STORY

In this searingly beautiful documentary director Rebecca Carpenter investigates the origins of the insidious chasm which grew between her and her father Lew, a World Champion Green Bay Packer and NFL coach, who passed away with a mysterious brain disease in 2010. Set in the world of professional football, the universally-acclaimed REQUIEM offers an intimate portrait of a complicated love between father and daughter, and the often elusive, enigmatic nature of truth. 

A Harvard-educated former collegiate rower and consummate ‘coach’s daughter,’ Carpenter elicits refreshingly candid, colorful and emotionally varied responses in her quest to understand her father’s increasingly mercurial temperament. She chronicles her family’s near-obsessive attachment to football and the ramifications of the revelation that repetitive head injuries may have stolen a part of her father she could never get back. An insider herself in this notoriously private world, Carpenter deftly manages to encourage former players to share with her the ethos of NFL culture, while mixing seamlessly with scientists who articulate clearly the latest medical discoveries. Members of Carpenter’s family reveal secrets harbored privately for decades; secrets that, if revealed, would not only have jeopardized their father’s job but might also have exposed the family to community ridicule and societal shame. Quirky, and at times sobering, Carpenter unravels the paradoxes of a life committed to winning and to loving; to rediscovering her father and herself along the way.