Prolific nonfiction filmmaker Richard P. Rogers documented the jungles of Nicaragua and the fountains of Rome, but when it came to documenting his own life, he was in a rut. In between teaching at Harvard and making films for the Smithsonian Institution and PBS, Rogers spent much of his time recording himself with the hope that an illuminating self-portrait would emerge. But Rogers was paralyzed with the fear of indulging his narcissism, and he often questioned his affluent WASP upbringing in the Hamptons, whose denizens he relentlessly filmed and satirized. After Rogers succumbed to cancer in 2001 at the age of 57, his former student and friend Alexander Olch—with help from Rogers’s wife, Susan Meiselas, a noted photographer—was put to the task of completing the film. He culled more than 200 hours of footage that spanned nearly Rogers’s entire life: his early 20s, Harvard, the 1960s New York loft scene, his celebrity friends Bob Balaban and Wallace Shawn, his bouts with cancer and his on-again off-again relationship with Meiselas. Olch not only completed the project that had haunted Rogers for so many years, he transcended it. THE WINDMILL MOVIE is a riveting cinematic ode to a conflicted artist and man. The film meticulously captures the messy, often contradictory emotions that, for Rogers, remained irreconcilable. With a muted self-consciousness and a refusal to sentimentalize, Olch reveals his subject’s fundamental struggles with feelings about romance, family, entitlement and creative expression. The film is nothing short of mesmerizing.