By way of a musical prelude, Dad Smiling begins with a 38 second slow-motion medium shot of my body moving into the frame and fixing a seated man’s shirt collar. I pull out of the frame, he blinks back tears. For the next 11 minutes this late-middle-aged man, my father, looks at the camera—at me—and smiles. Rain pours down the window behind him, the tree sways. Buses and garbage trucks pass outside. Dogs bark, he carries on with his smiling: it’s meager, coy , flirty, smug, bored, condescending, confused, opaque.
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