À la recherche du Dad perdu

Nobody has daddy issues like the children of famous men. Their fathers, like anyone else’s, only exist as a mystery. They may be pursued or ignored, but they will never be fully deciphered. Such fullness—Alex Colston showed in a piece titled “Father” published in Parapraxis—is itself a delusion. For the children of stars, their fathers’ unknowability is only further proved by the world’s delusions of familiarity and confident assertions of proximity.

At this year’s Architecture and Design Film Festival, the category Directed by Child of the Architect was a specific incarnation of the larger efflorescent genre of film Looking for Dad. If daddy issues aren’t always in fashion, they are at least ripe, raw material. The films featured under the category were Nathaniel Kahn’s Oscar-nominated My Architect, Elettra Fiumi’s Radical Landscapes, and Denise Zmekhol’s Skin of Glass. S…