My Father My Friend Excerpts

My Father My Friend Full Documentary

In a personal dialogue between father and daughter about life, death, love, faith, evolution and creation, this documentary reveals how monotheistic religion, modernity and scientific perception overlap on common ground. In casual everyday settings director Nabawia Elsoudani, portrays the life of her father, a Middle Eastern- born American citizen, in thought provoking discussions that shed light on his extensive historical and scientific research of theology. The filmmaker addresses her father’s unwavering faith with questions that challenge consistency of truth and the patriarchal establishment of religion. Her father approaches these large philosophical questions from a perspective that is innovatively mathematical, scientific and logical, backing up each statement with a chronology of historical evidence of overshadowed truths.

She captures this perspective through a lens that reflects her own internal psychological perspective. As her father draws a diagram of set theory to explain the long debated contradictions between free will and predestination, the ink on paper is transformed into elements that make up an alternate reality beyond that of the physical world. This is a reality of the mind of the filmmaker that she develops through animation and video feedback. These images weave together and illustrate her father’s complex research into a form that reaches human comprehension yet retains all the mystery of what remains unknown and inconceivable.

In representing her father’s humanity and open-mindedness, a feminist and progressive perspective about religion comes into focus. An exchange between contrasting points of view unify into a thorough search for personal truth where faiths find a common vein of universality based on justice to all genders and ethnicities. The mystery of both the unseen and the unknown is dealt with in an exploration of ideas about God and all that lies outside of the physical reality of the human experience between birth and death.