Cast of Shadows

Using unseen materials from his family’s archive, Sami van Ingen presents an essay about the women around his grandfather, filmmaker Robert Joseph Flaherty – his wife and their daughters, and the crucial roles they played in the making of his work.

In 2023, we proudly premiered Mika Taanila and Sami van Ingen’s Monica in the South Seas. It was van Ingen’s first documentary attempt at grappling with his massive family heritage, being the great-grandson of the man enshrined in official film history’s annals as non-fiction cinema’s progenitor: Robert Joseph Flaherty. 

Back then he had already announced that there would be more on the matter et voilà, here it is: Cast of Shadows, a stridently narrative essay, using materials mostly from the family archive, about the women around Flaherty and their influence on his work. The main figure here is Flaherty’s wife Frances who, as the documents show, was much more deeply involved in her husband’s films than the credits suggest. Due space is also granted to her daughters Barbara and Monica (about whom we learn some wild stories!). By looking at Flaherty’s legacy like this, van Ingen redistributes the film’s artistic merits, but he doesn’t take anything away. Which makes Cast of Shadows a much needed corrective to the established way film history is commonly told!

– Olaf Möller

• 

• 

•