CINE-FILE SELECTS: 
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO
By Kathleen Sachs
Friday, February 5th- Thursday, February 11th, 2020
https://www.cinefile.info/cine-list/2020/02/05/021121?rq=lynne%20sachs

In partnership with film distributor Cinema Guild, Cine-File is presenting a virtual screening of independent/experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ 2020 documentary feature FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO. The film is available to rent at the link below for $12, with half the proceeds going to Cine-File (funds will be used for general expenses, future programming, and to provide honoraria to our contributors). The film is also available via our friends at Facets Cinémathèque.
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Lynne Sachs’ FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here and through Cine-File here.

In his Odes, Horace wrote, “For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer.” It’s hardly an esoteric dictum, but nevertheless, it’s duly reflected in experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ wholehearted documentary portrait of her father, Ira Sachs Sr. Something of a longstanding work-in-progress, the film draws from decades of footage shot by Sachs, her father, and her filmmaker brother, Ira Sachs Jr. (whose own 2005 film FORTY SHADES OF BLUE was inspired by the same so-called “Hugh Hefner of Park City”), plus others, documenting not just the sybaritic “hippie-businessman” patriarch, but also his numerous descendants. Sachs’ knotty chronicle reveals that her father has a total of nine children with several different women, two of whom the other siblings found out about only a few years back. (The film opens with Sachs brushing her elderly father’s hair, working out a particularly unpleasant snarl. “Sorry, dad,” she says. “There’s just one part that’s very tangly.” The irony is faint and benevolent, but present even so.) Sachs considers the enveloping imbroglio from her own perspective but also takes into account the viewpoints of her eight siblings, her father’s ex-wives (including her own mother) and girlfriends, plus Ira’s mother, a gracefully cantankerous old woman in a certain amount of denial over her son’s wanton predilections and the role she played in his dysfunction. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO—the title an homage to Yvonne Rainer’s FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO…—is comprised of footage recorded between 1965 and 2019 and shot on 8mm, 16mm, VHS, Hi8, Mini DV, and digital; the fusion of all this material (by editor Rebecca Shapass) ranks among the most astounding use of personal archives that I’ve ever seen. It all exists in a state between documentary and home-movie footage, a paradigm that aptly reflects the conflict between reality and perspective, and the uncomfortable middle-ground that bisects the two. Sachs’ work often features her family, but this feels like an apotheosis of her autobiographical predisposition, likewise a question—why do the sins of the father linger?—and an answer. Among the most affecting scenes are roundtable discussions between the siblings where they consider revelations about their father and the implications of his actions. These scenes are heartrending not for their sadness, but rather for their naked honesty; it’s not just a film about a father who, but also a film about a love that defines a family. Sachs’ filmography is centered on infinite poetic quandaries (in voice-over, she explores some of them here, such as when she muses on her father’s profession as a developer in Utah: “What happens when you own a horizon?”) and this feels like a logical conclusion to a lifetime of such profound impasses, though I’ve no doubt she’ll continue to probe life and its enigmas in a similarly masterful fashion. For all the suffering on display, Sachs has created an indelible work that, like those within it, perseveres by way of honesty and love. (2020, 74 min) [Kathleen Sachs]

Film About a Father Who: Lynne Sachs Film Review
January 30, 2021
by Alison Smith 
https://redefinemag.net/2021/film-about-a-father-who-lynne-sachs-film-review/

In her 2021 documentary, Film About a Father Who, filmmaker Lynne Sachs recalls how her dad, Ira Sachs, owned two identical red Cadillacs that he swapped out for each other, never letting his family in on his con. While benign, this secret was the first of many more, which were often much more sinister.

Film About a Father Who, which is composed of archival footage spanning 1984 to 2019, is Lynne’s attempt to reconcile the loving father of her childhood with the deceptive figure enmeshed in a network of secret families. With his white walrus moustache and printed shirts, Ira was both a pillar of the community and a libertine, and his contradictions are the engine of this project.

Aesthetically, the film operates by its own dreamlike logic, cutting between time periods, places, and subjects without warning. It often feels as though we are in Lynne’s memories themselves, reliving her traumas with her. By the closing credits, the film is less an explanation of Ira’s character, and more a layered testament to the essential unknowability of even those we love most.

Overall, Film About a Father Who has a lived-in, DIY feel, splicing together materials ranging from grainy home video to dimly lit interviews. The relative banality of the footage makes the film’s visual motifs even starker. Several scenes are punctuated with footage of a volcano exploding, accompanied by the voices of Ira’s giddy children. How “true” is this scene, and what does it mean? These are questions that Lynne does not try to answer for the viewer. Another peculiar sequence is of a flickering field of daisies, which quickly turns into a whirling spiral of yellow and green, as the sensible collapses into the psychedelic. This moment perhaps points to the futility of trying to ascribe a linear, cogent storyline to a film as impressionistic and experimental as Film About a Father Who.

Yet not all is whimsy and light. Indeed, Lynne is not shy in portraying Ira’s womanizing. In a scene shocking in its offhandedness, Ira shows off a list of women he’s flirted with at parties to his son, turning page after page of names scrawled on yellow legal paper. Remarking to Ira Jr. how he took one of them to Miami, he laughs, “I’ve got a lot more to go! Miles to go before I sleep.” Painfully for the viewer, Ira Jr. seems in on the joke, either unfazed by his dad’s behavior or just numb to it. Lynne admits, with some chagrin, that Ira cycled through so many mistresses that she didn’t even bother to learn their names. Lynne’s sister Dana divides them into “major girlfriends” and “subsidiary girlfriends,” like a taxonomist describing a new species.

Interestingly, Film About a Father Who doesn’t propose a root cause of Ira’s behavior, eschewing psychoanalysis for intimate, eyebrow-raising footage. Instead, viewers are left to reckon with the damage he inflicted on his children, who bear his surname like a scar. In one heart-wrenching scene, Lynne sits in a circle with some of her half-siblings listening to spurned daughter Beth tell her story. The film cuts between Beth’s poignant testimony and Lynne’s grilling her father on his treatment of the damaged Beth. Ira claims he didn’t know his quasi-girlfriend was pregnant; Beth knows he did. Ira claims he wasn’t a part of Beth’s life; Beth knows that he posed as her godfather until she was 13.

During this sequence, the usually charismatic and talkative Ira barely says anything but “I don’t remember”; the tearful Beth remembers all too well. The two scenes capture some of Ira’s contradictions: he’s shameless but coy; he seems to lack a capacity for guilt, yet is intent on forgetting his past. While Ira has the privilege of forgetting, the film makes it clear that his children lack that luxury. Burdened with the self-hatred that often accompanies abandonment, they never receive the catharsis of a heartfelt apology.

Although the rehashing of infidelities is well-trodden territory for memoirists, Lynne gives us a striking portrayal of how pain and secrets ultimately knitted together the unconventional community made up of her father’s children. In several scenes, Ira’s kids from multiple women gather and even celebrate together. The film shows surprisingly little jealousy or rivalry between the offspring, perhaps because, as Lynne’s half-sister Julia speculates, they were all equally neglected. They all hungered for his affection, waiting for the day he would choose to be a real father.

Yet Julia’s notion of their group accord is belied by a scene where she and Lynne lie on a bed and tell stories about their father. Lynne explains how at a dinner with her half-brother Evan, she caught a glimpse of Ira’s insurance card in Evan’s pocket. The card listed Ira’s dependents with two names cut out—Julia and Beth’s. While the idea of a group united in pain may be comforting, the insurance card serves as a potent symbol of Ira’s favoritism.

Despite attempts by Film About a Father Who to illuminate Ira’s character, he ultimately remains an enigma. In scenes where he cheerfully evades any admissions of guilt, the viewer wonders whether there is a bedrock of conscience beneath his washed-out hippie charm, or if “I don’t remember” is as deep as we’re going to get. Dana may summarize the mystery of Ira as well as anyone when she says, “He can be selfish, but he also really loves people.” In the same vein, Lynne tells us that he was the sort of person who organized food drives while shamelessly bribing much younger women with fancy dinners. While Ira’s opaque nature can be frustrating, his children nevertheless offer a model for functional family dynamics even in the aftermath of betrayal.

Lynne’s film, clearly a product of immense time and devotion, also suggests the possibility of understanding without forgiveness. At its core, Film About a Father Who is about a daughter’s complicated love for a father who never made loving him easy.

Film About a Father Who
DeFacto Film Reviews
January 27, 2021
By Robert Joseph Butler
http://defactofilmreviews.com/film-about-a-fatherwho

Families hold many complexities and dysfunctions. Stories are often passed on from person to person, and many times it leads to siblings, mothers, fathers, and other members to feel bitter, but it can also be reconciled and even distorted. Family secrets are often passed down from person to person, and many times the truth can create adversities and hardships. Lynne Sachs compelling documentary, “Film About a Father Who,” is evidently about her father, Ira Sachs Sr. (not to be confused with the talented Independent filmmaker), who’s still alive. An engaging and personal documentary, it is told through artful 8mm and home video footage along with observational footage and Lynne narrating her own documentary, which in part makes it a redemptive framework. Can Lynne Sachs come to terms with the man her father really is?

Sach’s father Ira is a very charming and easygoing man, a semi-successful entrepreneur that presents himself more as a “hippie businessman.” Ira has long hair, a handlebar mustache, and almost looks like a character out of a Wes Anderson film. We see archival footage of him promoting cellphones in the early 90s at ski resorts. He’s also a real estate developer who explains how cell phones have made his life much more accessible for his business deals. During his off time he often wears Hawaiian shirts, loves to go skiing in Utah, and also enjoys traveling.  The images of this relaxed and likeable man are deceptive as Lynne Sachs points out how much damage he has generated for the women and children due to his endless affairs that led to him impregnating five different women who all had their children out of wedlock.

In the beginning of the documentary, the film is very warm and inviting, which almost plays out like a counterpart to something like “Dick Johnson is Dead”–which was last year’s documentary also about father’s and daughters reconnecting and making a documentary together. Throughout Ira’s life he had many affairs with many different women, withheld information about who he really was, and deceived many other women who led to a lot of agony and heartbreak that destroyed many livelihoods.

In many ways, Sach’s film reminded me of Andrew Jarecki 2003 documentary masterpiece “Capturing the Friedman’s” because just as Jarecki did in that masterwork, Sachs structures the documentary like a procedural or investigation in a way. She focuses on his character, his motivations, manipulations, and the adversities his actions created. This leads Sachs back to using scratchy home movies that were shot during her childhood and teenage years, and we get recent footage of Lynne’s half-brothers and sisters from different mothers who are introduced later in the film. It also features Sachs drilling her father over his selfish and self-destructive behaviors as she contemplates and narrates the narrative looking for traits or signs in earlier footage of what led to his behavior. Sachs is asking the audience if redemption and forgiveness can go when it comes to family, how much mercy can we give after years of so much dishonesty.

In the beginning of the documentary, the film is very warm and inviting, which almost plays out like a counterpart to something like “Dick Johnson is Dead”–which was last year’s documentary also about father’s and daughters reconnecting and making a documentary together. Throughout Ira’s life he had many affairs with many different women, withheld information about who he really was, and deceived many other women who led to a lot of agony and heartbreak that destroyed many livelihoods.

In many ways, Sach’s film reminded me of Andrew Jarecki 2003 documentary masterpiece “Capturing the Friedman’s” because just as Jarecki did in that masterwork, Sachs structures the documentary like a procedural or investigation in a way. She focuses on his character, his motivations, manipulations, and the adversities his actions created. This leads Sachs back to using scratchy home movies that were shot during her childhood and teenage years, and we get recent footage of Lynne’s half-brothers and sisters from different mothers who are introduced later in the film. It also features Sachs drilling her father over his selfish and self-destructive behaviors as she contemplates and narrates the narrative looking for traits or signs in earlier footage of what led to his behavior. Sachs is asking the audience if redemption and forgiveness can go when it comes to family, how much mercy can we give after years of so much dishonesty.

While Sachs could have dived even deeper in the interviews, especially with an interview involving her siblings, it’s the home video imagery that resonates the most, which has scratches, washed out colors, and wintry landscapes. If anything the footage feels abstract and metaphorical, as memories and even images can deceive our perceptions of how things really are beneath the surface. The opening of the film has the warm and cozy inviting moments, where we see a kind man and backgrounds that symbolizes tranquility, only for the footage to also look dated and worn out that matches the revelations of the family’s past that echoes a collection of semi-deceptive and exhausted memories. To her advantage, Sach utilizes her home footage to her complete advantage that makes it feel like washed out memories that are slipping away. She also uses 16mm in interviews with close family members, including one with her Grandmother. Formally experimental for a documentary, the wide range of aesthetics are quite reflexive in Sachs own commentary about the inconsistency of memory, and how the movie image is every bit as deceptive. If anything, this documentary shares a lot of the same ideas of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” which also uses commentary on the discrepancies of the image.

Sachs’ vision should be commended and embraced for what she’s doing not only on a technical level, but also on a personal level. Ultimately, Ira’s reckless attitude towards relationships with women has generated a lot of internal trauma and hardships for Sachs and her fellow siblings, as well as to the women he was involved with. The film is a reminder on the importance of documentary filmmaking, how it’s important to record and how the visual medium can capture and reflect the state of what is going on. We never know what we record could later surface into something cohesive and coherent, and even bring closure for the unexpected hidden revelations that can arise. If anything, all families should record because whatever we shoot at the moment can become the relics to finding redemption and salvation in bringing a family together.

by Mike D’Angelo
in Filmmaking
on Jan 21, 2021
https://filmmakermagazine.com/110892-the-2020-village-voice-voice-poll-reconstructed/#.YA7bpHdKg8O

Even when a global pandemic hasn’t upended everything, year-end lists and surveys often strike a faintly apologetic tone, acknowledging up front that there’s something inherently frivolous about ranking films in preferential order (whether individually or collectively). “This is kinda dumb, but enjoy!” How, then, should I further diminish a poll conducted in the name of a publication that effectively no longer exists, conducted at the conclusion of a film year that can barely be said to have happened? Movie theaters in many major cities have been dormant since last March, and the Village Voice, which established the original freewheeling critics’ poll back in 1999, went dark three years ago (though it was recently purchased by the same guy who transformed LA Weekly into a haven for sponsored content). Yet I still went ahead and solicited top ten lists from most of the writers and programmers who used to participate in the Voice poll, in my continuing effort to reconstruct what its results for Best Picture, at least, might roughly have been.

The shutdowns and lockdowns definitely took a toll. Last year, 91 people responded; this year, the number fell to 78, with several people expressly noting that they chose to abstain because they’d seen significantly fewer films than usual. Those who did submit a list had to decide for themselves what qualifies as a 2020 “release,” given that the already-fading standard—one week’s run in Los Angeles and/or New York City—would have rendered most of the year’s notable movies ineligible. (As it turned out, the film that won technically did get a standard theatrical release, just a week before everything closed.) I opted not to police this in any way, which is why you’ll see a few titles that really only had virtual-fest screenings last year (and may or may not become more widely available this year). Why arbitarily deny attention to a three-hour Romanian philosophy seminar? Making folks aware of such marketplace anomalies is arguably the whole point of year-end rankings, assuming one believes that there’s any point at all. (See? Reflex.)

Tabulation rules were once again taken straight from the Voice poll itself. Each ranked list produced 55 total points, with ten allotted to the film at #1, nine to the film at #2, and so on down the line. Those too cowardly, indecisive or “principled” to engage in strict hierarchy (sorry, I have strong feelings about this) submitted unranked lists, for which every film received five points—thereby totalling just 50, a small but not insignificant waffling penalty. Seems fair. Once all ballots had arrived, it shook out as follows: 

[parenthetical numbers = points/votes]

1. First Cow (286/41)
2. Lovers Rock (249/38)
3. Nomadland (182/31)
4. Never Rarely Sometimes Always (153/27)
5. The Assistant (149/29)
6. Time (138/25)
7. Dick Johnson Is Dead (128/23)
8. Martin Eden (128/20)
9. Bacurau (119/21)
10. Vitalina Varela (118/18)
11. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (108/18)
12. Collective (103/17)
13. Da 5 Bloods (90/14)
14. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (81/15)
15. City Hall (64/11)
16. Sound of Metal (59/11)
17. The Nest (57/11)
18. Kajillionaire (55/8)
19. Beanpole (53/12)
20. Promising Young Woman (53/9)
21. Another Round (52/9)
22. David Byrne’s American Utopia (52/9) [tie for #21]
23. Driveways (51/9)
24. Fourteen (50/9)
25. Wolfwalkers (38/7)
26. Days (37/5)
27. Minari (36/7)
28. I Was at Home, but… (36/6)
29. To the Ends of the Earth (35/5)
30. The Grand Bizarre (34/6)
31. The Whistlers (34/5)
32. The Father (30/5)
33. The Vast of Night (30/5) [tie for #32]
34. Tenet (29/6)
35. Shirley (27/5)
36. Soul (26/4)
37. Possessor (24/5)
38. She Dies Tomorrow (24/4)
39. Sorry We Missed You (24/4) [tie for #38]
40. Saint Frances (24/3)
41. Let Them All Talk (23/6)
42. The Invisible Man (22/6)
43. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (22/5)
44. Mangrove (22/5) [tie for #43]
45. A White, White Day (22/4)
46. Malmkrog (22/3)
47. The Painter and the Thief (22/3) [tie for #46]
48. Swallow (21/3)
49. An Easy Girl (20/4)
50. Bad Education (19/5)

As usual, there are no big surprises up at the top. First Cow (#1) was named the year’s best film by the New York Film Critics Circle; Lovers Rock (#2) received that honor from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (jointly with the rest of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe project); Nomadland (#3) took home the National Society of Film Critics’ Best Picture prize. Throw in Never Rarely Sometimes Always and you’ve also got the exact same top four that Indiewire’s much larger poll (230+ critics) produced, albeit in a slightly different order. On the other hand, David Fincher’s Mank placed 10th among Indiewire’s voters but failed even to crack the Pseudo-Voice top 50, amassing fewer points than Rebecca Zlotowski’s comparatively unheralded An Easy Girl (#49). One Night in Miami (Indiewire #17) suffered the same fate, receiving just two votes from this crew…which liked The Assistant considerably more than their counterparts (5th place vs. 22nd place). Ammonite and News of the World got dissed in favor of borderline avant-garde works like The Grand Bizarre and I Was at Home, but… People often refer monolithically to “the critics,” but clearly it depends which critics you’re talking about, even when they’ve been amassed into groups of many dozens. 

In any case, my own interest in year-end polls has always been weighted more toward the bottom than the top. The fun lies in browsing through individual, idiosyncratic choices—the comparative orphans, beloved by only a handful, sometimes the light of just one lonely critic’s life. (See #8 on my own list.) At the very least, give us all the data, so we can CTRL-F to our heart’s content. That’s what you’ll find below.

BRIAN DARR

(unranked)

The Beast Must Die
The Brilliant Biograph: Earliest Moving Images of Europe
Days
Film About a Father Who
First Cow
Fourteen
The Giverny Document
Nomadland
Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies
Undine

Film About a Father Who | Lynne Sachs
By Nicholas Yap
January 21, 2021
In Review Online
https://inreviewonline.com/2021/01/21/film-about-a-father-who/

Film About a Father Who is an intimate, innovative auto-doc about wounded people finding solace in the company of fellow stragglers.

Film About A Father Who is Lynne Sachs’ latest, and evidently most personal, feat of documentation. Patched together from various conversations and intimate moments inked on 16mm film, camcorder tapes, and digital masters — cleverly staggered to disrupt any linear timeline, and, by extension, any discernible narrative sequence — the film traverses the emotional interstices passed down by an absent father who radiates a kindly, domesticated charm in our first glimpses at him. This towheaded wayfarer is Ira Sachs Sr., a self-styled refusenik liable to one-time flings that conveniently fall within his orbit — affable though he may be, but waning in physique. This impression of the man — when contrasted with preceding home movie clippings, depicting scenes of play and hiking vignettes, tinselled in noise and unnaturally variegated — seems to complicate an expected narrative of old-age sentimentalism.

Ira Sachs Sr., we soon learn, is the center of a criss-crossing matrix of ill will and soured affections, the painful afterlives of his philandering excursions that persist to this day. The torment suffered by Ira’s former partners, as in the case of his second wife Diana and the children he fathered, is on full display as each party takes center-stage to voice the burdens foisted upon them as a result of both his romantic and familial derelictions of duty. During these soul-baring interactions, occasional lapses in the clarity of the recording (and overdubbing), along with stretched-out J-cuts, serve to deny us the affective impact of a more continuous, metered equilibrium. The effect of these techniques is made uncanny in an early sequence with Lynne’s mother, Diane, where the audio momentarily peters out as she relates an important transition in the relationship, and elsewhere, such as in a scene with Rose (affectionately nicknamed Maw-Maw) that connects the comingled love and disdain of her bond with Ira to the sequence’s separation of speech and thought.

The film’s title takes direct inspiration from sterling fellow filmmaker, choreographer, and theorist Yvonne Rainer’s sophomore feature Film About A Woman Who…, but tellingly drops the ellipsis. Per Lynne’s assertion that her father had “his own syntax, his own set of rules,” the film offers an enticing vantage point from which to take in the teeming life of another, before suggesting that any resultant observations cannot perfectly capture the complexity and unknowability of even the most flawed among us. As a rudimentary support circle is formed within Lynne’s expanding family unit, and contextual light is shed upon experiences previously assumed to be singular, Ira recedes into the background. The film refuses moral pronouncement and takes shape as an act of witness to disparate individuals working through unresolved bogies in real-time — strained even further by the abrupt introduction of two relatives unknown to the rest for decades. There are inevitable difficulties faced by the family members identifying with, and caring for, blood relations they know only through a traumatic history of neglect — as Lynne herself muses at one point, “How can you look for something you don’t even know is lost?” This makes for a shaky incompleteness that dogs the closing moments, an aleatoric cinema of sorts open to inopportune discoveries and inconvenient questions bubbling up long after its composition, complemented wonderfully by Lynne’s filmmaking background. Her experimental influences (there’s even a flicker-film insert near the end!) aid the sculpting of a collage film that parlays the misshapen specificities of its different media into an impressionistic flow of images, at once dissonant and eerily familiar. It is a work ever in progress, moving to the clip of life’s uncertainties and conveying well the difficulties of gingerly re-establishing one’s bearings while reckoning with a loved one’s severe failings, and the degree to which all can be forgiven. Film About A Father Who lurches forwards slowly but surely, a study of those who wander, wounded and lost, finding solace in the company of other stragglers.

January 2021

Lynne Sachs in conversation with the Belcourt Programming Staff: Allison Inman Mae Moreno, Toby Leonard, and Zack Hall on the occasion of “Film About a Father Who”‘s virtual theatre release.

Cinematheque hosting Zoom Q&A with director Lynne Sachs regarding ‘Film About a Father Who’
Cleveland.com
Updated Jan 20, 12:44 PM; Posted Jan 20, 12:44 PM
By John Benson
https://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/2021/01/cinematheque-hosting-zoom-qa-with-director-lynne-sachs-regarding-film-about-a-father-who.html

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Digging into family secrets can be a tricky affair.

That’s what veteran filmmaker Lynne Sachs learned with her latest documentary “Film About a Father Who,” which tells the story of her pioneering Utah businessman father, Ira.

While the new documentary touches upon themes of fatherhood and masculinity, the director along the way discovers some surprising hidden truths about her dad, who fathered numerous children after divorcing her mother.

Using family videos and digital images of her father dating back decades, Sachs created an autobiographical essay movie in an attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.

Not only is the Cleveland Institute of Art’s Cinematheque currently screening “Film About a Father Who” online, but the venue’s Director John Ewing will be moderating a free Q&A with director Lynne Sachs at 7 p.m. Tuesday via Zoom.

We recently caught up with the filmmaker to discuss the impetus behind the documentary and her father’s story.

Lynn, congrats on the film. Is it safe to assume you’ve been working on a documentary of your father for decades?

It all depends on what you would call work. If you started with the idea that one’s relationship with your parents is kind of working, there’s film footage going back to the mid-’60s so it kind of started there. But it also truly started with me as a filmmaker in 1991 when I decided that I wanted to make a film that helped me understand the medium and how it could give you an opportunity to get to know another person better. I actually made a film about a total stranger a few years later. Then I made a film about a distant relative. I thought the easiest one would be about my dad and it was definitely the hardest.

Despite trying your best to get answers about his past, your father proves successfully elusive in providing any concrete details about his actions — especially as it relates to other women.

With my dad, overt introspection wasn’t really part of his way of being. It just took me a long time to realize that. Maybe I evolved as a documentary filmmaker, where I saw that model as having a lot of limitations. I started to think about how you understand a person by the company they keep or how you understand them by the way they interact with the world or — even more — how they look at you. If they’re holding a camera and you have access to that material, then see something about their perception.

The film touches upon what was more than likely a traumatic incident your father experienced as a 3-year-old. Despite the fact he claims no memory of it, one could argue that defines his life and behavior.

My father always said he didn’t dream. I eventually realized he wasn’t keen on doing something that probably we do, which is to look at your childhood and figure out how that left an imprint on who you are. Now, I do believe that ruptures for children have a lasting impact. That’s the thesis or suggestion I want the film to have, which is not to say it makes excuses for behavior, but it gives context.

“Film About a Father Who” doesn’t shy away from casting your dad in unfavorable light regarding his philandering, which led to fathering numerous children with different women. Finally, how did he react to seeing the film?

He actually cried and he said to me, “I’ll try to do better in the future.” I don’t think he has any more kids, and I know he’s not going to have more. So far no one has materialized saying, “I’m the 10th child of Ira Sachs.” He never told me he had shame, but I don’t think shame is part of his vocabulary. The hardest thing for me was, I had two sisters that I didn’t know anything about. One is almost 40 years old, and I just met her a couple of years ago. I can say there were clues. I asked about them, I tried to follow those clues years ago and didn’t go anywhere with them. Am I culpable or complicit in that? I did my best.

Spectrum Culture 
January 19, 2021
By Joel Copling 
https://spectrumculture.com/2021/01/18/film-about-a-father-who-review/

A daughter explores her feelings about, the biographical landmarks and the explosion of family begotten by her father in Film About a Father Who, a free-flowing documentary whose title might lack the literal ellipsis that is nevertheless implied. For here is director Lynne Sachs, a veteran experimental filmmaker, reflecting upon exactly who her father, Ira Sachs Sr., is, and, more importantly, how she came to understand the who, when and why of his legacy. This is remarkably candid about a man who is, in many ways, anything but candid.

Legacy is at the forefront of study for Sachs, whose career has spanned the last three-and-a-half decades. Indeed, filmmaking kind of runs in the family. Keen observers will recognize the elder Sachs’ son and namesake, Ira Sachs, whose films (the most recognizable, perhaps, being 2008’s Married Life and 2014’s Love Is Strange) commonly explored marriage and relationships in flux and under strain. The younger Ira shows up only a few times in the framing device of the film, shot in the year 2019, but one can imagine that such a filmography was in answer to the tumultuous nature of his father’s relationships.

Those relationships have certainly had an impact, and if a minor disappointment here is that Sachs is not entirely able to communicate whose children were born to which woman, perhaps that is part of the point. Ira has lived a full life (he was 83 at the time of filming this documentary, and a spot of investigative work reveals that he is still alive now) – one of contradictions and blessings and hypocrisies and riches. A pioneering developer who, among other accomplishments, established the Yarrow Hotel (now the Doubletree by Hilton) in Park City, Utah, Ira was also a famed womanizer and was raised by a domineering mother who taught her son to push off all emotional maturity.

The result is a man who smiles through everything, who hides a whole lot of himself, and who seems unable to face anything that might present the opportunity for catharsis. At one point, when asked the question about when he knew that one of his daughters was his daughter, he cannot answer. Moreover, he would rather not try to remember, either. He says all of this with something of an empty smile on his face – remembering the good times and trying to push away the part that actually means anything.

Somehow, Sachs has made a documentary that is as comprehensive as it can be about a man who is almost the opposite of a generous subject. When we meet his mother, by the way, the interview is even more hostile about revealing any truth. That isn’t surprising, considering what we have come to learn about the woman, but it is a significant achievement on the part of Sachs to have shaped any of this material – culled from, as one could only imagine, hundreds of hours of home-video footage over the course of 35 years – into a workable motion picture. It is quite a moving one, too, especially on the level of personal introspection and reflection.

There is occasionally the feeling that this project is too personal to Sachs to translate for those looking from the outside in. Film About a Father Who still resonates as a reflection on a life lived and the love that has lingered.