NEW ONLINE RELEASE Film About a Father Who January 15–31, 2021
As part of a 20-film retrospective of Lynne Sachs, MoMI is pleased to partner with Cinema Guild to bring Film About a Father Who directly to Museum members and patrons to view from home. To support the Museum, please use the link below to watch the film.
Viewing link will be added soon(Tickets: $12/$10 MoMI members). A $30 ($26 members) all-inclusive series pass is available / $20 ($16 members) pass for all repertory programs (not including Film About a Father Who).
Dir. Lynne Sachs. 2020, 74 mins. 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’s 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. With this meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, Sachs allows herself and her audience to see beneath the surface of the skin and beyond the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal. A Cinema Guild Release.
In Film About A Father Who we observe the director’s father, Ira Sachs Senior, over the course of several decades. He is a man both generous and successful, whom we see running a hotel development business from the ski-slopes using an early model cell phone.
That said, we are also told early in daughter Lynne’s ingeniously crafted, searingly honest and ultimately big-hearted film that he defined himself not by work but by the space in-between, a place of largesse and abundance that was generally occupied by a harem of young women with whom he was having concurrent affairs.
His first wife Diane (mother to director Lynne, Ira Jr and Dana) turned a “purposefully” blind eye to his cravings. He wasn’t a faithful swan, we are told. He wasn’t monogamous. He wasn’t suited to marriage. He was more, as is later observed, “the Hugh Hefner of Park City.”
But he was a good dad, it would seem, if somewhat unconventional and both annoying and frustrating at times for his offspring during the film. Director Sachs puts it in grammatical terms. Her mum was stable, with a life punctuated by commas and periods (full-stops). Her dad meanwhile was all question marks and exclamation marks. While her mother’s semi-colon existence suggested organised compartmentalisation, he was a colon, a tool designed to open up onto new vistas. “I loved him so much. I agreed to his syntax, his set of rules,” daughter Lynne concedes.
Of course the more sexual partners your father has, the more half-siblings you are likely to come across, some of whom you may only get to know about when they are in their twenties. By the film’s end there is a fellowship of nine brothers and sisters, each of whom expresses in measured, articulate and non-histrionic terms, the impact of their father on their lives.
Director Sachs explains why the time seemed right to draw this ongoing portrait of her father (35 years in the making) to a close. As part of a film triptych in which she set out to “dive into the thinking of another person”, she had always believed that this would be the easiest to make. States of UnBelonging (2005) was about a complete stranger (a mother and filmmaker killed during a terrorist attack on a kibbutz) while in The Last Happy Day she communicates with its protagonist (a distant cousin of Sachs) via letter.
But Film About A father Who was always more problematic. Despite her father’s cheery countenance, he would always meet her questions with a benign obstinacy. He always had a tendency to answer ‘no’ to questions about his early life, or to claim complete memory loss about many troublesome periods or episodes.
One of the key propellants of the film’s eventual completion was the death in 2015 of Ira Senior’s mother, the centenarian Maw Maw, with whom he had a very complicated relationship. She abandoned the family home with him when he was a young teenager, only for him to be snatched back by his father Harry as they were boarding the train to Memphis. Maw Maw’s decision to carry on without her son represented a Sophie’s Choice moment, we are told.
“There was kind of a loosening in communication, and that was true because that was the time when I met two sisters whom I didn’t know anything about, so it seemed like things were becoming more transparent,” says Sachs. “It all started to fit together. So I thought the pieces are here. Yes, there may be more surprises, but I think that I’ve come to a sense of more clarity now, so I’m ready to do this.”
There was also a cache of film material at her disposal which, despite being an emotional wrench at times, was also decomposing, not that this was a problem in aesthetic terms. “Like old decaying VHS tapes that had been in the garage, I started to see them as interesting, like the texture was compelling and archaeological,” she says. “I came to a point where this film was also giving me the pleasure of the art.”
It would be easy to think about the work as a psychological profile of her father or their relationship, but Sachs is more generous and encompassing than that. Yes, the “reckoning” that she speaks of in the film offered a catharsis for her, one that she experienced through the craft of filmmaking, but there is a collective benefit to her documentary endeavour. “For me the reckoning was that my father stayed very much a part of my life, that I could look at him with clarity, and that I have connections with the siblings who I didn’t know. Now we all get together every Sunday on Zoom, with my dad.”
“I think maybe the film facilitated that in a way, because I listened to everyone who was critically involved, and about a year before I finished I said, this isn’t just my story, this is about a family, so I need to listen to them and I need to hear their angle on it.”
Ira Senior is in his 80s, less fleet of foot now and he doesn’t speak with the same clarity as we see in earlier footage, and he allows his dutiful filmmaker daughter to remove the tangles from his long grey hair. Given his tendency towards secrecy all of his life, what did he think of such a revelatory film, of which he is the focus?
“If you are in your 80s and somebody decides to chronicle or [some would] say memorialise your life, it gives a kind of significance to it,” Sachs responds. “He did say to me that he hopes he does better, and he cried when he saw the film… I don’t think anyone will make a film about my life – or maybe they will, I don’t know – but it gives it a place in the world after you have lived it.”
Returning to the subject of grammar, Sachs responds eagerly to the question as to which punctuation mark best describes her and her films. It’s as if she has been waiting all her professional life to be asked it.
“Ha, I am very interested in ellipses (…), in the dot, dot, dot,” she enthuses. “A lot of the film is constructed around associations rather than chronology – which would have been an obvious way to construct it. The ellipsis is like the fissure between one thing and the other, where you bring knowledge. In grammatical terms, it is interesting because it is like a vessel rather than something explicit and expository. It allows for a lot of participation. It has to be activated by the viewer, the spectator, the audience, because you bring your own energy. It is the idea that you can watch this film in which certain facts are not given, but through ellipses you connect associations or feelings, or your own sense of recognition.”
“So that is the grammatical tool I identify with,” she ends…
………….………….………….…………….
Museum of the Moving Image in New York will present the twenty-film retrospective Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression from January 13-31, 2021. The career-ranging survey, all presented online, will include Film About a Father Who which opens in MoMI’s Virtual Cinema on January 15.
Among other series highlights are three of Sachs’s key early works, Drawn and Quartered (1987), The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991), and Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994), which will be presented in new HD presentations. The last of these is both an intoxicating family travelogue and politically sobering diary of a trip from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. The series will also include the premiere of Maya at 24 (2020), the third edition of Sachs’s temporal portrait of her daughter Maya, which is presented as part of a program of films that document her children over a span of two decades. The full program is included below and available online at movingimage.us/LynneSachs.
Along with the screenings, the Museum will present a new recorded dialogue between Sachs and Assistant Curator of Film Edo Choi, who organized the retrospective, covering the breadth of Sachs’s career.
“Over a 30-plus-year career, Lynne Sachs has charted a formal path defying conventional categorization. Each of her films is a self-reflexive meditation into the psychic origins and intellectual process of its own making, issuing from a space between thought and expression,” says Choi. “This is true of her work as early as The House of Science and as recent as her latest and most personal film so far Film About a Father Who.”
About Sachs’ work, Choi writes: “Immersed in questions of form from her earliest, highly structural works, Sachs went on to embrace a more variegated aesthetic approach, incorporating elements of the essay film as well as observational documentary, while remaining dedicated to the embodied, gestural camerawork of the avant-garde. In her most recent long form works, such as Your Day Is My Night and Tip of My Tongue, she has progressed to a process of open-ended, communal collaboration with her subjects, making them equal partners in an effort to create works of multi-faceted and polychromatic dimension.”
In a normal year—won’t it be sweet when we can retire that phrase from our lexicon?—our screens would be chock-a-block with glittery trailers for holiday movies. Our local festival programmers, meanwhile, would be on hiatus except for the year-end fundraising email, mulling next year’s events.
But everything’s upside down in our ongoing Bizarro World. The only major studio films of the season, Wonder Woman 1984 and Soul, are delayed summer releases that will be viewed, overwhelmingly, on home streaming platforms (HBO Max and Disney+, respectively). Festival wizards, on the other hand, are plying us with rare December programs. And are we grateful.Sponsored
SF Jewish Film Festival 40th Anniversary Hanukkah Celebration Dec. 10–17 Online
The SFJFF canceled its annual big summer bash on account of the pandemic, and this eight-day program (to correspond to the Festival of Lights) is the second online mini-fest assembled by the venerable organization this year. The lineup includes several familiar names, including preeminent Israeli director Eytan Fox’s big-screen return to romantic drama, Sublet. The remarkable Lynne Sachs continues her rewarding adventures in personal, poetic documentary with Film About a Father Who. If you missed the crowd-pleasers Oliver Sacks: His Own Life and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit during their previous Bay Area presentations, you have another chance.
As for new voices, Yossi Atia’s slight slacker comedy Born in Jerusalem and Still Alive expands on his short film of the same name. This debut feature accompanies underachieving 30-something tour guide Ronen (played by Atia) on his free daily walks to the sites of terrorist attacks of the 1990s and 2000s. The premise is subversive, if not taboo, but the movie doesn’t mine either its sociological or political implications. Born in Jerusalem and Still Alive suffers more than any other movie in the festival by not being seen in a theater with a crowd, where the minor-key absurdism and deadpan jokes would build to, if not a cascade, at least a steady trickle.
EXCLUSIVE: Cinema Guild has acquired all U.S. distribution rights to the Lynne Sachs-directed documentary Film About a Father Who, which made its world premiere in January as the opening night film at the Slamdance Film Festival. The film is set to open at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image on January 15, 2021, alongside a retrospective of Sachs’ work. It will also be available in virtual cinemas across the country.
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker 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.
“We’ve long been fans of Lynne Sachs’ films and are very excited to work with her on Film About a Father Who,” said Cinema Guild President Peter Kelly, “It’s a defining work from a fearless and deeply feeling filmmaker and we can’t wait to share it with audiences.”
“I am thrilled to be bringing my most personal and candid film yet to cinema audiences via such an adventurous and thought-provoking distributor as Cinema Guild,” said Sachs.
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. With this meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, Sachs allows herself and her audience to see beneath the surface of the skin, beyond the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.
Film About a Father Who features Ira Sachs Sr. with Lynne Sachs, Dana Sachs, Ira Sachs, Jr., Beth Evans, Evan Sachs, Adam Sachs, Annabelle Sachs, Julia Sachs and Madison Geist.
The deal was negotiated by Peter Kelly of Cinema Guild with attorney Stephen Darren Holmgren negotiating on behalf of the filmmaker.
Lynne Sachs has a resume of 35 films including Tip of My Tongue, Your Day is My Night, Investigation of a Flame, and Which Way is East. She received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first collection of poetry Year by Year Poems. Her recent film A Month of Single Frames won the Grand Prize at Oberhausen 2020.
Cinema Guild’s upcoming releases include Hong Sangsoo’s The Woman Who Ran, Matías Piñeiro’s Isabella and Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 ft. The company’s recent release slate includes Wang Xiaoshuai’s Chinese Portrait, Angela Schanelec’s I Was at Home, But…, and RaMell Ross’s Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening.
Espaços da Intimidade is the title of the third part of the 18th edition of the festival, with a date set between December 3 and 9, and the moment with the greatest national presence.
In this 3rd part of the Festival there are names like Diogo Pereira (“A Vida em comum”), Guilherme Sousa (“O Primeiro Passo da Melomania is a Birra”) and João Pedro Amorim (“the shadows and their names”), who present his films at world premiere (the latter two are still eligible for the Fernando Lopes Award, for the first works). This moment also summons André Guiomar and Paulo Abreu who, after visiting Porto / Post / Doc, arrive in Lisbon to present “A Nossa Terra, Nosso Altar” and “O que não se se”, respectively.
December also features “This is Paris Too”, by Lech Kowalski, “Film About a Father Who”, by the North American Lynne Sachs, and “Narciso em Férias”, by Ricardo Calil and Renato Terra, where Caetano Veloso recalls his personal experience lived during the period of the Brazilian Military Dictatorship. The film will now premiere in Portugal, after being presented in September, at the Venice International Film Festival.
Between January and March, the festival welcomes in Lisbon Oleg Sentsov, Sakharov Prize for Press Freedom 2018, with the film “Numbers” and “Visions of the Empire”, by Joana Pontes (world premiere), again meets Paula Gaitán in “Luz nos Trópicos” (after the passage of “É Rocha e Rio, Negro Leo” in October), and also watches the acclaimed directors Radu Jude, Frederick Wiseman and James Benning return with the presentation of a restored copy of “ Grand Opera: An Historical Romance “.
After a packed room for the preview of “Amor Fati” by Cláudia Varejão, a film that ended the second moment of the festival, Doclisboa continues its journey with many new proposals and in permanent dialogue with the rooms so that all sessions are presented safely and in order to maintain the collective nature of the cinema experience.
Check out the December films here or check the complete program at doclisboa.org .
The Jewish Film Institute, the S.F.-based entity that wasn’t able to present its annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival this past summer due to the pandemic, has devised a special program to mark its 40th anniversary and light up your personal screen with Jewish films for Hanukkah.
From Dec. 10 to 17, JFI will be presenting what it has deemed “eight days of illuminating programs” — including a drive-in movie in San Francisco on opening night, online screenings, a panel and an event for the anniversary.
“Audiences will come together to honor four decades of independent vision,” the JFI said in a statement. In addition to films, the event will be “a celebration that will recognize SFJFF’s enduring history, our supporters and the vibrancy of our community. So let’s raise a glass and light a candle to 40 years of bringing Jewish storytelling to light.”
Things will kick off Dec. 10 at 6 p.m. at the Fort Mason Flix pop-up drive-in with the U.S. premiere of “Howie Mandel: But, Enough About Me,” about the Canadian comedian and actor. The 88-minute film examines Mandel’s life and career, as well as his painful struggles with mental illness. A special JFI interview with Mandel and director Barry Avrich will follow the film.
Tickets are $40 per vehicle for JFI members and $45 for the public, and many Covid-19 protocols will be in effect. Off the Grid will provide food truck options, JFI said, with details to come.
The other films in the 40th anniversary Hanukkah celebration will be available for streaming throughout the festival, most of them followed by a recorded interview with the director and/or principal actor. All are either 2019 or 2020 releases. Here’s a look at the lineup:
“When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit” is a sweeping, two-hour German drama about the rise of Nazism as seen through the eyes of a 9-year-old-girl in Europe. It’s the latest from Caroline Link, director of “Nowhere in Africa,” winner of the best international feature Oscar in 2003.
“Born in Jerusalem and Still Alive” is the festival’s Next Wave Spotlight film, an Israeli comedy selected for its appeal to young adults. Co-directors David Ofek and Yossi Atia, who also stars, find an absurdist angle on the social tensions and political violence of Israel 20 to 30 years ago.
“Sublet” is a romantic drama from Israel that’s been an audience favorite at other Jewish film festivals this year. Directed by Eytan Fox, it tells the story of an American travel writer who goes to Tel Aviv and is drawn into a relationship with a young film student.
“Oliver Sacks: His Own Life,” directed by Ric Burns, explores the life and work of a legendary neurologist and storyteller who had battles with drug addiction, homophobia and the medical establishment.
“Film About a Father Who” is a documentary by Lynne Sachs, who attempts to understand child-to-parent and sibling-to-sibling connections by using interviews, home movies and archival images to probe the personality of her bon vivant father, Ira Sachs Sr., over a period of 35 years.
“A Crime on the Bayou” is a gripping documentary by Nancy Buirski that recounts the true story of a Jewish lawyer who, in 1966 New Orleans, tirelessly pursued justice for a Black teenager wrongfully accused of assault.
Also in the lineup is “Jews in Shorts,” a program of four shorter documentaries from both the U.S. and Israel.
Another free event that can be accessed online at any time during the festival is a virtual panel called “Engines of Truth.” Jewish filmmakers Amy Ziering, Bonni Cohen, Judith Helfand and Roberta Grossman will converse about how various factors — such as Jewish values, identity, culture and feminism — have figured into their groundbreaking documentaries.
The event to celebrate the SFJFF’s 40th anniversary will take place online at 6 p.m. Dec. 12, with guests and remembrances from four decades of Jewish cinema and culture, plus film clips and trailers. This event is free, with a suggested donation.
“This year has made crystal clear to us that community, art and film have the ability to bring light and hope in challenging times,” Lexi Leban, JFI’s executive director, said in a release. “We are not going anywhere and we plan to be around for the next 40 years.”
“JFI 40th Anniversary Hanukkah Celebration”
Dec. 10-17. $10-$15 per online film, $40-$70 for festival online passes. All proceeds support the ongoing work of JFI. For more information, visit jfi.org, email boxoffice@jfi.org or call (415) 621-0568 weekdays 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Q&A with Miguel Ribeiro co-director of Doclisboa and “Film About a Father Who” editor Rebecca Shapass in anticipation of the film’s Portuguese premiere.
Here we give an introduction to their upcoming screening of my film in a real theater in a program titled “The Space of Intimacy” Dec. 3-9th.
Interview with Lynne Sachs, filmmaker of Film About a Father Who, presented in the section Seeking Communities (November 12-18)
You started shooting some of the material in the film some thirty years ago. Did you know at the time you wanted to make a film about your father? Why did you need three decades to achieve what you were looking for?
By the early 1990s, I decided that I would keep one foot in documentary and the other in experimental film. Deeply moved by critical and theoretical writings on reality-based filmmaking, I realized that I needed to invert the field’s tendency to look at others’ lives by turning the camera on myself. With this personal challenge in mind, I decided to shoot a film with and about my father. At the time, I was equal parts fascinated and confused by the free-spirited, iconoclastic, often secretive life that he led. When I told him that I was making a film about him, he seemed intrigued, and off we went. But the “production” was not an easy one. I stopped and started every year. When you are holding a camera, you sometimes see more than you bargain for.
How did your father, and the rest of the family, feel about the project?
It’s funny. I think that being the “star” of a movie these days comes with a kind of allure. My dad always seemed to enjoy his place in front of my camera. He got so into the idea of making a movie with me that he would say Hollywood things like “Lynne, hurry up, we’re losing light!” Clearly, we live in such an image-dominated society that people are more and aware of how they present themselves. It’s in the realm of sound, specifically voice, then, where I think you can find the most intimacy, candor and insight. As you can see in my film, my father was very controlled in terms of what he would say or, probably more accurately, what he could say about his feelings. Maybe that’s generational, common for men of his age. I hate to make these kinds of gendered observations. In terms of working with my eight siblings on this film, I discovered that keeping my camera off, and sitting with each one alone, in total darkness with my microphone and audio recorder was extraordinarily generative. A film director’s eyes function like a mirror for the people in front of the camera – whether they are subjects in a documentary or actors in a narrative. Having the lights out was key to taking my film to a deeper place.
Your footage comes from a variety of media (film, video, digital), but you manage to bring them all together in an aesthetically successful way. Was it a challenge?
Unlike painters, filmmakers need to adapt to constantly changing technologies. For me, there are some constants. I’ve been using the same wind-up Bolex 16mm silent film camera since 1987 but the video cameras I use change pretty much every two years, from VHS to Hi8 to MinDV to high-definition digital to cell phone. Thus, my film is a kind of archeological document of the changing field. The screen image reflects the times, both in terms of context and texture. But unlike the technology, we as subjects remain the same, only we get older, all of us at the same rate, day by day. I decided to edit the film with Rebecca Shapass, a wonderful artist and filmmaker who was a student of mine just a few years ago. Together in my studio, we watched the skin of the film and the skin of our bodies change over three decades. This process was extremely difficult for me, both personally and aesthetically. But, it was so important to share the stories in the film with someone who could have a distance from our story, and who clearly was not going to be judgemental. In addition, Rebecca, who is in her mid-twenties, was able to see the beauty in the older footage and to appreciate the refreshing non-digital wrinkles. We spent the first year editing 12 discrete experimental films that had their own interior shape and structure. We spent the second year pulling these apart and reconstructing them into a single feature-length film.
Your look on your father is very lucid but never judgmental, which I think is a great strength of the film. Was that a difficult balance to strike?
You’ve asked a key question by pointing to the daunting, interior challenge that both nourished my process and stopped me in my tracks. I needed to find a place in my narration for the film that could candidly articulate my rage and my forgiveness. Some cuts went too much in one direction, some in the other. I finished my film during a time in our culture when so many women are reckoning with who they are in relationship to the men in their lives. Our personal investigations necessitate finding a strategy where we can do so many things at once – resist a self-imposed artificial amnesia, be true to our own stories, and go forward.
You may still ignore who your father really is, but what did you learn about family through making this film?
Frankly, I have learned so much about the imprint of family on all of us from audiences who
have watched Film About a Father Who. Despite the fact that I have only interacted with people in real theaters three times since its premiere, more people have written to me (through my website lynnesachs.com) after watching this film than ever before. Virtual screenings, Q and A’s and these email responses are simply part of our lives these days, and the result is that viewers are watching films and seeking out ways to engage one-on-one with their makers. It’s really been extraordinary. To my surprise, I have heard from almost as many men as women, and in each case people are writing to me about the way that my film somehow offers them a way to think about the imprint that their parents have had on them as children and later as adults. This, in and of itself, is more important to me than the fact that they have “learned” something about me or my family. My intention was not to make an exposé but rather a visual essay, a 74-minute cinema experience that ultimately made people think about their own lives and relationships.
What was it like premiering the film at Slamdance, in Park City, where your father lives? It was also one of the last “live festivals” before the pandemic!
Ok, so I am going to tell you a behind-the-scenes story. In December of 2019, Paul Rachman, one of the founders and directors of Slamdance, called me from his car in Los Angeles. He told me that my film had not only been accepted to the festival but that they wanted it to be their Opening Night feature. At first, I was thrilled, but quickly my emotions shifted to fear and worry, for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Paul spent the next few days convincing me that Slamdance would be an exciting and supportive place for my World Premiere. He could not have been more correct. Hundreds of people came to the two scheduled screenings. There was so much interest in the film, they added a third show. More important than the number of people, however, was the special mix in the audience: local family friends, Sundance folks, cinephiles who come to Park City every year, film critics, and festival directors. Of course, I had deep face-to-face conversations with people who had known my father for decades but still discovered new, probably shocking, aspects to his complicated personal life. I also got the chance to talk to film writers, podcasters, and feminist bloggers. My father, who is now 84 and spends the winter in a warmer place, flew to NYC for the second screening of the film in the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight. He has expressed subtle regret at the pain some of his life choices have caused, but this was the life he chose, and he owns it.
Anything else?
I wish I were planning to come to Montreal by car or plane in a few weeks. The only time I have ever been to the city was for Expo ’67, when I was six years old. I was so enthralled by the exhibits, particularly the Telephone Pavilion which featured a 360-degree film screen that surrounded viewers. I just looked up this building and discovered that it was designed by Saskatchewan-born woman architect Dorice Brown. Very cool, especially for that time. I should also add that I got lost at the Expo for an entire day. My parents eventually found me at the police station. Somehow, I did not know I was lost, until they showed up with very relieved faces.
