IN SEARCH OF OUR FATHERS

“Forty-seven percent of black families had no fathers. Vaat was this doing to us?” This is the first and only statistic cited by the introspective documentarian, who turns the camera on his own lineage to put human faces over the numbers. A Harvard scholar who knew nothing about his long-absent father, not even the man's name, Marco Williams probed tangled family histories, coaxed out confessions, and captured on film a hunt for both personal identity and the responsibilities of one generation for another. The film covers a full decade, and takes the filmmaker from Paris, France to Columbus, Ohio. It testifies both to the decay of the family unit and the strength of a household without men, and asks whether this is the way things should be.