Sink or Swim is a heartbreaking portrait of Su Friedrich’s relationship with her father during her childhood, her parents’ divorce and the impact of all this on her adult life. Narrated — as a distancing mechanism — by a child’s voice in the third person, the film adopts a structure with entries ordered alphabetically, referring both to her father’s profession as a linguist and a certain tradition of structural American cinema, particularly Zorns Lemma by Hollis Frampton (1970). Formally complex and emotionally intense, this film has become an important reference in autobiographical cinema.
