ACE Presents My Architect

Director: Nathaniel Kahn

2003 / 116min / DCP

Estonian-born American architect Louis Kahn, whose life’s work includes a disproportionate number of masterpieces (Yale University Art Gallery, the Kimbell Art Museum, the First Unitarian Church in Rochester), is the subject of this penetrating Academy Award-nominated documentary by his son, edited with aplomb by Sabine Krayenbühl, later to become an accomplished nonfiction filmmaker in her own right. Kahn the younger explores his father’s celebrated work—Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, and Philip Johnson are on hand to offer testimonials—as well as his rather knotty personal life: following his death in 1974, Kahn, then bankrupt, was learned to be leading a triple life, with two long-term lovers and two children born out-of-wedlock, one of them the film’s director. “A Citizen Kane-like meditation on whether anyone is truly knowable… [Kahn] shows off his dad’s buildings’ epic grandeur as well as their spiritual intimacy.” —New York Magazine

Q&A with editor Sabine Krayenbühl moderated by film educator Joshua Handler on Friday, February 6th

Part of Filmcraft: American Cinema Editors