REVIEW BY MARGARET ALLUM
All About My Father
Directed by Even Benestad
Screened at the 49th Sydney Film Festival in June
Even Benestad made documentary film about his father, but both had very different ideas about what the film would achieve. Esben Benestad is a doctor in a small, quiet town in Norway. A respected local, he also enjoys dressing as a woman. It is this issue that is at the centre of the film.
Esben sees Even's film, All About My Father, as a chance to speak out about gender issues — the perception and the reality. Even chooses to use the film as a vehicle to demonstrate the effect his father's choices have had on the family.
Hearing Even, his sister and mother speak about Esben, it is clear that they find his "other life" disturbing and difficult to understand. Even cannot accept that the man who spends some of his time living as a women (calling herself Esther Pirelli) is the man he wants his father to be.
Discussing the film, Even said: "Contrary to my father's idea that this film would promote him as a colourful and different person who uses all his time and effort to combat the conservative bureaucracy, I wanted to make a deeply personal portrait of him where his transvestism and strong self-realisation forms the basis of the film. I have made this film on my own terms."
However, what comes across in the film is Esben's attempt to live his life in the way he prefers and to be understood and respected for doing so. Esben only wishes that his family look beyond narrow concepts and defined gender roles and relate to him as a person, a person who has both maleness and femaleness as part of his identity. The film exposes Even's inability to do this, not his father's failing.
All About My Father is a very engrossing and often painful portrayal of misunderstanding and hurt. But there is also joy and humour. The combination of video and old 8-millimetre home movie footage reveals the perspectives not only of Even and his father, but Even's sister and his mother, Esben's first wife, whose story is filled with sadness at the loss of the man she thought she once knew.
Esben's present wife, while seemingly supportive of Esben's identities, also fears that he may choose to spend most of his time living as a women — a thought of which clearly worries her.
This documentary won the prize for the best documentary at the 49th Sydney Film Festival in June. It has won awards at the Berlin and Gothenburg film festivals, Hot Docs in Toronto and at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munchen, Germany.
From Green Left Weekly, August 7, 2002.
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