The Flaherty January 2021
Flaherty Co-Presentation with the Museum of the Moving Image 
https://theflaherty.org/news/flaherty-january-2021-newsletter

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An evening discussion with Lynne Sachs and guests during her MoMI retrospective 

We are very pleased to announce that we are co-presenting a live discussion with filmmaker Lynne Sachs, her brother Ira Sachs Jr. (Little Men, Love Is Strange), and filmmaker Kirsten Johnson (Dick Johnson Is Dead, Cameraperson) on January 19, 7pm ET. The live online event is organized by Museum of Moving Image and introduced by Eric Hynes, MoMI Curator of Film.

This conversation focuses on Lynne Sachs’s new documentary Film About a Father Who, a film where she revisits the life of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Lynne Sachs is an old friend of The Flaherty film community. She had her first seminar experience back in 1984, when at a very young age she got to participate as a fellow. “With hindsight in my pocket, I can see that meeting the artists and scholars that programmer D. Marie Grieco convened that summer was one of my life’s most influential experiences.” 

We are very honored to be part of Lynne’s process and education as a filmmaker as with many of our past fellows, guest artists and attendees that consider The Flaherty Seminar a key moment for their carriers. We are also very happy to be witnesses of her retrospective at MoMI available online starting January 13 through the end of month.

See all links for the event below.

Film About a Father Who Discussion with the Sachs Family and a retrospective of Lynne Sachs’ work 

Live conversation featuring Lynne Sachs, Ira Sachs Jr., and Kirsten Johnson. Introduced by Eric Hynes, MoMI Curator of Film.

For more than thirty years, artist Lynne Sachs (1984 Flaherty Fellow, 1989 Flaherty Guest Artist) has constructed short, bold mid-length, and feature films incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, and observational documentary. On the occasion of her latest feature, Film About a Father Who the Museum of Moving Image is pleased to present a career-ranging survey of Sachs’s work from January 13 to 31 in their virtual theater. On January 19 at 7 pm, the Museum of Moving Image will host a unique family conversation around Lynne’s new film. In this live online discussion, Lynne Sachs will be joined by her brother, filmmaker Ira Sachs (Little Men, Love Is Strange), and filmmaker Kirsten Johnson (Dick Johnson Is Dead, Cameraperson), who is also connected to Lynne and Ira as co-parent of Ira’s children. The program will be introduced by MoMI’s Curator of Film, Eric Hynes.

This program is co-presented by The Flaherty Film Seminar, where Lynne Sachs has served variously as a Fellow, an Artist, and a presenter.

RSVP here. An email invitation with a link to join the conversation will be sent no later than one hour before the event. 

And here is the complete list of links to all Lynne Sachs related live events, screenings and film retrospective at the Museum of Moving Image this month:

Film About a Father Who directed by Lynne Sachs
Museum of the Moving Image Virtual Theater
Jan. 15 – 31, 2021

Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression – 20 Film Retrospective
Museum of the Moving Image Virtual Theater
Jan. 13 – 31, 2021

Film About a Father Who discussion with Lynne Sachs, Ira Sachs and Kirsten Johnson
Jan. 19, 2021 at 7 PM
Co-presented by Museum of the Moving Image and the Flaherty Film Seminar

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Dispatch: “An Evening With The Sachs Family
by Anto Astudillo
The Flaherty – February 2021 Monthly Newsletter
https://theflaherty.org/news/flaherty-2021-newsletter-february

This past January 19, we had the opportunity to co-present a live discussion with filmmaker Lynne Sachs, her brother Ira Sachs Jr. (Little Men, Love Is Strange), and filmmaker Kirsten Johnson (Dick Johnson Is Dead, Cameraperson). The online event, organized by Museum of Moving Image (runs through February 7) and introduced by Eric Hynes, MoMI Curator of Film, was shown live via the museum’s YouTube channel and had the participation of a very lively audience. 

The conversation focused on the making of Film About A Father Who and Lynne’s production process, but it also included questions from Ira and Lynne to Kirsten Johnson about Dick Johnson is Dead, and her own personal experiences integrated to the creative process of filmmaking. At the beginning of the conversation, Johnson who is also part of the Sachs family as a co-parent with Ira, mentioned how much she wanted to go to the Flaherty Seminar: “I just want to say, I’m always delighted to be in the house with Eric Hynes and the Museum of Moving Image and that I’ve never been to the Flaherty Seminar. It has been a life long dream of mine, so I got festive at the idea of finally making it into the Flaherty family in a certain kind of way.” Maybe in the near future, post pandemic world, we’ll be able to see Kirsten Johnson and all the Flaherty community gathering in person again!  

We were very fortunate to be part of this conversation and we want to thank the panelists for being so open to share their family stories with us and the audience. We also realized how great of an interviewer and panel moderator Ira Sachs is, some of his questions helped connect Lynne Sachs’s film and Kirsten Johnson’s and the idea of “imprint”, which speaks to the influence fathers have had in the lives and works of the filmmakers and their families. Ira also added how both of “the works reveal pain, and pain is not a discussion so much in family.” This comment helped us spectators put into context how much these filmmakers have become so vulnerable by opening their personal inner world through their work, and how these themes can speak to many in a universal language of moving images.

Lynne Sachs focused the discussion back to Ira Sachs. To him she says “you made the first and second film of dad and I made the third.” It is interesting to watch the work of Lynne and Ira and see the different perspectives that they have chosen to speak about coming from a similar experience, as well as how they have become such different and unique filmmakers being part of the same family. 

Another very interesting theme touched by Lynne Sachs is when she talks about “obstacles” that come up in every film project. As a conclusion to this idea and with her long time experience making films she passionately states: “We realize that the very biggest obstacle to making the film is actually what makes it the most interesting. And we have to keep trying. To me the hardest part was (in Film About a Father Who) what was my point of view?”

To close this dispatch, we want to leave you with the kind words that Lynne Sachs shared about the Flaherty Seminar during the discussion: “People wanted to ask about the Flaherty. The Flaherty is this fantastic gathering of film people who are very-very-very committed to the documentary practice. It is named for Robert Flaherty (and Frances), he was an early documentarian and he worked in the real… the idea of working with the real! and I think it has been extremely important to me. I saw my first experimental films at the Flaherty, I saw the work of Maya Deren there, I saw Bruce Connor (both in 1984), but then jump ahead, I went to a Flaherty where George Stoney was (he showed work back in 1955 and later in 1982, 1987, 1990, 1994, 2002, 2004 and 2011), where Tran T Kim-Trang was (in 2000), you know where people were doing really-really outlandish, and wonderful, and risk taking things with their work. Les Blank was there one year (he showed work at the Flaherty in 1972, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1985, 1990 and 2011), people who lived and breathe documentary, and it mattered to them. I think the fact that I saw the Flaherty work and experienced it at age 24 left another kind of imprint in me.” 

You can read more about Lynne Sachs’ impressions of the seminar in her website also published by Patricia Zimmerman in VOICES FROM THE FLAHERTY FILM SEMINAR on August, 2018.

WBAI-FM Upcoming Program
Cat Radio Cafe
Hosted by Janet Coleman and David Dozer
Mon, Jan 11, 2021 12:00 AM
https://www.wbai.org/upcoming-program/?id=2629

FILMMAKER AND FEMINIST LYNNE SACHS

On this show, we are joined by the experimental filmmaker, feminist and poet Lynne Sachs whose new autobiographical film, “Film About a Father Who” – 26 years in the making – will premiere on January 15 as part of a 20-film retrospective, “Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression,” presented by The Museum of the Moving Image.

Lynne Sachs grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked closely with such artists as Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Min-ha. Her moving image work ranges from short experimental films, to essay films to hybrid live performances.  She has made 37 films, retrospectives of which have been presented at The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, China Women’s Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/ Fest. In 2014, Lynne received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts and, in 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems.   Currently, Lynne lives in Brooklyn with her husband, filmmaker Mark Street, and their two daughters.

Links to 1) “Film About A Father Who” film page with streaming information:   http://www.cinemaguild.com/theatrical/filmaboutafatherwho.html;

2)Museum of the Moving Image retrospective Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression – which runs from January 13-31: http://www.movingimage.us/lynnesachs;

and

3) for more on Lynne Sachs’ work in general: http://www.lynnesachs.com/

Hosted by Janet Coleman and David Dozer

Facebook at catradiocafe@facebook.com

Twitter @catradiocafe

Review: Film About a Father Who Walks Down a Recorded Memory Lane
January 10, 2021
By Pat Brown 
Slant Magazine 
https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review-film-about-a-father-who-walks-down-a-recorded-memory-lane/

Throughout, Lynne Sachs undercuts the image of the past as simpler or more stable than the present.

Though the title of Lynne Sachs’s Film About a Father Who is inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 avant-garde feature Film About a Woman Who, a deconstruction of the “ideal” domestic unit, this long-gestating documentary takes a more personal and certainly less abstract look at a less-than-stable family life. Composed largely of conversations with her family that Sachs has captured over the last few decades, the film often feels like the coherent story everyone wishes they could assemble out of the neglected boxes of old home video tapes in the garage. But Sachs goes places that most amateur moviemakers avoid, undercutting the image of the past as simpler or more stable than the present.

Sachs’s father is outwardly easygoing, a self-styled “hippie businessman.” In most of the time periods covered in the documentary, Ira Sachs Sr. sports a handlebar mustache and a stringy mop of unkempt hair. Film About a Father opens with an early-‘90s conversation with him that comes off like some kind of early promotion for cellphones: While the wealthy real estate developer talks about how much he enjoys the mobility that cellular technology allows in his business dealings, we see him skiing and relaxing, hanging around in his trademark Hawaiian shirts. Methodically but not without affection, the film undermines this projected image of the ambitious yet insistently casual, essentially harmless man.

At first, it’s easy enough to believe that Ira, whom Sachs describes at the outset of the documentary as a loving father, has committed crimes with few victims other than a resentful lover or two and his morally scandalized mother, Rose, known as Maw-maw, who appears occasionally in older footage to gripe about her son’s behavior, which she colorfully describes as a kind of sexual handicap. But it becomes clear that not all of the women who Ira has been with were equal players in his lifelong game of libertinism. As a decades-old tearful conversation with his second wife, Bali native Diana, makes evident, the man leveraged his largesse to maintain a privileged position in all of his relationships, one that kept him shielded from dealing with the emotional distress that his actions were spreading.

For her part, Sachs approaches the looming but seemingly unassuming figure of her father with a frankness that, if not quite unsparing, couldn’t have been easy for her. She structures Film About a Father as an ongoing investigation of his character, with the existence of two offspring he kept hidden from his other children coming as a late-film reveal. Sachs’s interrogation of her emotionally reticent father repeatedly brings her back to fuzzy home videos captured in her childhood or young adulthood, seeking in them some explanation for his behavior, or at least signs of the stories she wouldn’t be able to assemble until later. “How can you look for something you don’t even know is lost?” she ponders over early-‘90s footage of her younger half-brothers playing in the woods, referring to two additional secret half-sisters who were growing up at the same time, unbeknownst to the other Sachs children.

Given the nature of its construction, Film About a Father can feel insular to a fault, but Sachs nonetheless finds her most affecting imagery in her old snippets of home video, with its indistinct lines, color distortions, and instances of “snow.” Part of this comes from the metaphorical redeployment of her footage—like the glimpses we get of the small mountain located on a property that Ira was developing in the ‘90s. Early in the film, the large, grassy mound symbolizes the serenity and ease of his personal and professional life, but footage later depicts the dynamiting of that mountain, just as the Sachs family’s sense of their past is upended. There’s also something specific about analog home video that Sachs exploits here. It’s much hazier and harder to interpret than the crisper present-day digital footage, or the warm 16mm she used to interview her Maw-maw before the latter passed; it speaks much more to the instability of memory, the faultiness of the images we keep with us from the past.

Only implicitly connecting the Sachs family’s problems to the distribution of privileges and indignities under patriarchy, the film lays emphasis on the personal side of “the personal is political.” Beyond attempting to come to terms with Ira the philanderer and the ways his laissez-faire approach to relationships with women has shaped her life and those of her siblings, Film About a Father Who also explores the relationship between recording and remembering, the way past and present inform each other as the stored memories of film and video footage are brought together into a coherent shape. It’s an evocative distillation of some truth from the sprawling mess of documents that a family always leaves in its wake.

FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO – Review
January 8, 2021 
by Diane Carson 
Alliance of Women Film Journalists
https://awfj.org/blog/2021/01/08/film-about-a-father-who-review-by-diane-carson/

Film About a Father Who examines a problematic relationship.

Among the most important, complex relationships are those with our parents, relationships often painful to probe. And yet, in Film About a Father Who, here’s documentarian Lynne Sachs courageously exploring thirty-five complicated, problematic years of interaction with her father Ira. In addition to archival 8- and 16-millimeter footage, she interrogates Ira, grandmother Maw-maw, brothers, sisters, an ex-wife, and Ira’s girlfriends.

And what she learns in her incredibly honest profile is deeply disturbing. For Ira was, though cheerful, emotionally detached and an unrepentant womanizer. His mother, Maw-maw, describes him as a cripple, handicapped, since he had a wife, a mistress, and, as much as he could, multiple women. Director Lynne, his daughter, explicitly asks Ira about his life and behavior, to which Ira repeatedly replies, “I don’t remember.” In her investigation, Lynne discovers two previously unknown siblings (Ira had nine children), Ira’s traumatic childhood, fueled by Maw-maw abandoning Ira to lead her own life, and his real name.

None of these details suggest the truly captivating appeal of Film About a Father Who. That resides in Lynne’s pursuit of an ever-elusive understanding of Ira, of his essence. In her quest, Lynne and her brother Adam describe Ira having “his own language and we were expected to speak it.” They concur that they loved him so much that they agreed “to his syntax, his set of rules,” though they always felt there was a dark hole somewhere in his youth. Significantly, Lynne and a sister also acknowledge a shared rage they couldn’t name for the man called the Hugh Hefner of Park City, Utah.

Film About a Father Who is an emotionally wrenching scrutiny of another person, much less a parent. In voiceover narration, Lynne defines her grappling with her father best when she says, “This is not a portrait. This is not a self-portrait. This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry, a story both protracted and compressed.” That she worked on this film for decades acknowledges the critical role her parents, and probably most of ours, play in our lives, their impact inestimable. It may raise the question, “Can we ever really understand another person?” Whatever the answer, Lynne Sachs shows her effort results in a powerful, haunting film.

Film About a Father Who is available on the Cinema Guild website.

GoIndieNow Presents TOP INDIE FILMS OF 2020, PART 2: FILMS 10-6
By GoIndieNow
January 6, 2021
https://plotaholics.com/2021/01/06/goindienow-presents-top-indie-films-of-2020-part-2-films-10-6/

GoIndieNow Presents is an occasional column featuring the third Plotaholics, Joe Compton. In these columns, Joe will discuss that state of indie film and offer suggestions for worthwhile media to consume in that market. This iteration of GoIndieNow Presents is a three-part exploration of 2020’s indie film landscape.

Hello, Plotaholics faithful. Joe Compton (the third Plotaholic) here.

Let’s be honest: 2020 sucked. Who knows what all of it means as far as 2021 goes, especially when it comes to Independent Film, which is something I cover over at Go Indie Now. But as for now, I am here to continue discussing the best in indie film from 2020.

Today, we kick off my Top 10 list with entries 10-6.

10. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO – DOCUMENTARY (USA) 

SYNOPSIS: From 1984 to 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot film, videotape and digital images with her father, Ira Sachs, a bohemian businessman from Park City. This film is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to eight siblings, some of whom she has known all of her life, others she only recently discovered. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, her film offers sometimes contradictory views of one seemingly unknowable man who is always there, public, in the center of the frame, yet somehow ensconced in secrets.

WHAT THIS FILM DOES WELL: Lynne is a legend, and her style and abilities are at the top of the list in terms of Documentarians and their storytelling styles, but this one is so different. It is almost by nature that this has to be presented as it is, but it serves as a triumph and not a crutch or gimmick. There is no avoiding the fact that not every shot was composed and lit or mic’ ed properly. Yet, in true Lynne Sachs form, she weaves such an intricate and intimate narrative that twists and turns with the best of them. You almost expect there might have been some prior planned composition to those “home movie” shots.

It is also striking because the one being most affected in and throughout is her and her family. So, in a weird and interesting way, this film that starts looking into a family patriarch becomes a character-driven, dilemma story that interweaves the documenter with the subject matter and creates a mystery cloaked in a soap opera-type drama. The fun aspects are the ratio and framing of a lot of raw footage that gets shot over time on many different devices and how it enhances the experiences of the narrative–a skill set that editor Rebecca Shapass clearly possesses in spades.

Documentaries are often that idea that what you see is not what you will get in the end, and in a way because of the brave way in which Lynne chooses to put herself out there, comfortable or not, we really see a 4th wall crash that presents such a compelling and shocking result. In talking to her, I know this was a choice that was not easy to make. Yet this film has very few moments of bleakness and never are they overt–another display of the skill set that Lynne possesses as a proven Documentarian. Instead it chooses naturally to highlight and enhance the positive aspects of the reveals, which makes you wish your family or life was half as interesting as this one.

Women and Hollywood 
Feature – January 2021 Preview
December 31, 2021
By Tatiana McInnis and Shayna Maci Warner 

2020 has been an exercise of endurance, unspeakable loss, tragedy, anxiety, and rage, the scale of which cannot be addressed in any piece of writing. Many truths have been exposed this year, including that we are deeply invested in the stories we tell about our world — and other worlds! Many of us sought and found solace on screen, whether through binge-watching, virtual cinemas, or Zoom. While the challenging truths and issues laid bare in 2020 will not leave us when the clock strikes midnight on the 31st, we are hopeful about the stories we will tell, hear, and see in 2021. 

Premiering January 1, Roseanne Liang’s “Shadow in the Cloud” follows Chloë Grace Moretz as Captain Maude Garrett, a female flight captain navigating the challenges of WWII air warfare and the sexism of her crew.

Viewers can get an in-depth look at the life, loves, and career of beloved star Audrey Hepburn in Helena Coan’s “Audrey” (January 5). In a similar vein, they can learn more about an acclaimed artist and the eccentric collectors who will do anything to get ahold of his work with Oeke Hoogendijk’s “My Rembrandt” (January 6). Meanwhile, Yu Gu’s “A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem” (January 26) chronicles two former NFL cheerleaders’ legal fight for fair pay.

The month rounds out with two family dramas, Fernanda Valadez’s “Identifying Features” and Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s “Our Friend,” both out January 22. The former sees a Mexican woman trying to find out what happened to her son, who crossed the border into the U.S. and hasn’t been heard from since. “Our Friend” is about a family rocked by their matriarch’s terminal cancer diagnosis, and the friend who offers to help them in their time of need.

Here are the women-centric, women-directed, and women-written films debuting in January. All descriptions are from press materials unless otherwise noted.

JANUARY 15

“Film About a Father Who” (Documentary) – Directed by Lynne Sachs (Available in Virtual Cinemas)

Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8mm 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.

2020 on Screen: The Best and Worst of Film and TV 
by CHRIS MCCOY
Memphis Flyer 
December 23, 2020
https://www.memphisflyer.com/memphis/2020-on-screen-the-best-and-worst-of-film-and-tv/Content?oid=24444547

There’s no denying that 2020 was an unprecedented year, so I’m doing something unprecedented: combining film and TV into one year-end list.

Best Documentary: Film About a Father Who

More than 35 years in the making, Lynne Sachs’ portrait of her mercurial father, legendary Memphis bon vivant Ira Sachs Sr., is as raw and confessional as its subject is inscrutable. Rarely has a filmmaker opened such a deep vein and let the truth bleed out.

EXCLUSIVE TRAILER FOR LYNNE SACHS’ Film About A Father Who TAKES A PERSONAL LOOK AT FAMILIAL MYSTERIES
Jordan Raup
December 23, 2020
The Film Stage 
https://thefilmstage.com/exclusive-trailer-for-lynne-sachs-film-about-a-father-who-takes-a-personal-look-at-familial-mysteries/

From The Father to Dick Johnson Is Dead to Falling to Minari, 2020 has been an exemplary year for films exploring all facets of fatherhood. Premiering at Slamdance Film Festival earlier this year and now arriving in Virtual Cinemas next month, another poignant entry in this category is Lynne Sachs’ documentary Film About a Father Who. Featuring materials shot over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019 by Sachs herself, the film explores her father Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah, which leads to many unexpected discoveries. Set for a nationwide Virtual Cinema release beginning on January 15, Museum of Moving Image will also hold a a director retrospective that features five programs in their Virtual Cinema, from January 13-31.

Jared Mobarak said in his Slamdance Film Festival review earlier this year, “While director Lynne Sachs admits her latest documentary Film About a Father Who could be superficially construed as a portrait (the title alludes to and the content revolves around her father Ira), she labels it a reckoning instead. With thirty-five years of footage shot across varied formats and devices to cull through and piece together, the result becomes less about providing a clear picture of who this man is and more about understanding the cost of his actions. Whether it began that way or not, however, it surely didn’t take long to realize how deep a drop the rabbit hole of his life would prove. Sachs jumped in to discover truths surrounding her childhood only to fall through numerous false bottoms that revealed truths she couldn’t even imagine.”

See the exclusive trailer below.

Film About A Father Who opens on January 15 virtually nationwide alongside a director retrospective in Museum of Moving Image’s Virtual Cinema.

The Seventh Art
2020 Roundup #6
December 17,  2020
https://theseventhart.info/tag/film-about-a-father-who/

Film About a Father Who (Lynne Sachs)

At first glance, Lynne Sachs’ latest documentary comes across as another iteration on the now all-too-common work of ‘personal archaeology’ in which filmmakers trace their roots through public and private archives, at times rending open the specific ways their unhappy families have been dysfunctional. Sachs, for one, employs home movies shot over half a century in half a dozen formats—8mm, 16mm, VHS, Hi8, Mini DV and digital—by herself, her father and her siblings, filmmakers Dana and Ira Sachs. The material turns around their father, Ira Sachs Sr., a ‘hippie businessman’ who sowed his wild oats across the world and virtually birthed a baseball team. Senior’s constant womanizing comes down heavily upon his children, some of whom have known the existence of the others only after decades, but also upon his mother, with whom he nevertheless shares a close but complicated relationship. Sachs weaves through years’ worth of footage and layers it carefully into a simple, direct account with a voiceover addressed at the audience. She takes what could’ve been a narrow family melodrama into much stickier territory. As she says, the film isn’t a portrait of her father, but a meditation on relationships with this man as the connecting element. Sachs and her siblings sit with their father, now infirm with age, and ask him to recollect episodes from the past. What do they expect? Confession? Reckoning? Simple testimony wrought from a gradually vanishing consciousness? Sachs goes beyond all gut responses to her father’s behaviour—disappointment, rage, disgust—towards a complex human reality that can elicit only inchoate sentiments, as suggested by the film’s incomplete title. She isn’t filming people or their stories, but the spaces between people, and how these spaces are always mediated by the actions of others. Senior’s wayward life, itself rooted perhaps in a traumatic childhood, profoundly shapes the way his children look at each other. Two living room discussions are intercut as though they are unfolding in the same space, the only way the filmmaker is able to bridge these invisible branches of the family tree. Sachs’ film is ostensibly a massive unburdening project for her; that she has been able to draw out its broader implications is a significant accomplishment.

Just Another Film Buff