Family

Sheffield International Documentary Festival
2002

Family
Sami Saif

Dolan Cummings

Family is a personal epic about belonging, reponsibility, balding and pot bellies. Following his brother's suicide, Danish film-maker Sami Saif sets out to find his long lost Arab father. Sami's girlfriend Sophie points the camera as he follows various leads and finally makes it to Yemen.

The pace is relaxed and there are plenty of diversions along the way, including a trip to an antique fair where Sami's friend buys a pair of binoculars. Nothing to do with the story, but when I caught sight of Sami at the festival a couple of days after seeing the film, I felt like I knew him. This is important, because without the particularities there is nothing especially engaging about any family story.

In the event, Family has all the narrative depth of a feature film, and an orchestral soundtrack to match. The film's strongest theme is inheritance. Sami doesn't know his father, but is acutely aware of him as a determining influence on his life, and most directly, his appearance. Sami's anxiety about his receding hairline is heightened when he discovers that his half-brother, a singer in Yemen, wears a wig. But he does find a strange consolation by standing half naked with his new brother in front of the mirror, and seeing his own belly take its place in the family.

If the subject of the film were someone other than the film-maker himself, several scenes would have been much more uncomfortable to watch. When Sami calls an airport in Yemen to ask for his father, he eventually gets through to another relative who is also a pilot. Though Sami is using a false name, his relative guesses who he is and at first seems willing to help, and then, apparently after checking with Sami's father, changes his mind and says he doesn't know him. Sami is clearly distraught and the tension is awful.

At this point the film is less like drama than reality-style documentary, except that there is no unwitting subject being exploited. Sami himself provides the anguish, and presents it to the audience.

The film's peculiar blend of narrative and documentary, distance and familiarity, makes for an engaging story. No doubt it is a one-off, as unique as Sami's family, but it somehow adds up to more than the sum of its parts.