Club Screening: “Tell Them Who You Are” – A Documentary on Haskell Wexler

This film centres on the director’s relationship with his father, legendary cinematographer and filmmaker Haskell Wexler, whose long and illustrious career is a virtual catalogue of 20th century classics. Haskell collaborated with world-class filmmakers such as Elia Kazan, Milos Forman, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, and includes many of Hollywood’s best-known classics, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, American Graffiti, Coming Home, and One Flew Over the Cucko’s Nest.

The film features interviews with all those artists, along with Hollywood luminaries including Michael Douglas, Ron Howard and Julia Roberts. But the true “star” of this documentary is Haskell himself, a larger-than-life character who challenges his son’s artistic choices. As these two men swap positions on camera and sometimes behind it, the film explores the specifics of this particular father/son dynamic, revealing universal truths about how our parents teach us to see the world.

Mark Wexler is an American documentary filmmaker and photojournalist. He is a producer and director, known for Me and My Matchmaker (1996), How to Live Forever (2009) and Tell Them Who You Are (2004).