Tag Archives: film about a father who

PesaroFF57 – Meeting with Luca Ferri and Lynne Sachs

Sentieri Selvaggi 
June 24, 2021 
by Veronica Orciari
https://www.sentieriselvaggi.it/pesaroff57-incontro-con-luca-ferri-e-lynne-sachs/

The Bergamo director is in competition with a film dedicated to the monumental Brion Tomb by the architect Carlo Scarpa, also the work of the American director Lynne Sachs

“Postmodernism is evil, it is betraying all the rumors that were there before you, it is making a smoothie without putting anything personal in it” . Luca Ferri likes to provoke, there is no doubt. In competition with the thirteen-minute short film Mille Cipressi, the director explained its genesis and realization, also discussing the relationship between classicism and modernity. “When I went to the Brion Tomb for the first time I did not have a defined architecture in front of me and in fact I was unable to collect it all in the film” , said Ferri regarding the monumental building by the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, located in the cemetery of San Vito, in the province of Treviso. The short is punctuated by a female voice, that of Assila Cherfi, already present inColombi:  “I wanted the words to break away from the“ Scarpa man ”, using a female voice I wanted to enter a territory of non-emulation, to take the text to another level”.

UNICINEMA – A NEW UNIVERSITY IDEA 

“One of the things I share most about Scarpa’s speech is the criticism of everything that doesn’t fit into the classic. I find a lot of my vision in it, in my opinion there is no new, there is no experimentalism. There is only the possibility of entering a classic canon with its own style. ” Ferri did not mince words to describe his idea of cinema, a cinema (indeed, an art in general) that must necessarily deal with what preceded it: “You have to be aware of the past, a word that in this contemporaneity seems to be a dead word ” . According to the filmmaker, Scarpa’s thinking is lucid and theoretical and his architecture reflects the consequences and in this sense he is very close to this approach.

However, architecture is an element that needs time to be understood and admired, in this regard the director said he was amazed to have one day seen a group that remained inside the Brion Tomb for only 15 minutes. “I found it absurd, for art it takes time. Having made this film myself, I feel I have been disrespectful of a place that deserves even more time. This hit and run of culture is no good. ” Speaking of his cinema, Ferri concluded:“I believe that in all my films there is the comic, not the ironic. In serious and busy cinema, the comedian is always pornographic, it always seems that laughter, especially fat laughter, demeans you. Just think of experimental cinema, how seriously certain authors are taken. Experimental cinema adheres to the genre and for me it is reprehensible. “

The meeting was concluded by another protagonist of this year’s competition, Lynne Sachs, with her Film About a Father Who . An intimate and personal film about an important father figure, influenced by Film About a Woman Who , by filmmaker and choreographer Yvonne Reiner. “This film is an attempt to understand what it means to try to be a man today, putting anger on one side and forgiveness on the other,” said Sachs, who also explained how for her the reflection on the parent-child relationship is a constant in his life.“There were aspects of my family that I wanted to investigate, although there was a sense of ambivalence and shame inside me, there was an unease that needed to be analyzed. I have allowed myself to be vulnerable in two senses: form and content. Looking at my 80s footage I thought they looked awful when compared to the clean high definition images. But on the one hand we got tired of clean images and I’m happy to have embraced this work. “

Sphere Festival: Cinema Garage with Lynne Sachs

Cinema Garage with Lynne Sachs – Sphere
spherefestival.com
July 18, 2021

In focus: Film About a Father Who
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 centre 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.

Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her highly self-reflexive films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.

The Artist : Lynne Sachs
From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing directly the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany—sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. 

Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, and China Women’s Film Festival. Her 2019 film “A Month of Single Frames” won the Grand Prize at Oberhausen Festival of Short Films in 2020.  

Lynne Sachs’s catalogue is represented in North America by Canyon Cinema and the Filmmaker’s Cooperative with selected features at Cinema Guild and Icarus Films. Her work is distributed internationally by Kino Rebelde. In tandem with making films, Lynne is also deeply engaged with poetry.  In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems. 

In 2021, both the Edison Film Festival and the Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center awarded Lynne for her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields.

The Task of the Translator
By Lynne Sachs
10 min. 2010
Premiere: Migrating Forms Film Festival, New York, NY May 2010

Lynne Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.

In “The Task of the Translator,” Lynne Sachs turns her original, probing eye to the ways in which we struggle to put words to the horrifying realities of War. In her subtle, trademark shifting between the intimate, personal space of a few individuals and the cavernous, echoing ambiguity of larger, moral questions, Sachs stakes out unsettling territory concerning what it means–what it feels like–to be made into unwitting voyeurs of Mankind’s most grotesque doings. At the same time we find she is also talking, with startling deftness, about the way that all artists are, in the end, engaged in the task of the translator: stuck with the impossible task of rendering imponderables, unutterable, and unsayables, into neat representations to be consumed, digested, perhaps discarded. We are not, however, left despairing; a pair of hands, caught again and again in the beautiful motion of gesticulation, is far from helpless or mute. This image captures, rather, the supreme eloquence of the effort to translate, and the poignant hope represented by this pungent, memorable film itself.”Shira Nayman author of The Listener and Awake in the Dark, both of which “ explore the havoc historical trauma plays with the psyche.

The Small Ones
By Lynne Sachs
3 min. colour sound 2007
(from 16mm and video)
Screenings: Tribeca Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Black Maria FilmFest (Award), Dallas Video Festival, Pacific Film Archive, MadCatFilm Fest

During WWII, the US Army Graves Registration Service hired the filmmaker’s Hungarian cousin, Dr Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones–small and large–of dead American soldiers. This elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of excerpts of Sandor’s letters to Sachs’ family, highly abstracted war imagery and home movies of children at a birthday party.

“Profound. The soundtrack is amazing. The image at the end of the girl with the avocado seed is so hopeful. Good work.” – Barbara Hammer, filmmaker

“Photograph of Wind”
by Lynne Sachs
16mm, b&w and colour, 4 min. 2001
SCREENINGS: San Francisco Film Festival, Onion City Film Festival

My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word Maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather–like the wind–something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.

“Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” – Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

ABOUT SPHERE

https://spherefestival.com/

We strive to identify the problems of multidisciplinary objects and find a concrete and practical panacea with the extensive and experiential applications across the streams of science, art and social philosophy to construct an alternative culture in earth.

Masterclass by Lynne Sachs at the Lighthouse International Film Festival

Lighthouse International Film Festival
Masterclass on the Every Day by LYNNE SACHS
June 6, 2021           
https://www.goelevent.com/LIFF/e/MasterclassontheEveryDaybyLYNNESACHS

FREE for filmmakers and IN&OUT PASS HOLDERS!!
According to Freud’s theory of dreams, our day residue is composed of the memory traces left by the events of our waking state. In this workshop, we explore the ways in which fragments of our daily lives can become material for the making of a personal film. While many people in the film industry rely upon a chronological process that begins with the development phase and ends with post-production, our interaction will build on an entirely different creative paradigm that encourages participants to embrace the nuances, surprises and challenges of their daily lives as a foundation for a diaristic practice.

FREE for Filmmakers and IN&OUT PASS HOLDERS

Three of Lynne Sachs films are available at Lighthouse Virtual Festival:

Your Day is My Night (64 min., 2013)

Tip of My Tongue (80 min.,2017)

Film About a Father Who (74 min. 2020)

Costa Rica Festival Internacional De Cine 2021 presents “Film About A Father Who”

Costa Rica Festival Internacional De Cine 2021
June 11- 19, 2021
https://www.costaricacinefest.go.cr/produccion/film-about-father-who

FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO

COUNTRY:  USA

SYNOPSIS: From 1984 to 2019, Lynne Sachs filmed her father, a lively and innovative businessman. This documentary is the filmmaker’s attempt to understand the networks that connect a girl with her father and a woman with her brothers. With a nod to cubist representations of a face, Sachs’s exploration offers simultaneous and sometimes contradictory visions of a seemingly unknowable man who publicly uninhibitedly stands in the center of the frame, but privately takes refuge in secrets. As the alarming facts add up, Sachs, as a daughter, discovers more about her father than she ever expected to reveal.

Poster created by Kino Rebelde, International Sales Agent / Representative of Film About a Father Who.

Deadcenter Film Festival presents “Film About a Father Who”

Deadcenter Film Festival – 2021
Film About a Father Who
June 12- 20, 2021
https://deadcenterff2021.eventive.org/films/60873d3168446400cd3578c5

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.

Showings – select to order tickets:

[Available June 12, 1:00 PM – June 20, 11:45 PM, 2021] Watch now online…

Sat, Jun 12th, 1:00 PM @ dC Virtual Platform

“Film About a Father Who” Reviews on Letterboxd

https://letterboxd.com/film/film-about-a-father-who/

“An intensely personal documentary in the mode of ‘Must Read After My Death’ and ‘Stories We Tell’ — the hook here being that director Lynne Sachs has evidently been making this film for decades. That fact proves to be the secret sauce that most distinguishes ‘Film About a Father Who’ from other self-reflexive docs about a filmmaker’s own family. ‘FAAFW’ is assembled from snatches of time, way-stations on a lifelong journey to unravel a mystery in the form of a person. It’s not a straight line from nagging questions to satisfying answers, but a swirling impression of what it’s like to live in the shadow of those questions. As Garrett Bradley’s ‘Time’ demonstrated so beautifully last year, scrambling chronology can be more than a structural choice — it can reflect and enhance the feature’s themes, as it does here.

Time keeps slipping back and forth in ‘FAAFW’, which can be (perhaps glibly) described as Sachs’ attempt to vivisect her father Ira Sachs Sr.’s complicated story. Particularly his habit of settling down briefly with a woman, having a child or two, and then moving on to a new wife or girlfriend (or two). Some of these children had no inkling that the others even existed. (“Fucker’s settin’ up franchises,” Brad-Pitt-as-Tyler-Durden once snarked.)

In the end, Sachs doesn’t stumble onto any grand, penetrating conclusions about her family, her father, or about why exactly Ira Sr. has elected to live the life he has. The film’s most salient psychological observations about the elder Sachs seem to emerge organically from the director’s interviews and roundtables with her numerous half-siblings. There’s no summary statement at the end, just questions about the meaning of love and family, and about whether it’s ever possible to understand another human being — even our own parents.

Which is for the best, really. Indeed, one of the most appealing things about ‘FAAFW’ is its refusal to offer easy answers. There’s a definite sensation that the film is — and will always remain — unfinished, which feels like a bold statement in and of itself. Sachs could (and may) continue to unearth old footage and record new footage, but she might not get any closer to understanding her father. As much as anything else, she seems to have made this film to document her viewpoint and that of her extended family, to catalog the ever-expanding ripples initiated by her father’s often questionable choices. The only constant is that there seems to be no end to the revelations.

The feature’s strong sense of stasis despite the march of time is what evoked Bradley’s film for me, and it manifests in the way ‘FFAFW’ flits across thousands of miles and decades of time. While the film roughly follows the chronological birth order of Ira Sr.’s many children, it also skips around a lot, drawing from a wealth of 8mm, 16mm, video, and digital footage. It’s the 90s. No, it’s the 00s. No, it’s the 10s. There are three siblings, then five, then seven. It is then and it is now and Dad is Dad, graying and slowing but somehow unchanged and still unknowable. Perhaps, ‘FAAFW’ ponders, we are all mysteries to one another.”

– Andrew Wyatt 

Film About a Father Who, Lynne Sachs’ family self-portrait, opens with a shot of the documentarian brushing her father’s hair. Her gentle combing is then disrupted by a knot that won’t detangle. Sachs fights it, nervously laughing as she does, but refusing to give up. It’s a scene so personal, the act of grooming your own parent, but Sachs makes the audience aware that even in tenderness there is pain.

More from my Austin Chronicle review here. –

Jenny Nulf

Full Review at In Review Online

“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.”

–  Nicholas Yap

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.

See my full review at Spectrum Culture.
– Joel Copling

“I’m happy to feel an affinity for Lynne Sachs and I would like to say for now she is my favourite filmmaker. film about a father who was an exquisite hodgepodge about an elusive father and an even more elusive maw maw, told by the 7 children and former partners of ira (this was my granddads name too) very intimate storytelling, and ugh the scenes shot on film in the meadows, with maw maw in repose staring into light, the shots of children like held against their will by sachs in front of the camera, i really enjoyed and it was visually a beautiful viewing experience. i loved that at every stage of mature life sachs was there with a camera carving out this picture for audiences of complete strangers who could be equally intrigued by her father as she is, and the embarssment and awkwardness that comes from the outside inqiuiry into this man, and then the children who had to live with the repercussions of their dad’s lifestyle. loved a lot”
– ‘uglymother’

Watched in my Documentary Traditions II class at NYU. Sachs was in attendance and gave a Q&A after the screening.

An excerpt from an essay I wrote comparing the film to The Grand Bizarre:

“[T]he footage in Film About A Father Who is often of a kind we’re used to seeing in documentaries – archival home videos, interviews, ect. What’s unconventional is the achronological way in which the footage is stitched together. […] Sachs’s sound design […] is absolutely vital to her film’s success. It frames the entire project almost as a memory or a dream – getting at the nostalgia inherent in Sach’s central premise. This nostalgic quality cuts some of the darker emotional stretches of the film and keeps them from overwhelming everything else.

[…]

In class, Sachs described the structure of her film as ambiguity followed by clarity. If this was the intention, the film’s ending fails to achieve it. The clarity Sachs describes simply never arrives. Her film is an incredibly thoughtful and stimulating one, but I can’t honestly say that I left it with a greater understanding of who her father is […] Intent aside, an argument could certainly be made that the film is stronger this way, provoking the audience to think without supplying an answer. The problem, however, is that this lack of resolution doesn’t feel graceful in context. The film simply ends.”

– Burt Reynolds

Director Lynne Sachs’ documentary “Film About a Father Who” poses an intriguing question about fathers and their children — and whether the child can ever truly know what is going on in their parent’s head.

Sachs tries to make sense of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., through footage accumulated for 35 years, from home movies in 1984 to interviews taken from the ‘90s to now. The footage spans all formats, from 8mm and 16mm film to VHS, Hi-8 and digital. The different formats serve as historical markers, and also showing how intimate the moments become, with the older film more formal and the tape and digital cameras becoming less obtrusive and more ubiquitous, to the point where people act like they’re not there.

Read the full review at The Movie Cricket: moviecricket.net/sundance-2020/2020/1/24/slamdance-review-a-daughter-tries-to-figure-out-her-father-in-thoughtful-enigmatic-film-about-a-father-who

– Sean P. Means

This film isn’t therefore about righting wrongs, but exposing facts Ira kept locked away. Lynne Sachs captures it with immense compassion.
my full review at The Film Stage and archived 

– Jared Mobarak

Croatia’s Vox Feminae Festival to Screen “Film About a Father Who”

Full Festival Line-Up: https://voxfeminae.net/festival/

About Vox Feminae Festival: 
Vox Feminae Festival is an international festival held annually, since 2007, in Zagreb, Croatia.

Vox Feminae Festival was founded with the aim to promote and increase the visibility of women’s artistic achievements through the international competition film program, exhibitions and performances as well as workshops and educational content.

Vox Feminae Festival presents and rewards films of all genres, and topics include gender equality, women’s creativity, and achievements, non-stereotypical gender roles and relationships, as well as feminist and LGBTIQ themes. Vox Feminae Festival especially encourages submission and presentation of the biography films that celebrate women who made significant contributions to the society in the fields of culture, politics, science, human rights, and art.

Vox Feminae Festival is organized by non-profit organization Expanse of Gender and Media Culture ‘Common Zone’ that provides innovative cultural and gender patchwork.

Vox Feminae Festival 
May 23, 2021
Sunday, 23.05.2021 // Kino Tuškanac // 9:00 PM
https://voxfeminae.net/festival/vff-2021/film-about-a-father-who/

Film About a Father Who

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. With a nod to Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ exploration offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Lynne has made 37 films, including features and shorts, which have screened, won awards or been included in retrospectives.

Maysles: “Film About a Father Who” Collaborators Panel

Saturday, April 3, 2021
https://www.maysles.org/calendar/2021/4/2/film-about-a-father-who

A PANEL DISCUSSION BETWEEN LYNNE SACHS (DIRECTOR), REBECCA J SHAPASS (EDITOR), STEPHEN VITIELLO (MUSIC AND SOUNDSCAPE), KEVIN T ALLEN (SOUND COLLAGE AND MIX), AND RACHEL ROSHEGER (ANIMATION AND CREDITS) WILL TAKE PLACE ON SATURDAY, APRIL 3 AT 4PM EST. MODERATED BY EMILY APTER AND INNEY PRAKASH.

“Our conversation will look at the way that films can be made with collaborators who bring their own vision and insight to a project. Dialogue with each of these people was critical to the making of my film, providing challenges to my own assumptions about working with and beyond reality. These four people pushed me to think in new ways about my own process and intention in the editing, sound and graphic design that were so much a part of the making of Film About a Father Who.” — Lynne Sachs

In Their Own League – Interview with Lynne Sachs

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR LYNNE SACHS
In Their Own League 
March 30, 2021
By Joan Amenn 
https://intheirownleague.com/2021/03/30/exclusive-interview-with-director-lynne-sachs/

Following my review of her latest, “Film About a Father Who” (2020) which I saw as part of her exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, I sat down with Lynne to dive deeper into this poignant and revealing film.

Going through all this footage, was it ever just too painful? Did you ever think “I need to walk away from this”?

In a sense, every film I made since ’91 is a walk away from this film. For example, I made a film with my sister in 1994 called “Which Way is East?” She was living in Vietnam as a journalist. In the early ‘90’s she was one of the first journalists to be there and I went there with her to kind of understand the Vietnam War from the perspective of Vietnamese people. It’s very much from that of two sisters, two women, what we notice. It’s definitely not from a former soldier who is going back to Vietnam would notice. That film was made and finished in ’94 and it was a run to my sister but away from the Dad film. I actually started that film as a triptych, “Film About a Father Who,” that was about the ways that you can know about another person. I made this film that was about my Dad, and then I made a film about a woman who was a filmmaker and a mother who lived in Israel and how her life got wrapped up in the violence of the Middle East. She was a total stranger but ..I felt a connection to her.  So, I made that film called “States of Unbelonging.” And then I made a film about a relative of mine. I never met him but during WWII he lived in Europe, in Rome specifically. He was a doctor and he reconstructed the bodies of dead American soldiers. I called it “cosmetic surgery” and it was all about his letters. He was kind of connected to me but also a stranger.

So, there were these three degrees of how you can know another person and you would think the one about my father would be the easiest but it was hardest because it was painful, there was shame. There was an inability to find distance, and also even aesthetically I would look at film footage that I had shot all through the ‘90’s and the Aughts, I would look at the mediums and not like it, it didn’t look as good! I would be very judgmental of it. Until I had this flip, which you articulated very well, this is the skin and the texture of that era, so why not celebrate it? I made “States of Unbelonging” in 2005 and the film about my cousin was called “The Last Happy Day” in 2009 so I kept doing other things because it felt more possible and less intimidating.

I noticed that in your ending credits, you suggested the diagramming of a sentence?  Maybe I read too much into that.

Oh, yes! Oh, yes-you got it! I did a lot of diagramming in junior high school…I thought that they had stopped teaching diagramming because my daughters never learned it which I thought was a shame. But my editor assistant, Rebecca has a very good friend of hers who does animation, went to an all-girl Catholic school and at least in 2010 let’s say, they were teaching diagramming. When I said to the two of them I want my credits to be this ambiguous play between a family tree and diagramming, because both of those are sort of structuring devices we can use to introduce people to relationships.. [the animator] got it…I don’t think she had ever done credits before but she had done animation. In my mind I was so insistent that it had to be something like that and she just got it and she went way beyond what I ever expected…The thing is I could have made my life a lot easier in this film if I had a family tree early. I could have eliminated the mystery, my mystery, my confusion. If I gave you a family tree than you would get clarity like that! I didn’t want that and I didn’t really care at all if you would finish this film and you would know…you would probably know that I’m the oldest. You didn’t have to know the order of everything else because things were more associative and I didn’t want it to be so rigid that way. I wanted it to be more amorphous and for you to keep asking questions, even about your own family.

…This brings up something I’ve never talked to anyone about in relation to “Film About a Father Who” which is, this is a film about a parent. I’m a mother. Everybody writes about this film being about a daughter but it’s really a film about a parent. Actually, maybe more because I didn’t understand all the responsibilities of being a parent, I didn’t understand the expectations, the complexities of how you live your life in relation to these other people. And the idea that you leave an imprint. I realize in talking to you, that I couldn’t finish it until I had become a parent because that allowed me to move into this other zone, not exclusively being a daughter. I could handle a lot more once I had my children and once I knew how much guilt is involved in being a parent; like, did I make the wrong decision? Maybe my Dad didn’t have that superego that said, “Don’t do that, that’s going to make your child feel bad!”

We’re almost out of time, so what’s next?

Oh, that’s a fun question! Well, I have been spending a lot of time on the distribution of the film. It’s distributed through Cinema Guild. I’m a filmmaker more than a director so because of that I’m used to traveling…I like talking to the audiences. Sometimes I do workshops, I try to put together shows in little storefronts… but we’re not doing that now. Working with my distributor has been a lot of work and pleasure. What a treat that’s been! I’ve also probably made around four or five short films since the pandemic. They’re all plays between sound and image. For example, I made a film which was a commission for a film festival in Spain called Punto de Viste which is a super interesting film festival in Pamplona. They asked ten filmmakers around the world to make a film and they gave us each 400 Euros, which is enough to make a digital film. The film was supposed to be a letter to a filmmaker who had been important to us who was no longer alive. I chose Jean Vigo, he made “Zero for Conduct” (1933) and “L’Atalante” (1934) and he was a filmmaker in the 1930’s. He only made three films but he is very beloved to people in the experimental and documentary film world. His film “Zero for Conduct” is 45 minutes and it’s about boys in a boarding school, who take over the boarding school. It’s very anti-authoritarian. They’re very adorable, and feisty and crazy and it’s all about childhood anarchy in the 1930’s. It’s a great film. On January 6th, when the rioters broke into the Capitol and the violence ensued, I started to think about when playing becomes dangerous. I made this short film as a letter to John Vigo but it uses footage from the January 6th breach. I also cut it into a film that Peter Brook made, “Lord of the Flies” (1963). In “Lord of the Flies” you see these boys that have landed on this island and they become very violent. They endanger one another and themselves so that space between beautiful anarchy and violence was interesting, so I made that film. I don’t think short films are calling cards to the big ones. I like making films of all lengths… so it has been kind of exhilarating. I [also] have a big project that has something to do with Ida B. Wells. It’s a collaboration with a friend of mine who teaches African American studies. Ida B. Wells was a journalist who researched lynching. She comes from Memphis which is where I come from so there are stories I want to explore related to her life.

DCTV presents “Film About a Father Who” and a conversation between Kat Sachs & Lynne Sachs

“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.- Kat Sachs, Cine-File Read Kat Sachs’ full review of “Film About a Father Who” on cine-file

“Film About a Father Who” will be available in DCTV’s virtual cinema through April 22, 2021. Get your tickets HERE!

DCTV Presents
Film About a Father Who

http://news.dctvny.org/q/qNMm2XG6IICrU7XrJvrXOH-ShggvU1FW-_KmRmP-9Vd8NfhQo66wtOeF6

Dir. Lynne Sachs / 2021

“Sachs has created an indelible work that, like those within it, perseveres by way of honesty and love.” — Kat Sachs, Cine-File

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. 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.

This online rental in DCTV’s Virtual Cinema includes a Q&A with film critic Ela Bittencourt, as well as an exclusive Q&A with Director Lynne Sachs and Cine-File’s Kat Sachs, where Lynne Sachs looks fondly back to her first film class at DCTV. We’re so honored to be able to continue to support and share her work. This film is not to be missed! Watch >

https://cinemaguild.vhx.tv/checkout/film-about-a-father-who-dctv/purchase