DANCING WITH MY FATHER

Happy families are all alike, goes the famous adage, while unhappy families are different in a thousand different ways. Marcia Rock, an award-winning New York-based documentary filmmaker, felt lost when she and her husband Terry divorced her after 18 years, he complaining about her ?distance,? she injured by his perfectionism and verbal abuse. Rock coped by using the tools she had available; her camera, fascination with history and interviewing skills. In a compassionate combination of psychological self-analysis and dynastic saga, Rock traces her family lineage from a tiny, now-extinct Jewish community in Slovakia, to the Woodland Avenue neighborhood of Cleveland during the early 20th century. Her delving uncovers the thwarted hopes and misdirected ambition that led her Old Country grandmother to build a private business empire while perpetrating outrageous acts of abuse on her children. One of them, Marcia's father Manuel, grew up to be a self-sufficient businessman, a charismatic and avid dancer, but a cold (and, yes, distant) parent, more adept at sorting non-ferrous metals out at his North Coast scrap yard than expressing loving emotion to his three children. To Marcia fell a legacy of bad relationships ? serial mismatches with blaming, controlling men, and seeking solace in the comfort of the editing suite. Now, by asking the right questions, Marcia Rock finally gets to dance with her father, not around him.