200 hours of footage, dusty boxes of film, a broken editing computer: these were the pieces of filmmaker Richard P. Rogers’ daring attempt to make his own autobiography. He died in 2001, leaving behind a lifetime of filmed memories, until his student and protégé, Alexander Olch began making a movie out of the pieces.

Writing in his teacher’s voice, working with with Wallace Shawn, Bob Balaban, and Richard’s wife – acclaimed photographer Susan Meiselas – Olch steps into his mentor’s shoes and his past – to make a film that was impossible to make. An autobiography, that isn’t. A documentary which is fiction. A lifetime of questions, finally answered.

FOUR STARS – CRITICS’ PICK – “Mind bending” – Time Out

CRITICS’ PICK – “A love letter to fading memory and the passage of time” – New York Magazine

“A feat of filmmaking“” – Filmmaker Magazine

“The most moving documentary of the year” – Anthem Magazine

“A haunting, poignant documentary” – Newsday

“Extraordinary.” – William Johnson, Film Quarterly

Nominated for the Writers Guild Award Best Documentary Screenplay

“Both a near uncategorizable feat of documentary filmmaking and a gorgeously constructed emotional portrait of a man grappling with the deepest of artistic and personal issues.” – Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker Magazine

“A stirring autobiography-by-proxy culled from 200 hours of footage… an act of memory preservation and facilitation whose eloquence, largely free of pat analysis, captures the messy, paradoxical emotions that often remain irreconcilable to the grave.” – Nick Schager, Slant Magazine

“A profoundly empathetic study of unfulfilled artistic ambition, and of the emotional ruthlessness that often separates great artists from decent people.” – John Anderson, Washington Post