Edith Lorain Fenner cadillacnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cadillacnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Print
In the opening moments of Lynne Sachs’ personal documentary “Film About a Father Who,” we see the filmmaker carefully detangling her octogenarian dad Ira’s unruly, hippie-holdover locks. It’s a quiet slice of caretaking intimacy, but it also doubles as prologue to the knotty family journey to follow, which in no small part involves Sachs making sense of a free-spirited parent’s complicated legacy.
Ira Sachs Sr. was no ordinary father. Marked by wide-ranging business ventures, grand gestures and righteous causes, his peripatetic life was driven by the joy in whims. But it also created nine children over 30 years with six different women, where various kids were often unaware for long stretches about others’ existences.
Dr. Quinn Headen remembers the conversation like it was yesterday. It was one of those small moments that grow over time as his students do. He was the assistant principal at Meridianville Middle School in Hazel Green, a growing but tight-knit community in north Alabama near Huntsville. One of his students, a young lady named Nakerra Lewis, approached with some news about her younger brother, who was 10 or 11 at the time. She told me, My brother can play basketball, Headen said. I said, We ll see.
Headen wanted to see for himself so he started watching her brother play ball. It didn t take long to notice that the pretzel-thin, pin-drop-quiet young man from the middle school hallways had a different and definite presence on the basketball floor. Even then, he moved at a different speed.