Like any memoir, this movie is heavily dependent on the audience connecting with the film’s subject for the narrative to work, and because of Sachs’s obvious passion for the story she is telling, the movie is mostly effective.
This film isn’t therefore about righting wrongs, but exposing facts Ira kept locked away until it either benefitted him or could no longer stay hidden.
What starts out as a typical look at father by a daughter slowly becomes something else as revelations about Sachs’ father begin to muddy the waters and change what she and others think of him. It quickly becomes clear that there are more than one way to see him.
I guess in filmmaking there’s a thin line between voyeurism and intimacy.
When I started making the film, I didn’t know what I was talking about. [Laughs] You can’t be on a mission about your own life. It’s not like writing a novel, and you know what the ending is going to be. I didn’t know that the last two years would go in the direction that it did. I just kept doing it.
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.
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.
The filmmaker Lynne Sachs makes her 3rd visit to the podcast 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.
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 would make a few films that allowed me to “open the door” on a person, group of people or place that I knew little about in order to develop a deeper understanding through my filmmaking. Then, I would turn the camera back on myself and my immediate surroundings to produce more personal, introspective films.
