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Looking for Robert

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On Cinema • 1h 13m

Directed by Richard Copans • Documentary • With Robert Kramer • 2025 • 74 minutes

Robert Kramer’s politics were as a radical as his approach to making films. A founder of the leftist Newsreel collective, he went on to direct documentaries and dramas, and films that blended both. Disgusted with the politics of the United States, he lived for decades in self-imposed exile in France.

Directed and narrated by Kramer’s longtime cinematographer and sometime producer, Richard Copans, LOOKING FOR ROBERT is a retrospective of Kramer’s work, and a love letter to a colleague and friend.

Copans assembles telling moments from groundbreaking films like ROUTE ONE/USA and DOC’S KINGDOM, and includes never-before-seen rushes. While the relationship between the two men was at times stormy, Copans remained the “loyal indispensable helper.” He loads film, frantically keeps the money coming when a shoot goes over-budget, and sleeps in cheap motels, all to fulfill his friend’s vision. What emerges in LOOKING FOR ROBERT is not only an intimate portrait of an artist, but also the moving biography of a friendship.

Tags
art, bio, biography, cinema, cinema studies, citizenship, culture, doc, documentary, documentary films, exile, expository, faln, film and video studies, film history, filmmaker, filmmakers, filmmaking, france, french, french culture, friendship, icarus films, ice, looking for robert, milestones, ovid, route one/usa, social movements and activism, the 1960s and vietnam era, united states

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