Slamdance review: A daughter tries to figure out her father in thoughtful, enigmatic 'Film About a Father Who'

‘Film About a Father Who’

★★★1/2

Playing at the Slamdance Film Festival. Running time: 74 minutes.

Screens again: Monday, Jan. 27, 11 a.m., Ballroom, Treasure Mountain Inn (Park City).

–––––

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.

The work Lynne Sachs does to understand her dad starts from the outside and works its way in. We see Ira Sachs Sr. as an enthusiastic and iconoclastic businessman, splitting between Memphis, Tenn. — where he and his first wife, Diane, raised Lynne and two siblings (including the filmmaker Ira Sachs Jr.) — and Park City, Utah. (One of his best known properties in Utah was the original Yarrow Hotel, now the DoubleTree by Hilton.) He worked hard, loved getting out onto the land he was developing, and loved working while playing, made easier as an early adopter of cellular phones.

Women are a constant presence in Ira’s life. Ira and Diane were divorced by the time Lynne started the film formally in 1991, and Ira was married to his much-younger separate wife, Diana, with whom Ira had three more kids. There are also girlfriends, and three more siblings, though that takes some sorting out for the audience. But most important was Judy, aka Maw-Maw, Ira Sr.’s mother, who maintained a hold on Ira Sr., both emotionally and financially, well into his adulthood.

Taking visual cues from modern art, and a title borrowed from Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 drama “Film About a Woman Who…,” Lynne Sachs compiles a film that’s as colorful, as complex, and sometimes as inscrutable as her father. She may not have unlocked the secret of her father’s heart, but the attempt reveals touching, humorous and painful insights about what we think a father is and what he should be.