David Farnor | On 06, Jan 2015

Update: The trailer for My Own My has now been released. You can see it below.

Netflix and Edward Norton are teaming up for the original documentary My Own Man.

The film, which made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2014, was written, produced and directed by David Sampliner (Dirty Work) and exec produced by the Hollywood star.

The documentary follows director Sampliner, who learns he’’s about to become a father to a baby boy. He fears he must “man up” and finally embrace the latent masculinity he’s rejected all his life. But as he immerses himself in a strange new world of masculine ideals, including vocal lessons, warrior weekends and hunting, he realises all roads lead back to his own fraught relationship with his father.

Intimate, funny and moving, My Own Man reveals the sometimes painful truths that are often left unspoken between fathers and sons.

“We’re proud to be working with Edward Norton and David Sampliner on this film,” says Lisa Nishimura, Netflix VP of Original Documentary and Comedy. “Intensely personal and yet universally relatable, My Own Man is both an exploration of the new masculinity and an examination of age-old differences between fathers and sons.”

David Sampliner’s first documentary feature, Dirty Work (co-directed with Tim Nackashi) screened at the Sundance Film Festival and won Best Documentary Feature at the Atlanta Film Festival.

“When I started making this film, I wanted to document an experience I shared with a lot of my peers: becoming a husband and father in a time when the roles for men were changing so dramatically,” explains Sampliner. “But in the course of shooting over seven years, I realised that discovering how to be a 21st century dad meant coming to terms with my own father. I’m hoping that by watching a portrait of my family, audiences will find new ways of understanding their own.”

“My Own Man is as deeply personal as filmmaking can get,” adds Norton. “You rarely see an artist document their own personal experience with such candour and simultaneously offer such deep insights into the very universal struggle to communicate within a family.”

It will premiere exclusively on Netflix on Friday 6th March 2015.

Here’s the trailer:

 

Photo: Netflix/David Sampliner

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