The director of Arab and Danish origin will take us on an interesting and emotionally wrought journey with the camera mercilessly directed to his own self. The outline of the plot is the search for his father who left the family in Denmark when the director was still a young boy. On our journey to Yemen we will find out a lot about his traumatic childhood, much-adored older brother who committed suicide, and his mother who drank herself to death... The search reveals Sami’s half-brother, the toupee of a mega popular Yemen pop star for which no one had ever known before, and as for the father, whether they found him and ate the Christmas turkey with him – well, you will have to find that out by yourself!
Sami Saif
Sami Saif was born in 1972 in Denmark, and graduated in 1997 from Danish National Film Academy. ‘Family’ is his second film, and also the realization of his high school dream, to find his father with a camera. Upon finishing his personal journey, in his following documentary ‘Dog&Deer: Dogville Confessions’ (2003) he portrayed the much beloved Lars Von Trier as neurotic and unreliable director on Prozac. Trier returned the favor, in what other than a masochist way, by appearing in his latest documentary ‘American Short’, filmed in 2004.
Phie Ambo
Phie Ambo was born in 1973, Denmark. She graduated in documentary film directing at the National Film School of Denmark in 1999. Ambo is the winner of IDFA’s Joris Ivens Award for ‘Family’ (2001), co-directed with Sami Saif. After directing ‘Gambler’ (2006), a portrait of film director Nicolas Winding Refn in the midst of a crisis, her film ‘Mechanical Love’ (2007), about robots and emotions, was selected for the Joris Ivens Competition. ‘The Home Front’ (2010) is selected for Mid-length Competition at IDFA.
