Nobody gets over the loss of a father. This sensitive film portrays several articulate men who describe the emotional problems resulting from the absence of a father. Whether through death, divorce, alcoholism, or simply the inability to relate, each of the men portrayed was left with an emotional void which they spend their lives trying to fill.

Poet Patrick Lane grew up with an emotionally distant father, with whom he never had a single conversation. He set fire to his father's wheat field, glad to endure the beating just to get his father's attention for once. Chris Kaplan was fortunate in that his father who had left the family reappeared eighteen years later. Chris was on his way to becoming a substance abuser and a criminal, but his new found relationship turned him around.

John Lee, son of an alcoholic father, spent his childhood yearning for his father to return and then wishing for him to leave. He points out that mothers and sons have an unnaturally dependent relationship when there is no father around. All these men constantly search for a father figure and each has difficulty acting as a father to his own sons.

Program Note: see the companion film Daddy's Girls

American Psychiatric Association, 1995