2020 Directed by Lynne Sachs
From 1984 to 2019, Lynne Sachs shot film of her father, a bon vivant and pioneering businessman. This documentary is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.
USA
Slamdance Film Festival
USA
USA
USA
A girl becomes a filmmaker and ponders why her father was such a mysterious, womanizing enigma. Her seeming endless number of half siblings wonder the same thing. Hopefully the revenue from this film will pay for some therapy.
Poet and experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathers together footage captured over approximately thirty-five years for her documentary, Film About a Father Who.
The documentary assesses her relationship with her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a Park City, Utah businessman who had numerous wives, countless girlfriends and an ever-expanding list of children. The footage has been shot in a mixture of formats and linearly jumps backwards and forwards through time, with the raw footage distinctly assuming the appearances of its segregated era.
It's an extraordinary amalgamation of the archival material, with Ira's life materialising amidst the patchwork of footage as Lynne endeavours to exhume what propelled him forwards. Ira has embodied contradictions to Lynne for virtually the entirety of her life, with…
A short meditation on the unknowable male stoicism that's perpetuated by men of a certain era and age. Specifically, Lynne Sachs pieces together 35 years of home movie and impromptu documentary footage of her father in an attempt to better understand a man who spent his life trying to avoid any one person understanding him.
This fell somewhere in-between intriguing and "who cares" for me–I have to admit I'm fatigued by portraits of flawed, selfish men who care more for the pursuit of pleasure than everything else that comes with it. But I'm only human myself and begrudgingly I did find it interesting to put myself in Lynn's shoes and really ponder what it might have been like to have…
watched with my mom & brother. exploration of intergenerational trauma...my mom spoke to Lynne over WebEx. now my mom wants to make a movie :)
Circling the memory image. A matter of negotiating an approximation that produces some strong moments, but remains less radical than filmmaker seems to hope so. The movie seems to be searching for a rupture that never quite arrives.
Sat down to watch while we were more than 20 minutes in and kept nodding off through the whole thing.
Didn’t even try to pay full attention as this did not capture my interest at all. Nothing about this was particularly novel and why should we bother caring about this woman’s shitty father??
Also, I just hate movies (thinking mostly about narratives, but I guess applicable to docs too) wherein you’re shown this awful man, but it’s supposed to be understood he’s a terrible person. But what’s the point of illustrating this fact?? I just don’t understand the gain of sitting and watching someone acting horribly.
I appreciated what the filmmaker was going for more than the final results, but I suspect this would resonate very strongly with people who can identify with the central issue of a parent hiding things from them and living a double life.
Lynne Sachs used footage shot over a period of more than thirty years, across a variety of formats, to attempt to uncover who her father really was, in a sense that escaped her throughout her life. It's a cinematic therapy session, and moments of it can be very moving, though it felt to me like something bigger was always just out of Sach's reach, as it surely must have felt throughout her life as a child, adult, daughter…
If I told you a true story about a businessman/resort developer with multiple children from multiple wives and girlfriends, the first name to pop in your head would be…
Incredible, incredible film and portrait of an eccentric father. Bookended an amazing lineup of films programmed by PleasureDome which kicked off with Maya at 24. I laughed so loud throughout the whole thing. The filmmaking and unfolding of the story is nothing short of incredible. So brave and personal and honest. Lynne left the theatre partway through, I could only imagine how heavy watching this film she worked on for thirty five years must've been for her. Made me think a lot about my own life, relationships, and family, as well as a couple other films about fathers I had watched earlier this year and really lingered in my head--The Meyerowitz Story, Aftersun, One Fine Morning. During the post-screening conversation,…
Boy, we sure do bend over backwards to accommodate shitty men and their shitty behaviour, don't we? Here's a bad film that commemorates a garbage human being, a documentary that tries - pointlessly - to understand a shit father's shit actions without condemning him. Foolish, undoubtedly, but also revealing as to just the lengths that we'll go to try to absolve a person via fruitless investigation, fruitless understanding. There's a terrific book by Lundy Bancroft called "Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men" that is basically required reading, yet can quickly be summarized when answering its titular question: because it's pleasurable. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO gives a broad overview of an abusive, thoughtless, uncaring dipshit all while overlooking the obvious truth: he did what he did because he enjoyed it. Not rocket science. Some people are just vile, and those are people we'd be best without.
