About as "personal" as a documentary can get. Nathaniel Kahn, the unacknowledged bastard son of Philadelphia-based architect Louis Kahn (whose obituary in the New York Times mentioned only one offspring, a daughter, Sue Ann), sets out twenty-five years after his father's death, when the filmmaker had been but a boy of eleven, to disentangle the strands of his father's private life -- there is yet a third offspring, Alexandra, by yet a third mother -- and to visit all of his father's major edifices, of which, owing to the man's lifelong contentiousness, there are not a lot. ("Three or four masterpieces," opines I.M. Pei, "[are] more important than fifty, sixty buildings.") The film offers a good overview of the works themselves: the Salk Institute in La Jolla comes off well on screen (or as well as anything can in the pallid and fuzzy DV image), with the son roller-skating around the courtyard to Neil Young's "Long May You Run," and the capitol of Bangladesh makes a fitting climax both emotionally and artistically. We might have hoped for more out of the arranged meeting between the three half-siblings, and many questions remain unanswered or unasked. But one way or another the filmmaker completes his mission and has something to show for it: a compelling film to show for it. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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