Over the past four years, director Rebecca Carpenter embarked on a personal journey of discovery and returned with a documentary film, REQUIEM FOR A RUNNING BACK. It is powerful, informative, and through the specificity of her focus succeeds in speaking to our culture in general.
Her father, Lew Carpenter, was a former Detroit Lion who, after his death, was one of the first players diagnosed with previously undetected brain damage. That was the impetus for Rebecca to go back and investigate her father’s life and her own experience of him as the mercurial, unpredictable, charismatic, loving, withdrawn, and occasionally frightening parent that he was.
This investigation brought her to visit with an engaging cast of characters from her own family, other NFL players, their families, doctors, researchers and social scientists. In highlights from searching interviews with Mike Ditka, James Lofton, Chris Borland, Dr. Ann McKee (CTE neuroscientist), Dr. Julian Bailes (former NFL team doctor) and Dr. Bennett Omalu (protagonist of recent feature film CONCUSSION) among many others, she finds out and brings back to us what is known, what was known, and what was concealed in an entertaining, moving, and thought provoking way.
