Film About a Father Who

Film About a Father Who

Directed by Lynne Sachs • 2020 • United States

Over a period of thirty-five years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16 mm 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. Like a cubist rendering of a face, Sachs’s cinematic exploration of her father offers multiple, sometimes contradictory, views of a seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately shrouded in mystery. With this meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, Sachs allows herself and her audience to see beneath the surface of the skin, beyond the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.

This exclusive streaming premiere is accompanied by a selection of experimental short films by Sachs, many of which also reflect her probing exploration of family relationships.

Subscribe Share
Film About a Father Who
  • Film About a Father Who

    Directed by Lynne Sachs • 2020 • United States

    Over a period of thirty-five years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16 mm 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 ...

Extras

  • FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO Commentary

    The following commentary features director Lynne Sachs.

  • Lynne Sachs Interview

    This interview with filmmaker Lynne Sachs was recorded in 2021.

  • Which Way Is East

    Directed by Lynne Sachs • 1994 • United States

    When Lynne Sachs travels north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi with her sister Dana Sachs, a writer living in Vietnam, conversations with strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared narrative. The sisters’ reflections on tourism, c...

  • The Last Happy Day

    Directed by Lynne Sachs • 2009 • United States

    THE LAST HAPPY DAY is an experimental documentary portrait of filmmaker Lynne Sachs’s distant cousin Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and writer of Jewish descent. In 1938, Lenard fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly ...

  • Wind in Our Hair

    Directed by Lynne Sachs • 2010 • United States

    Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, Lynne Sachs’s experimental narrative follows four girls discovering themselves through a fascination with the trains that pass by th...

  • The Washing Society

    Directed by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs • 2018 • United States

    When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? THE WASHING SOCIETY brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Liz...

  • Girl Is Presence

    Directed by Lynne Sachs and Anne Lesley Selcer • 2020 • United States

    For GIRL IS PRESENCE, Lynne Sachs has made images as a form of reading and listening in response to disquieting words from Anne Lesley Selcer’s poem “Sun Cycle.” A girl arranges and rearranges objects, sensorily reflecting th...

  • E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo

    Directed by Lynne Sachs • 2021 • United States, Spain

    In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, filmmaker Lynne Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic ZÉRO DE CONDUITE, in which a group of schoolboys wage an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thin...

  • Maya at 24

    Directed by Lynne Sachs • 2021 • United States

    Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya Maya Street-Sachs at ages six, sixteen, and twenty-four. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle—clockwise—as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Conscious of the stra...