deadCENTER Film Festival 2009

David Karr, husband, father, White House press reporter, film producer, powerful millionaire, defense contractor, Corporate CEO, renaissance businessman… soviet agent? Ten for Grandpa is a fast paced, introspective look at the enigmatic life of a most influential ancestor. Structured by a list of unanswered questions, the film takes an analytical, clear-eyed, and often comedic look at the life of this complex character and the events surrounding his untimely demise. An existential hero operating outside the everyday constraints of society, or a sociopathic loose canon willing to indiscriminately betray associates, friends and family members alike in the service of his obsessive ambition? Ten for Grandpa reaches to understand the forces that push an individual to immerse himself in a nefarious web of danger and infamy. Rooting the narrative thematically by looking at the consequences of secrecy on the family, our narrator tries to decipher if his forbearer really was a shrewdly manipulative antihero or simply a victim of a McCarthy witch hunt and State Department character assassination. If his most precarious choice was deciding to do business with the USSR at the height of the cold war, or if he really was a vehicle for international deception and skullduggery. With a multifaceted approach, the film reconsiders the romanticized popular conception of the secret agent. Deflating the quixotic convention of a dapper playboy, and replacing it with an elusive serial-husband who had as much difficulty dealing with the blurred lines of rivaling international superpowers as he did raising his own children. Far from answering these impossible questions, Ten for Grandpa evokes the specter of the enigmatic lineages and the unseen forces that inform our personalities and family lives. At its crux, the film is a snapshot of a fascinating ancestor, and the skeletons that rattle away in our closets. Ten for Grandpa was filmed on Super 35mm film, framed with a 2.35:1 screen aspect ratio.