Darn it, point that camera somewhere else, Dad!

Home movies boomed in the postwar era, with the introduction of portable Super-8 cameras. Although films of birthday parties and family vacations are a yawn to anyone who wasn't there, people often made their friends watch anyway.

That social faux pas is largely avoided by the camcorder generation. Yet there is an undeniable fascination to peeking into other people's lives, even if most of what they choose to record is banal. That's why God, in his infinite wisdom, gave us the scissors and software to cut out the dull bits.

Unfortunately, the Polish-born, American-based filmmaker Marian Marzynski didn't get the memo. His feature-length father-daughter portrait, "Anya (in and out of focus)," which draws on 30 years of obsessive filming and taping, is awash in ordinary and unrevealing moments.

"Anya (in and out of focus)," which screens in the S.F. Jewish Film Festival, is essentially a look at the tensions between American-born children and their immigrant parents.

The younger generation, represented here by Anya and her nearly unseen brother, throws itself into the only world they know. Its parents, less fluent in the language and less comfortable with the culture, are torn between pushing their children toward unimagined opportunities and protecting them from unknown dangers.

Marzynski was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto to the Catholic side as a boy, and lost most of his family. Unlike the Holocaust survivors who fled to the United States immediately after the war — many of whom were cursed with lifelong fears that they inevitably passed on to their kids — Marzynski didn't leave Poland until 1972, seemingly coming to terms with this awful legacy.

When he came to the United States to teach filmmaking, he had a successful TV career, a Catholic wife and a son. After Anya was born, the Marzynskis settled in Chicago's Hyde Park, where much of "Anya" was shot.

Along the way, he made a couple of documentaries for PBS including "Shtetl: A Journey Home." But his favorite subject, based on the evidence here, was Anya. Marzynski's boisterous love for his daughter is a fine thing, but from a viewer's standpoint it's too bad he didn't have a more interesting character to work with. Anya's a loud, bossy child, and displays a chronic immaturity as she grows up. She's not especially self-aware or articulate, and there are scant few moments where we discern what her life is really like beyond the range of her father's camera and her mother's conservatism.

Marzynski, as much as Anya, is the focus, because his voice is ever-present. Unwilling to simply record Anya living her life, he feels compelled to interview her incessantly. Some of these scenes reflect reality, but others feel as though they were provoked — staged is too strong a word — for the benefit of the camera.

A case can be made that Marzynski's ceaseless poking and prodding is his way of challenging Anya to stand up for herself. He knows something about the indifference of the world, and his intent may be to equip Anya so she gets what she wants out of life.

I am not a parent, and I was never a girl, and moviegoers who fall into those groups may enjoy — or recoil at — the shiver of recognition. I fervently hope, though, that there isn't another teenage girl somewhere whose father asked her, on camera, if she'd started menstruating.




"Anya (in and out of focus)" screens at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, July 28 at the Castro Theatre in S.F.; 3:30 p.m. Sunday, July 31 at the Mountain View Century, 3:45 p.m. Monday, Aug. 1 at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley and noon Saturday, Aug. 6 at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. Tickets: $8-$11.