In college, I spent a fair amount of my free time roaming the rooms of the Yale Art Gallery. I knew it had been designed by Louis Kahn, a famous architect and, I'd heard, an arrogant man, and I used the rumor to dismiss the building. Didn't the ceiling look like a parking garage? Never mind that I liked the feel of the museum's stairwells with their polished round landings. I was young, and dismissing idols came naturally. Still, there was no way to dismiss the beautiful British Art Center, also designed by Kahn, across the street from the Gallery. That building struck me as holy, though not in a religious sense exactly. Outside, it looked like a big, elegant box, but inside, the space had a decidedly numinous quality. It actually made me tremble.

All of which made me curious about Nate Kahn's documentary exploration of his father, "My Architect." But one doesn't need a personal connection to find the contradictions at the center of Louis Kahn's life compelling. He was, after all, a great artist with a questionable (and certainly unusual) personal life: He had three separate families, one with his wife, two with his long-term mistresses. This is part of the puzzle that Nate's film seeks to untangle. But it is only part of the puzzle. The real goal is to discover the man himself.

Who was he, after all, this world-famous architect who died in the arms of a stranger in New York's Penn Station? A charmer? A tyrant? The answer remains elusive, but "My Architect" informs and satisfies nonetheless. It suggests touching possibilities about Kahn - that the pocked look of his walls stemmed from the scarring of his own face in a childhood accident - without simplifying Nate's own angry, admiring, confused feelings for his father. In one particularly telling moment, Nate gathers his two half-sisters, both less willing to overlook Kahn's flaws than their mothers appear to have been, and says, "I guess what I've always wondered is, are we a family?"

"The intellect of man," W.B. Yeats writes in his poem "The Choice," "is forced to choose/ Perfection of the life, or of the work." From all appearances, Kahn - who often slept in his office and labored tirelessly on his designs, and expected others to do the same - chose work. It was not a decision that his son might be expected to honor. And yet Nate does honor it - not by overlooking Kahn's limitations, but by suggesting that his father, at his best, transcended the art vs. life paradox, creating work that led back to life. Not life in an intimate family sense, it is true, but life in the guise of a building: Kahn's magnificent capital for Bangladesh, from which, as architect Shamsul Wares says at the film's moving end, "We can rise."

Debra Spark is the author of the novels, "Coconuts for the Saint" and "The Ghost of Bridgetown," as well as the forthcoming "Curious Attractions: Essays on Writing." She directs the Program in Creative Writing at Colby College.

2004 MJFF Program Book edited by Abby Zimet