Theme: Murder

This film is an investigation on many levels, in different sorts of ways. It is a portrait of an internal process as much as a sory about external events. These program notes from the Vancouver International Film Festival cover it well: 'A quality of creeping, tender intensity distinguishes Martha Swetzoff´s documentary investigation into the unsolved murder of her father, a noted art dealer who kept his gay identity a secret from his estranged family. Her mesmerizing two-decades´ journey to find personal peace and closure began with a student film at age 19. Now, 20 years later, she has incorporated pieces of her early probe into a work of maturity and philosophical vision, a film partly about knowability, partly a keen social history of a time in the 1960s when gayness was routinely closeted, even in modernist philosophical circles. Sensual, formally ambitious, Theme: Murder is an unusual three-way collaboration between producer Jane Gillooly and editor Karen Schmeer.'