss the children who are now adults or you miss even more than the people who died, who people were, so all that kind of nostalgia or pathos, I didn’t know how I would deal with it. Once I set my mind to finishing it, one of the amazing things is when I went back, it wasn’t the images, but the sound, that was even more enthralling and I tried to bring that into the soundtrack of the film [because] usually sound is what you gather accidentally — casual conversations that were happening while you were shooting.

So that was the gift when I went through the material and that’s what actually the last few months [of editing consisted of] — I’d go and I’d look at material that I totally dismissed because the images I thought were so bad, and actually one of the things that kept me from making the movie is looking at the footage and being extremely judgmental of my own photography and then I came to this conclusion, which was I was sick of beautiful images. We can see beautiful images any time we want on television or in the movie theaters and the digital image is so available and so pristine that our measure of success with the digital image is often how does it mirror reality, but with the older cameras and the older material, it’s not nearing reality. It’s like much more impressionistic and it’s much more about the sensation of that moment in reality and I started to like that better. I thought, “Oh, I’ve got a lot of ugly images, like tarnished or degraded VHS kept in garages,” but I thought maybe the decay is interesting in a wabi-sabi way, so I decided I liked it.

How did you go about recording your voiceover? It’s wonderfully conspiratorial.

Another challenge of this film was to find my voice in it in a conceptual way – to be not just transparent, but to be expressive and not to keep censoring myself. I was at an artists’ residency in January, it’s called Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York and I had applied to write the narration for this film, but every time I started to write, I scratched it out. I [thought] I’m pretending to say something, but not really, so what I tried to do was get out my recorder, put on my headphones, sit in the dark or wait until nighttime and just start speaking and that was a breakthrough. I couldn’t censor myself. Because there was nobody listening, I just spoke and it’s very different because I thought 99 percent of the time when you speak, you speak for a listener, but this time I wasn’t really. Then I took those audio files, and I sent them to a transcription service and they sent it back to me within 36 hours and then I had the skeleton for working on my voiceover. I felt a lot less inhibited because then I was just tinkering with it, not trying to write it, so it’s like I wrote with my mouth. Ultimately, I did rerecordings [for what you hear in the film], but at least I felt they had more of an authenticity than just pen to paper.

Given your father’s history, it’s wild this will be premiering in Park City. What’s it like bringing this into the world?

Well, I’m nervous. My dad won’t be there because he spends winters in a warmer place, in Florida, but he’s going to come to one of the screenings in New York [later in the spring]. He’s seen the film twice already and he cried, which was the first time I’d ever seen that before, [and while] I’m nervous about Park City, but I also feel like there is an appreciation. My dad lived in this Bohemian way, so some people might say, “Well, I didn’t realize he had nine kids [by] six moms, but we all are actually close as a family, all nine of us, with him. We spend almost every holiday together, so he created this ramshackle family, [but] one of the things I realized [making this] is this whole idea of nuclear family these days, and maybe also going back decades, has more to do with how you feel a connection to other people. Like some of [my family], two of the sisters, I haven’t had a whole lifetime to get to know, but I’m getting to know now and it’s interesting. There’s so many families now that are finding each other through DNA. Ours is just a little different.

“Film About a Father Who” will screen at Slamdance on January 24th at 7 pm and 9 pm and January 27th at 11 am. It will next screen at Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight in New York on February 11th at 8 pm and February 14th at 4:30 pm.

http://moveablefest.com/lynne-sachs-film-about-a-father-who/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

01/23/2020

Filmwax Radio

Ep 595: Lynne Sachs Returns – FILMWAX RADIO

By Adam Schartoff

http://www.filmwaxradio.com/podcasts/episode-595/

[8 mins. 20 secs.] The filmmaker Lynne Sachs makes her 3rd visit to the podcast; she appeared on Episode 328 with her husband Mark Street & again on Episode 515 with cast members from her film “Tip of My Tongue”. She’s back to discuss her most personal film yet, something she’s been working on most of her life, a film about her father Ira Sachs, Sr. Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. “Film About A Father Who” is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.

The film has its world premiere at Slamdance on Friday, January 24th at 7PM & again at 9PM, and then again on Monday, January 27th at 11AM. Visit the Slamdance website for details. The film comes to NYC at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight on February 11th at 8PM and again on Friday, February 14th at 4:30PM. Check MoMA’s website for details. Lynne also has a new book of poetry called “Year by Year Poems” (Tender Buttons Press | 2019). She’ll be making a number of appearances reading from the book: she’ll be at Dolly’s Bookstore in Park City on January 26th, 2:00 PM; at the Greenlight Books in Brooklyn on February 4th, 7:30PM; at McNally Jackson Independent Booksellers in Soho, NYC on February 18th; and participating at a reading & screening as part of National Poetry Month at the San Francisco Public Library on April 18th. Visit lynnesachs.com for more details.

 

01/22/2020

The Park Record

Park City’s enigmatic businessman Ira Sachs is subject of Slamdance opener

By Scott Iwasaki

Slamdance audiences will get a peek into the past 30 years of Park City businessman Ira Sachs Sr. when they sit down for the film festival’s opening night screening of “A Film About a Father Who” on Friday at the Treasure Mountain Inn. When it comes to managing a business you can learn a lot from Robert K. Bratt.

The documentary, by Sachs’ daughter Lynne Sachs, known for her experimental works such as “And Then We Marched,” about the 2017 Women’s March, and ¡Despertar! – New York City Laundry Workers Rise Up,” which documented a protest by laundry workers in New York City in 2018, examines the Park City millionaire’s non-traditional lifestyle.

That lifestyle covers not only his career, which included developing the Yarrow Hotel, now the Doubletree Inn. It also takes a look at Ira’s family, which includes his life’s secrets like the different women in his life who mothered his nine offspring.

Lynne says she had to make the film, because it is her “reckoning.”

“I think it’s kind of a feminist reckoning in that this was not the life I would choose to lead in relationship with these women and my dad,” she said in an interview. “I wanted to respect them. I wanted to recognize the different conditions that brought them into his life, therefore my life.”

In order to do that the filmmaker had to find a place where she would not be judgmental.

“I had to realize people make choices, and find different levels of compassion in order for me to go forward,” she said. “I have plenty of friends who don’t talk with their fathers, because their fathers did things they couldn’t abide by. And I didn’t want that. There are so many things that I adore about my father, so I had to take this whole package.”

Lynne made the decision to make a film about her father in 1991, nearly 30 years ago. She started filming on VHS tapes and switched to 16mm film.

“I would then go back and forth with Super 8,” she said. “Then I’d shoot in Hi8 and then Mini DV and finally digital, because the technology would change. I mean, I was shooting every time I was with him.”

Working with the different mediums posed the logistical challenge of combining them into one cohesive storyline.

“I didn’t want to tell the story chronologically, because that was of no interest to me,” she said. “I did, however, wanted it to run episodically, so each section would have a moment of realization and pathos. I didn’t want that just to come at the end of the whole film.”

Lynne also wanted the audience to experience each discovery she made about her father in the same way she did.

“I wanted to maintain my own naivete, and look as if I was finding out these things about my father at the same time the audience was,” she said. “My father so many layers. He’s one of those people who could function in the mainstream, but isn’t just interested in being there. That’s why he had these other pockets of relationships and connections.”

As a child Lynne learned a little about her father’s lifestyle while the family lived in Memphis before it moved to Park City in the late 1980s.

“We lived a pretty conventional life, but my dad was also friends with all of these artists, and people who did funky, radical things,” she said. “So he let us in and out of those communities.”

Lynne said Ira had an “open door policy in his life.”

“You just never know who would walk in,” she said. “I didn’t know if these people would be staying with us for a long time or just coming over for dinner. That kind of unpredictableness was something I had to get used to.”

Although Lynne had been working on the film for the past three decades, she knew that audiences would eventually see it and learn about some of her family’s dynamics and secrets.

“I didn’t necessarily think that other people would be interested, but I also hoped it wasn’t going to be a film that was just about my relationship with my father,” she said. “I hoped it would be a film about how a child connects with a parent, and the imprint that parent leaves on the child, even though they are very different.”

Making the film also helped Lynne start thinking about herself differently.

“I was no longer just his daughter, but an adult who was trying to figure this man out,” she said.

The decision to submit it to Slamdance was another thing she felt she had to do.

“I’ve been making experimental documentaries for decades now, and I’ve opened other people’s doors by asking them to tell us about their lives,” she said. “So, I felt it was time for me to open my own door and look inside.”

That idea also tried to keep her from finishing the film.

“I felt vulnerable for myself, for my family and for him,” Lynne said. “But he’d opened up to me, and I saw that he made choices that were layered in a search for happiness. Throughout the film you will see my father never said goodbye. He kept saying hello.”

The filmmaker knows that her father’s lifestyle made a challenging film in the #MeToo era.

“But I think it shows the older men in our lives come with pockets of compassion and problems that need to be reckoned with, rather than simplifying them and putting them on a shelf,” she said.

Alina Solodnikova, Slamdance Festival manager, said “A Film About a Father Who,” which was submitted to the Breakout category, is a “brave statement” and needed to be the opening film.

“Lynne has established herself as an experimental filmmaker, and she patiently and delicately has been exploring her family history for 30 years,” Solodnikova said. “She discovered many new facts about a person who is fairly well known in Park City, and who happens to be her own father. The storytelling we thought was incredible, and it was a local story. So there wasn’t a question of whether or not it was going to be our opening-night film.”

https://www.parkrecord.com/entertainment/park-citys-enigmatic-businessman-ira-sachs-is-subject-of-slamdance-opener