Forgetting Dad

A man has a minor road accident. A week later he builds a new identity for himself. He says he does not remember being a father. Close to twenty years pass and nothing changes. Examinations find no brain damage and no physical cause. The film follows both the man and the family left behind. It moves through what the people around him say. The account offers no diagnosis; it shows what happened and how the family lives with it. The question it asks is what being abandoned means. The account is built as a record spread across years. Matt Sweetwood and Rick Minnich’s German documentary, eighty four minutes long, was completed in 2008.