Lynne Sachs’s prismatic, psychodramatic family portrait “Film About a Father Who” (IMDb) is a gripping, poetic essay suggesting that looking at a family tree is not enough to understand a family.

American filmmaker, artist and poet Lynne Sachs—whose work, spanning documentaries, experimental shorts and hybrid live performances, is too diverse to be confined to a single genre—made the 2020 film “Film About a Father Who”, which is not only a fragmented family album but also a record of how Sachs’s filmmaking has evolved over the years.

In her film, which takes its title from Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 avant-garde masterpiece “About a Woman Who…,” Sachs unlocks the secrets of her rebellious, free-spirited father Ira, now in his eighties. Looking deeply into a far-from-stable family life, she also tries to understand the bond that ties a child to their parent and siblings.

Ira Sachs Sr. is no ordinary father. He resembles an older version of The Dude from “The Big Lebowski.” He is a hippie whose grand gestures and exuberance draw attention wherever he goes, and a businessman with ambitious commercial ventures. And at the same time, he is the father of nine children, all now over 30, from relationships with six different women—some of whom grew up unaware of one another for years.

Lynne Sachs, the eldest of the siblings, has been recording her father since 1984. She gathers 8 and 16 mm film footage, videotapes and, more recently, digital material, and from this visual memory spanning decades she crafts a documentary that is as experimental as it is deeply personal.

Starting from cubist representations of a face, Sachs’s cinematic inquiry presents multifaceted, sometimes contradictory images of her father, portraying a man who, though he shows himself openly in front of the camera, remains mysterious and invisible in his private life.

Sachs approaches the father figure—seemingly modest, and one the audience feels very close to—with a candor that, while not entirely merciless, is not easy on him either. She structures her film as an investigation into his character—and, of course, around the shock that two children he had hidden from his other children, revealed toward the end of the film, sent through the family.

Sachs’s emotional interrogation of her glib yet secretive father takes her back, again and again, to blurry videotapes shot in her childhood or young adulthood, where she searches for signs that might explain his behavior.

Unfolding as a meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, the film gives both Sachs herself and the viewer the chance to look beneath the skin, beyond the reality being projected. As surprising truths come to light, she learns things about her father she never expected.

“How can you search for something you didn’t even know was lost?” asks Sachs, referring to the two half-sisters she was unaware of for years and who grew up around the same time as she did, as she ponders early-’90s footage of her young half-brothers playing in the woods.

Despite the shocking revelations she uncovers, Sachs does not turn her film into a punch, and takes care to convey her love for her father. A feature-length polyphonic portrait of her father filmed over many years, the film ultimately shows that this man is essentially unknowable, his mysteries too vast to be captured by a camera.

Jonathan Romney of Screen Daily describes the film as “Terrific in its courage, honesty and purpose! Like a chapter in the ongoing body of work of a director who makes experimental, deeply personal work.” Benjamin Hollis of Documentary Weekly says, “Sachs’s greatest achievement to date. A unique, brilliant film that stayed with me in the end.”

The film had its world premiere as the opening film of the Slamdance Film Festival in 2020, was screened in The Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight program, and had its international premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest alongside a retrospective specially devoted to Sachs.

The film also holds a surprise: one of Lynne’s siblings is the American director who shares his father’s name, Ira Sachs. Known to audiences in Türkiye especially through “Keep the Lights On” (2012), and continuing his success with films such as “Love Is Strange” (2014), “Little Men” (2016) and his latest film “Passages” (2023), which competed at the Berlinale, Ira Sachs briefly joins his sister Lynne in her search.

Kundura Sinema’s “Love, Rebellion, Freedom” selection will screen “Film About a Father Who” on June 4. For ticket information, please follow this link.

Lynne Sachs: An experimental filmmaker and poet born in Memphis and based in Brooklyn. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries to essay films, experimental shorts and hybrid live performances. She has directed more than 30 films, including “Tip of My Tongue,” “Your Day is My Night,” “Investigation of a Flame” and “Which Way is East.”