Hyde Park Pick: His Three Daughters

Our Hyde Park Pick this week is His Three Daughters, the new film from American director Azazel Jacobs.

Jacobs is one of a body of low budget American filmmakers it’s too easy to not have on your radar in part because there are so many exciting ones to follow, the task is not possible.

I’m grateful to Leeds International Film Festival because they were the ones who first brought him to my attention. It was a single screening as part of LIFF back in around 2008 of Momma’s Man, an early piece by Jacobs. Filmed in his parents’ New York apartment, a sprawling loft-like space full of the ephemera of a life well lived, Momma’s Man was a beautiful and sincere film about a man (Mikey) escaping the pressures of his grown-up world by hiding away in the fortress of his youth. 

Going in, I knew nothing about Momma’s Man but it’s a film which instantly caught my heart. Where Mikey could be a joke for his efforts to escape reality there was something very loving and tender in how Jacobs captured this very human experience. A deer caught in the headlights of life; a moment of weakness indulged with the outcome being overstaying a situation where we feel comfort. I think I saw Momma’s Man when I was young enough to still be absorbing cinema in search of the things that mattered most to me and, 16 years later, I now know it’s films like this which capture these small but enormous everyday experiences and bring compassion and kindness into the characters.

Which finally brings me onto His Three Daughters. Jacobs has made many films in the intervening years between these two titles but there’s a particular tie that binds these two. Sharing themes about the spaces in which we grow and the stories (good and bad) which last there, and the legacy of family on who it is we become as we grow.

I was lucky enough to be allowed to interview Jacobs (thanks to the kindness of Altitude and Netflix who have released the film here in the UK) and speak to him about the film. He shared that there was something precarious in His Three Daughters, something of not knowing if this would be his last film but also something deeply personal about the worries it conveys about losing (or letting go) of a parent.

I could say His Three Daughters is Jacobs’ masterpiece, but I won’t as I don’t think there’s a need to elevate any one film above another. It is a waypoint in an artist’s career that represents years of crafting their skills and talent to tell a story, and the point in an artist’s life when the weight of that must also be shouldered (or shown perhaps) in the work produced.

His Three Daughters has made a speedy journey to Netflix in the UK but the quiet sense of space and the electric performances of it’s three leads (Carrie Coons, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen) make it a beautiful cinematic work which I hope you will join us to experience on the big screen.

His Three Daughters is showing at HPPH on Friday 25 October at 20:10 and Sunday 27 October at 14:00, both with pre-recorded Q&As with Wendy and the director, Azazel Jacobs. You can book tickets here.