By Dino-Ray Ramos
December 3, 2020
https://deadline.com/2020/12/cinema-guild-acquires-lynne-sachs-documentary-film-about-a-father-who-ira-sachs-sr-1234649756/
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.