Friday May 30 | 9:00 pm | Pacific Cinémathèque

Director: Celia Maysles, USA, 2007, 70 minutes

In the 1960s, David and Albert Maysles revolutionized documentary film by creating “direct cinema,” a nonfiction form of cinema verité meant to capture the truest nature of experience. Together, the Maysles Brothers were responsible for some of the most influential documentaries in American film history, including Salesman (1968), Gimme Shelter (1970) and Grey Gardens (1976).

Celia Maysles was just seven years old in 1987 when her father, David, died from a brain aneurysm. Almost twenty years later, she set out to uncover who her father really was by making—what else?—a documentary film called Wild Blue Yonder. In the grand tradition of the Maysles, whose work often sprang from the complexities of family, Celia retraces her father’s footsteps, visiting the sights of some his famous films and reconstructing him as an artist and person through interviews with those who knew him best, from his therapist to his wife. But as she begins to dig into her family and personal history, deep fractures are revealed. A bitter legal battle over her father’s unfinished autobiographical film Blue Yonder is only the beginning. It develops that her Uncle Albert has plans for his own documentary, and like most great artists, he has little interest in sharing the limelight. Soon Celia’s quest to rediscover her father threatens not only her family’s fragile reconciliation but her emerging sense of herself as a filmmaker in her own right.

The film features a veritable who’s-who in American documentary filmmaking including Albert Mayles, D.A. Pennebaker, Charlotte Zwerin and Susan Froemke, as well as clips from the Maysles Brothers’s most celebrated films, including footage of Grey Gardens’ Big Edie and Little Edie, Mick Jagger, Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Wild Blue Yonder is a deeply personal journey that addresses the mutability of memory, the value of art and ultimately asks whether the mystery of a father’s life (and death) can ever be fully understood by the daughter he left behind.

Director Biography

Celia Maysles is the daugher of the late David Maysles and niece of Albert Maysles of Maysles Films fame. Celia Maysles has been working in documentary production since 2004. She has worked at Corra Films as a line producer, in development and real people casting on projects for VH1, The Sundance Channel, several independent features and commercial campaigns. Wild Blue Yonder is her directorial debut.

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