Lupita Peckinpah, the director's daughter from his brief marriage to Mexican actress Begoña Palacios, was 12 years old when Peckinpah died. Born Maria Guadalupe Peckinpah Palacios, she was largely raised by her mother in Mexico after their divorce, but she looked forward to her visits with her father, many of them spent in Livingston. The documentary Peckinpah Suite (2019), directed by Pedro González Bermúdez, follows Lupita as she returns to Livingston for the first time in decades to talk to the people who knew her father and revisit the places that Peckinpah chose to call home. In the words of the director, "the film is something of a search for childhood, for that unknown father and for a mystery to uncover."
While it offers a brief survey of his career, Peckinpah Suite is not a conventional biographical documentary or a study of the director's films. It offers a look at the man behind the legend through the remembrances of Lupita and Joe Swindlehurst, who was Peckinpah's closest friend in Livingston, and stories of Peckinpah's behavior that have become legendary among the locals and the current members of the Murray Hotel staff. And it takes viewers through the suite (long since renovated) where Peckinpah lived for so many years, in addition to the remote cabin where he escaped.
Lupita's own memories are complicated. The project was "a very personal process, almost like therapy. I have recreated a puzzle of a father who was never present. I have understood that my father's life was cinema. For him, his films were his children, but he would never have done what he did if he had not given himself in this way." She credits him with giving her the strength to stand up to her mother, who pushed Lupita into acting, and strike her own path. Like her father, she ended up working in the movies on the other side of the camera, finding her passion as a costume designer. Peckinpah Suite is ultimately her journey to reconnect with the father who left her too soon.
The film originally premiered on TCM Spain on December 14, 2019, to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the death of Sam Peckinpah and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the release of The Wild Bunch (1969).
Sources:
"Lupita Peckinpah presenta el documental de producción propia de TCM 'Peckinpah Suite'." Warner Media Press Release, December 18, 2019.
"Lupita Peckinpah presenta el documental 'Peckinpah Suite'," Mew Magazine. December 12, 2019.
"Home Suite Home (Or Why Real Men Love the Murray)," Lynette Dodson. Bozeman Daily Chronicle, August 11, 2003.
IMDb
By Sean Axmaker
