02/04/2020

Directed by Women

Lynne Sachs: Exploring the Making of ‘Film About a Father Who’

By Barbara Ann O’Leary

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker whose work deserves the serious attention of film lovers. As she prepares to bring her new documentary Film About a Father Who to MoMa’s Doc Fortnight, following its world premiere last month at Slamdance, she took time to converse with #DirectedbyWomen about her multidecade filmmaking project, the complexity of documenting the life of her non-conforming father, and how the film relates to her larger body of experimental and documentary work.

Seek out Film About a Father Who… and her earlier films as well.

DBW: Lynne, thanks for your patience. It’s taken me some time to collect my thoughts. Watching Film About a Father Who felt a bit like looking through a kaleidoscope or seeing things reflected in a fun house mirror. The story unfolds in unexpected ways. I know it will stay with me for a long time. You’ve been working on this film for 35 years! How did you finally know it was time to complete it and share it with the world?


LS: It’s very interesting to me to hear you use the word kaleidoscope rather than some other form of viewing device, like a camera or a telescope, for example. For me telescopes are inherently voyeuristic, often providing the one seeing a kind of power over the one seen. So, the fact that you experienced the fragmentation, the color and the disorientation of a kaleidoscope indicates to me that you witnessed some aspects of my story quite clearly, while others appeared refracted, very much removed from the 20/20 reality we usually expect from a documentary. My film is still very, very new, so I anticipate learning more and more about what I made from viewers, particularly people like you who are willing to articulate their experience to me. While I had never planned to create the sensation of a “fun house mirror,” I am familiar with the architecture of those spaces. They are places where you catch a reflection of yourself and, in that first moment, you actually do not even recognize that it is you. Yes, I think you are spot on, that is probably the filmic experience I have created, whether I am at ease with it or not.

DBW: The film is about your father, but not simply about his relationship to you. It’s an ever- expanding look at fatherhood from many perspectives. This is clearly not a story that was understood in advance. It evolved as your awareness about your father and his life choices evolved. Can you share insights into how you coped with what feels like waves of revelation… without giving away any of the many surprises the film holds, of course? We don’t want to spoil the experience for viewers.

LS: Throughout my life, I have had to deal with “discovering” things about my dad that I did and did not like. There were times when I celebrated his break-all-the-rules approach to life, and other times when I wished he would simply be like every other dad in middle America. When I read Freud’s psychoanalytic schematic which divided the self into the id, the ego and the super-ego, I had one of those breathless aha moments. My father just simply did not have a super-ego; he did everything his own way. This sounds very cerebral, I suppose, but once I came to this understanding I was able to better appreciate his radical sensibility. I was also able to embrace my own rage and frustration as a woman. I swore to myself that I would never place myself in a position of dependency that he seemed to expect from the women who surrounded him. In “Film About a Father Who”, I tried to explore these evolving feelings through my own voice-over narration and through the shaping of my images, as well as by listening to my three brothers and five sisters. We all, in our own way, had to find our own resolution.

DBW: Can we talk for a moment about “introspection”? Several times in the film your father is described as not being introspective. And I think about how crucial introspection is to your work as an experimental filmmaker. I’m curious. Do you experience this film as a way for you to come to terms with your own deep introspection?

LS: About a year ago, I was taking a walk on the beach with filmmaker Alan Berliner, a dear friend who made a film on his father in 1997 which is called “Nobody’s Business”. His father was resistant to his son’s filmmaking endeavor. He expressed his antipathy with humor, anger and pathos. Alan and I shared stories, laughing about the fact that while our fathers were nothing like William Kunstler or Louis Kahn (famous fathers whose children made films about them), we still found them fascinating, at least as their children. In contrast to Alan’s curmudgeonly dad, my father was more than willing to be the “subject” of my movie, he just didn’t want to talk about himself. My camera had to witness his actions instead.

Earlier you mentioned that the film looks at the nature of fatherhood. In that context, it may also be my attempt at grappling with the nature of masculinity, at least how it was delivered to many of us in the later- half of the 20th Century. Thank goodness, men are finally being given some platform from which to express their emotions. I would have to say that “introspection” is inherent to all human beings, but being willing to express that, in writing, in a film, in a poem, in conversation feels so risky. I am not (yet) a let-it-all-hang- out kind of person, so when I actually hear my own voice in this film saying what I might not have ever even said to my closest friends, it’s scary. But the time was right.

DBW: The film was shot in so many different formats. I’d love to hear about how that evolved and particularly about how that impacted the editing process. It gives the experience such a rich feel of moving through time.


LS: I appreciate your attention to the texture of the film. I have always loved and been proud of the 16mm film material that I shot throughout the entire project. For example, in 1992 I shot the sync-sound footage of my father’s second wife and his girlfriend at the time with me using an Arriflex camera and my new boyfriend filmmaker Mark Street recording sound on a 1/4” reel-to-reel Nagra. That was probably one of our earliest dates, and we’ve been together ever since. When I saw that film footage for the first time, I knew it was both haunting, compelling and extraordinarily beautiful. And yet, I was scared to use it, so the film cans followed me for 28 years – from San Francisco to New York to Florida to Baltimore and back to NYC until I finally decided I was ready to look at and listen to the material, as if a straight shot back through the decades.

Another reason the film took so long to make was that I thought so much of my earlier video material was ugly, poorly shot, deteriorated, simply not as “realistic” and precise as the digital imagery with which we have all become accustomed. Not until I started to watch and transcribe the tapes with my editor, artist Rebecca Shapass, did I decide that the fact that this degraded media felt authentic, more impressionistic, painterly, and expressive. Like we all do with our faces as we look over and over in the mirror, I ultimately accepted the bumps, wrinkles and scars as signs of a life lived.

DBW: Since watching the film I revisited some of your work from the 1980s. And I’m thinking particularly about Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning. This new film feels like a continuation of that theme across time. This film is interwoven with the work that was unfolding across the past 35 years, I suppose. Looking back do you notice ways that this project was informing your work on other films you’ve made since you first started this one?

LS: Wow, Barbara, that is incredible! Never ever would I have made the connection between those two films, but I think you are so right. Two of my very first films, Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986) and Following the Object (1987) were made during a time in my life when I was just beginning to figure out how filmmaking was going to work for me as an artist. As a feminist, I was profoundly resistant to objectifying anyone, male or female, on screen. I was also thrilled by the way that film, as compared to painting, photography or poetry, could explore the lives of people – real or invented – whom I was trying to depict or understand better. I guess I have been working on that exercise, so to speak, ever since.

DBW: The title of the film is inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s A Film About a Woman Who… Can you share with us something of your experience being part of a community of women creating experimental film? Perhaps that’s too vast a question, but I’m thinking about how often women’s filmmaking work has been under seen and undervalued. The act of clearly connecting your work with work that has gone before seems like an act of power and a commitment to ongoing dialogue.

LS: I am thrilled and honored to mention some of the women filmmakers who have inspired me as an artist. I rarely do things in chronological order but I think in this case it might be interesting. When I was 20 years old, I lived in Paris for a year. It was there that I realized that there were women in the world who were directing their own films. I beheld the work of Chantal Ackerman and Marguerite Duras and never looked back. Soon after, while living in New York City, I discovered the films of Lizzie Borden, Bette Gordon and Meredith Monk. I went to graduate school in San Francisco, and there I actually had the chance to work with Peggy Ahwesh, Barbara Hammer, Karen Holmes, Babette Mangolte, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Gunvor Nelson. Now, as a life-long filmmaker with comrades from across the country, I am indebted to a long list of makers including Zeinabu Irene Davis, Jeanne Finley, Sasha Waters-Freyer, Michelle Handelman, Irene Lusztig, Kathryn Ramey, Jennifer Reeves, and M.M Serra, for sharing their passions and enthusiasms with me and the rest of the women in our community.

DBW: Film About a Father Who had its world premiere as the opening night film at Slamdance this month. What a great place to bring the film out into the world. And then on to an NYC premiere at Doc Fortnight at MoMA. It’ll be interesting to see how those very different film communities respond to this complex, multi-layered work.


LS: Historically speaking, these two festivals do represent two different approaches to filmmaking. I think that the indie film community that, for the most part, is found at Slamdance is becoming more open to formal experimentation, using hybrid approaches that shake up established views of film practice and genre. And I think, more and more people are becoming interested in film as an art. In its newly enlarged space, The Museum of Modern Art has embraced the moving image like never before, finally celebrating film and media alongside painting and sculpture in a way they have never done before. It’s a profound shift in the zeitgeist. It will be exciting to see how this is manifested in their 2020 Documentary Fortnight.

DBW: I’m sorry I won’t be there in person to celebrate with you. Will be with you in spirit. Is there anything else you’d like to share before we wrap up?


LS: When I first started teaching film, I would give my students a questionnaire and ask them to write about their favorite directors. Male or female, they NEVER wrote about women “in the directors’ chair.” Then I started asking them to write about their favorite male director AND their favorite female director. For the most part, they would complain that they did not know any women directors. Yes, that has changed by the year 2020, but not enough. The best known female directors got their start as actresses. People knew their faces first. By bringing attention to women directing on your site, you will succeed in changing this disconcerting state of disequilibrium in our field and in society at large. For this, and for these stimulating questions you have asked me, I am grateful.

DBW: Thanks so much for taking time to communicate about A Film About a Father Who. It means a lot.
Documentary Fortnight 2020:
MoMA’s Festival of International Nonfiction Film and Media https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/6412

https://directedbywomen.com/lynne-sachs-exploring-the-making-of-film-about-a-father-who/

01/31/2020

Criterion Collection

Scorcese and Schrader, Ghatak and Godard

By David Hudson

As Slamdancewrapped last night, the grand jury award for best narrative feature went to Heather Young’s  The portrait of a woman in her sixties who takes on more pets than she can handle won the FIPRESCI Prize when it premiered in Toronto last fall. This year’s Slamdance opened with Lynne Sachs’s Film About a Father Who, an exploration of familial bonds and tensions. The film will screen on February 11 as part of MoMA’sDoc Fortnight, and Ira Sachs, Lynne’s brother and the director most recently of Frankie, calls Film About a Father Who “one of Lynne’s most searingly honest works.” She discusses its making at the Talkhouse, and in a piece for Grasshopper Film, she writes about the impact the work ofJean-Luc Godard has had on her own: “Risk became my task and not my nemesis.”

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6805-scorsese-and-schrader-ghatak-and-godard

01/31/2020

ComingSoon.net

CS Interview: Lynne Sachs on Personal Journey in Film About a Father Who 

One of the most compelling and buzzed-about features to debut at this year’s Slamdance film festival in Park City, Utah is Lynne Sachs’ documentary Film About a Father Who and ComingSoon.net got the opportunity to talk with the filmmaker to explore the very personal project that focuses on the connection a child has to their parents and how it shapes them into who they will become.

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.

When it came to diving into this tale and learning of her father’s web of secrets, Sachs didn’t view it as wanting to tell a story but would rather become engaged in the material in a “documentarian way” as she followed him around with a camera asking him questions.

“It sort of made that collaboration between me and my father more, in his mind, serious or professional or fun because it was like a creative thing that we were doing instead of just a home movie,” Sachs described. “Years later, once you’ve lived that life, it’s like the story becomes something that unfolds in a way that takes on the shape and the structure. But at the beginning, it was just that I had this very interesting dad that I knew from way back when, day one, and sometimes it was challenging to have a dad who’s so different from everybody else’s. But then, when I became an adult, I said ‘Hey, maybe I was lucky that I had a father who didn’t play by the rules  and that had an imprint on me.”

Sachs found that this not playing by the rules mentality her father had with life would sometimes bleed over into interviewing him on camera, as he was known to give pushback regarding certain questions she would ask.

“I’d say he was cooperative and he was a collaborator, but in a way, maybe I’d say he set up the rules,” Sachs said. “It wasn’t until much later that I kind of got the picture that my father was, in a sense, a performer or an actor on multiple stages. I just didn’t know how many stages he was being himself, but himself in various ways. I kind of realized that it was a bit like a Cubist painting, a Picasso painting, where you’re never really just looking at one façade, you have multiple façades, so it just took me years to understand that.”

Diving into her father’s life and secrets was a fairly emotional time for Sachs, learning about the multiple women he kept secret from her and her siblings, as well as him having fathered children with said women. Exploring this situation, Sachs describes, was essential to tying together the themes of how one’s place is tied to their connection to their parents.

“When you look at a photograph and you have the darkest blacks and you have these white, well-lit areas, and then you have all of the scale in between,” Sachs said. “I and my siblings, too, we had a lot of low moments because as a child or as an adult, you come to certain stages of your life where you think you might not understand who you are, at least as a child. Even if you’re 30 or 40 or 50, you’re still someone’s child and you understand it. If it keeps changing, it’s very unsettling, and it can be like a seismic reaction. So in some ways, the film helped me to kind of calibrate that and to work through it and to know that I’m my own person. So that’s a very mythic thing to say, I am separate from my parents, I know he or she is there, but I am separate. So then, if I can find that, and maybe I found that through the making of the film, then I could move on. It’s been very interesting to see how many people, no matter what age, are still trying to reckon with who they are in relationship to where they came from.”

Having started the documentary in ’84, Sachs began shooting it on 16 mm film and as technology evolved over the years she would eventually transition to 8 mm film for some of its filming but found herself returning to the older tech frequently.

“The only kind of camera that is consistent throughout the whole film is 16 mm film, the only really stable material is 16 mm film,” Sachs said. “Even knowing this from being in the film business or industry, everybody keeps saying film is dead, we can now say tape is dead but film still exists. That material to most people’s eye looks the most beautiful, so even as the technology becomes more and more sophisticated or state of the art, there is a kind of lushness and a kind of aesthetic pleasure that you get from film. There is a scene in the film where I do these interviews with my father’s second wife and one of his girlfriends, and that was shot in 16 mm with sound. That is a lot of equipment because I was using a big 16-mm camera and this kind of very professional audio and then video came in and we were all saying, ‘Oh, now it’s easy, now it’s all in one camera, sound, and image.’ But the problem is you compromise the quality of the image and the beauty of it for the ease of it, so I was always going back to 16 mm because I was really drawn to the texture of the image.”

With a lot of material and different styles of shooting over the years, Sachs took her time pouring over everything and putting it all together, finding that even some of what she considered flaws actually translated into a very helpful style of filmmaking for her themes.

“When I was watching the material, it took a year to really watch all of it and I transcribed everything,” Sachs recalls. “I was very, very critical of some of my shooting because I said, ‘Oh, the camera was shaking or why was I paying attention to what was being delivered to the table rather than what the person who would be —all these things that one does when in real life. Then I thought, maybe it becomes more personal — it’s not that I was trying to make excuses, but maybe it brings this connection between the person behind the camera and the person or whatever’s happening in front of the camera.”

https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/1120502-cs-interview-lynne-sachs-on-personal-journey-in-film-about-a-father-who

The Daily Buzz from Sundance: Day 4

1/30/20

Day four of Slamdance and Sundance coverage includes a segment with the girls of TAHARA, a narrative feature about the teenage complications of lust, social status, and wavering faith. Director Olivia Peace, writer Jess Zeidman, and actresses Madeline Grey DeFreece and Rachel Sennott join the Daily Buzz for a fun conversation about this crowd-pleasing Jewish film. We speak with filmmaker, Lynne Sachs, about her opening night Slamdance film, FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO. It’s a “personal meditation” on her father, Ira Sachs, who was also a prominent businessman in Park City, UtahWe also speak with Justin Simien and actress Elle Lorraine regarding the “Midnight” film about a scalp trauma, BAD HAIR. There’s one other roundtable with Greek-born French actress, Ariane Labed, and Slamdance Episodic participants, Scout Durwood and Kacy Boccumini. We talk to these ladies about OLLA, the directorial debut for Ariane Labed, and TAKE ONE THING OFF, a series of episodes that blend comedy and music, from director, writer, and star Scout Durwood and producer Kacy Boccumini. The two films seem so different, but there are so many similarities. You’ll have to listen to find out how it all connects!

http://kcpw.org/blog/daily-buzz/2020-01-30/the-daily-buzz-from-sundance-day-4-1-30-20/

01/29/2020

The Fog of Truth

Episode 801: Slamdance 2020

By Chris Reed and Bart Weiss

https://www.fogoftruth.com/current-news/2020/1/29/episode-801-slamdance-2020

Welcome to Season 8! In this episode, we invite back our old friend and cohost Summre Garber to talk about the documentary slate at the 
2020 Slamdance Film Festival, where she is co-captain of the documentary- features program. We learn what she is up to now and hear about her favorites at this year’s fest. In addition, Bart and Chris interview the directors of two of those movies, Film About a Father Who (Lynne Sachs) and Jasper Mall (Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb). Enjoy! As always, you can and the audio of the episode on our “episodes” page, on Apple Podcasts and other sites.

01/26/2020

KUER

Slamdance Opener Explores The Dual Life of Eccentric Park City Developer

By Jon Reed

Park City got a glimpse into the complicated personal life of a local legend Friday. The flamboyant developer and entrepreneur Ira Sachs Sr. is profiled in a documentary that premiered opening night of the Slamdance Film Festival.

“Film About A Father Who,” directed by Ira’s daughter Lynne Sachs, is an experimental film that weaves footage of her family — shot between 1984 and 2019 — into a portrait of a man who, while charming and gregarious publicly, is depicted as emotionally stunted and difficult to connect with in private. A serial womanizer, he fathered nine children with six women and had countless girlfriends.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, the film offers a daughter’s unique perspective on the relationship between powerful men and the women in their lives.

“I had to figure out, well, do I ignore that or do I say — that actually is similar to what a lot of young women go through?” Lynne said. “They try to see, well, what is the connection between how my father is in the world and the men you want to be with or the men you date?”

Ira, now 83 and living in Florida, first came to Park City in the 1970s. He moved there full-time in the mid-80s, and quickly became a local fixture. He was the driving force behind a number of significant developments in the area, including the city’s first two-story hotel, the Yarrow on Park Avenue, which is now the DoubleTree Hilton. He was also known for his generosity, delivering food to local homeless shelters and bringing winter coats to public schools every winter.

Lynne said though that Park City never quite lost the bohemian exuberance it had when her father first showed up.

As for what she’d like viewers to take away:

“I hope I’ve created something that allows people to feel compassion for people who aren’t perfect, who make choices that are not their choices,” she said.

“Film About A Father Who” is playing as part of the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City. The last screening is Monday, Jan. 27 at 11 a.m. Slamdance runs alongside the Sundance Film Festival, featuring independent films with budgets of less than $1 million and without U.S. distribution deals.

Despite his presence in the community, Ira appears guarded in the film. He’s reluctant to answer personal questions, often deflecting with a joke or a shrug. And while Lynne said her father has always been supportive of her and her career goals, he rarely gave that same kind of support and attention to the other women in his life.

“I think it’s a film that asks us what do we as women want from the men we attach ourselves to?” she said. “And what do we sacrifice [in the process]?”

For Park City residents who know Ira, either personally or by reputation, he might also serve as a parallel to the city itself. It began as a mining town in the 19th century but has transformed into a destination for the rich and famous, both as a ski resort and the site of the country’s largest film festival.

“[My father] loves to hike [and] he loves to look at the Wasatch Mountains, but he also is a developer,” Lynne said. “That’s the contradiction of a place like Park City, when people say, I love the mountains and the trees, but I need a seven-bedroom house that has heating in every single room.”

https://www.kuer.org/post/slamdance-opener-explores-dual-life-eccentric-park-city-developer#stream/0

01/26/2020

Hammer to Nail

Film About a Father Who

By Christopher Reed

Ira Sachs, now in his 80s, started adult life out as a seemingly content married father of three, before transforming himself, later, into a successful real-estate developer dubbed “the Hugh Hefner of Park City.” That’s Park City, Utah, where Sachs has opened a number of properties, including one that is now the DoubleTree by Hilton Park City (formerly The Yarrow), never losing the hippie vibe he cultivated in the 1960s, his slowly graying locks ever flowing. Buildings are not all he developed, however; accumulating lovers as the years wore on, he also built a growing family, not all the members of which were known to the others. Now, one of his daughters from that original marriage, the experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs (Tip of My Tongue) – whose brother, Ira Sachs Jr., is also a director (of Little Men, among others) – has completed a documentary, Film About a Father Who, about her father’s complicated life and her evolving relationship with him. It’s a fascinating probe into the mysteries of the human mind and heart.

We begin with the man today, Lynne cutting his hair, before launching into a past documented via footage shot by Sachs père, Sachs fils and, bien sûr, Sachs fille, among others, from 1969 to now. In a variety of formats, each textured with the look of its respective era, we jump backwards and forwards through time, watching the family mature. Beyond the primary subject, there is his own mother – affectionately called Maw-Maw – with whom Ira Sr. has a close bond, though not so close that he tells her of all the children he’s fathered, lest she cut him off from his expected inheritance. There are also all Lynne’s siblings, full and half, as well as Lynne’s mother and some of her father’s many (increasingly much younger) romantic and sexual partners from yesterday and today. In interviews and many bits of observational footage, Ira appears to have but one obsession: women. But they like him, too, so where’s the harm? That, indeed, is the question.

For Ira Sachs is not just a narcissist: he’s a warm and giving person who is capable of love…if not for very long. As Lynne and her brothers and sisters grapple with their father’s legacy, they are forced to confront the fact that someone who doesn’t set out to cause damage can nevertheless inflict much of it. He’s a man with many shades of gray, for sure. Beyond this multifaceted portrait, however, A Film About a Father Who is also remarkable for its terrific synthesizing of the wealth of archival material. Given the breadth of the narrative span, it’s extraordinary that the director fits the story into a compact length of just 73 minutes, yet, masterfully, she does. Given her extremely personal connection to the story, it’s astonishing how deeply she investigates the good and the bad in a person she clearly loves. This gripping documentary, the opener of the 2020 Slamdance Film Festival, speaks its truth and speaks it beautifully. Let it be heard.

– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)

https://www.hammertonail.com/reviews/film-about-a-father-who/

Slamdance Review – Film About a Father Who: A Complicated Legacy
Pop Culture Reviews
By theratchetblack
January 25 2020
https://popculturereviews.com/2020/01/25/slamdance-review-film-about-a-father-who-a-complicated-legacy/

Director: Lynne Sachs
Editor: Rebecca Shapass
Composer:  Stephen Vitiello

Film About a Father Who is visionary filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ method of processing her father’s complicated legacy. The opening of the film — a comb pulled gently through the mass of Ira Sachs’ hair by disembodied fingers — subtly states its purpose and challenge.

Sachs tells her father as he protests her ministrations — unravelling knots,  unweaving the complex — this is the goal of Film About a Father Who, and audiences will be split as to the success of this project. Sachs begins with grainy home video footage that serves a literal and analogical purpose. The first purpose is to literally showcase her earlier experiences with her father, and the second, to replicate the hazy nostalgia of childhood. Within minutes, the outline of the tangle of Ira Sachs begins to emerge: fast moving and witty, reticent and loquacious by turns, quintessential capitalist with defiant hippie pretensions — driven by money but not quite given over to it. Sachs approaches her subject with a patient curiosity, weaving different characters into the story with aplomb.

A signature flourish of Film About a Father Who is the film’s clear-eyed but sympathetic look at perhaps the biggest influence on Ira Sachs’ life: his mother. Lynn Sachs takes great pains to show us that the specter of his mother looms over every portion of her father’s life. Ira’s mother serves as kind of an example of the expectations and failures that make Ira such an enigma to his offspring. Although themes of failure, dishonesty, avarice, crave-ness and selfishness make up the core of this story, Sachs never loses sight of the humanity of her subject. Even when full bore denunciation is seemingly obligated by the oft infuriating narrative, Sachs retains an emotional reserve. In this sense, Sachs imitates her subject — this reserve serves Sachs well, as the cast of characters continually expands, with ex-wives and girlfriends, secret siblings, and family members all making appearances.

Quotes from the assembled characters could easily read like witness statements in the indictment of a protagonist’s character, but for the most part, Sachs situates them so firmly within the narrative of Ira Sachs that she takes the sting out of their revelations. In one particular interview Sachs veers uncomfortably close to emotional manipulation but with good reason. Overall, Sachs’ artistic distance from her subject allows her to present the most incendiary moments in an almost matter of fact way, enabling the viewer to make an emotional connection based off the information alone.

The music, orchestrated by Stephen Vitiello is note perfect. Whimsical when necessary, ominous at times, and occasionally inquisitive — the music always adds and never detracts.  Sachs also invests this movie with several subtexts worth mentioning: how the sexual revolution unequally empowered men and women, and how ‘lads’ culture defenestrates boys — while never losing sight of her main objective. In certain moments Sachs allows us to see the whirring gears of the documentary, taking us behind the curtain. This self-conscious artificiality adds to the artistic pretensions of the movie and establishes Film About a Father Who as a documentary of both style and substance. Lynne Sachs approaches this documentary with the mentality of an artist, and the attentiveness of a daughter — the result is a searing look at the depravity of toxic masculinity, the destructiveness of secrets and the resiliency of the human spirit. 

01/24/2020

Disappointment Media

Slamdance 2020: FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO — A Personal and Experimental Memoir

By Sean Boelman

http://www.disappointmentmedia.com/reviews/slamdance-2020-film-about-a-father-who-a-personal-and-experimental-memoir

In the film, Sachs uses thirty-five years of footage shot across a variety of mediums and situations detailing the life of her father, a businessman from Park City, Utah, and his relationship with his family. 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.

The most interesting thing about this film is the morally ambiguous way in which the filmmaker presents her father. Similar to any parent-child relationship, there are plenty of ups and downs, and Sachs does a good job of representing these realistically. Over the course of the movie, viewers will see Sachs as her opinion of her father shifts based on his actions in the moment.

Ultimately, the film does feel like it starts to lose a bit of steam in the middle, but that is because of the extremely unorthodox narrative structure of the movie. While there is an arc in the film, it isn’t made

The main idea that Sachs explores in her film is the obligation that a person has to their family. On one hand, this serves as a document as to who her father was, but the movie is even more effective when it is a complex examination of the role that her father played in her life. The other portions of the film are compelling, but feel a bit more commonplace.

Often it seems like Sachs intended the movie to be a much more emotional experience than it actually is. It is evident that making this film was an important part of Sachs’s own growth, as it allows her to put her feelings to words, but those emotions do not extend to the audience as they likely should.

Unfortunately, this is caused by something that is also one of Sachs’s biggest strengths: her visual style. Sachs has an undeniable command of the craft, and she obviously knows how to tell a story in a visually impressive way. However, the fact that this film feels so aesthetically-driven distracts from some of the humanity that it contains.

Lynne Sachs’s newest documentary Film About a Father Who has some very interesting parts, but it likely could have benefitted from another pass. Still, Sachs’s talent makes this a documentary worth seeing.

Film About a Father Who debuted at the 2020 Slamdance Film Festival which runs January 24-30 in Park City, UT

http://www.disappointmentmedia.com/reviews/slamdance-2020-film-about-a-father-who-a-personal-and-experimental-memoir