Prodigal Sons aroused a bit of a frenzy in Telluride leading up to its first screening on Friday––with a line around the block an hour before the screening, many pass holders were turned away––and no doubt in part due to the Orson Welles factor. As per the Festival program notes, in the film director Kimberly Reed, who “once was a male named Paul,” revisits her “tumultuous relationship” with her adopted brother Marc “and chronicles Marc’s discovery: he is the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth.”

But Sons is hardly the exploration of starry ancestry that the logline might lead you to believe, at least not in much of a direct way. Though Reed does travel with Marc to Croatia, where he appears in another documentary and bonds with Welles’ ex-girlfriend Oja Kodar, ultimately she’s less concerned with Marc’s geneology than in his unlikely status as anti-social “other” in a family in which he’s the only sibling without an LGBT identification.

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