Few people can claim to know Robert Frank the man as well as Robert Frank the photographer. Frank, who was born and raised in wartime Switzerland, found the power and fascination of photography at a young age and rapidly realized that the craft meant far more to him than money, success, or fame. The art was everything to him, and he planned to devote his entire life to it. 
The documentary American Witness is the first in-depth look at the life of a guy who is as elusive and evasive as he is prolific and creative. Frank left Switzerland in 1947 for the more fluid United States, where he became friends with everyone from Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky to photographer Walker Evans, actor Zero Mostel, painter Willem de Kooning, filmmaker Jonas Mekas, Bob Dylan, writer Rudy Wirlitzer, jazz musicians Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus, and more. Frank traveled the country with his small family, gathering around 27,000 images and compiling 83 of them into his most renowned work, The Americans. 
His was a new America, and while it was initially panned for depicting a divided country, the collection eventually came to be acknowledged as a transformational American vision.
Then he abandoned assured success, abandoning photography to remake himself as a film and video producer. Frank helped establish American independent filmmaking in the 1960s and collaborated with the Rolling Stones on a classic film. Today, the nonagenarian is a symbol of restless invention and what it takes to be creative in America, his life defined by never repeating himself and never being satisfied. American Witness is a depiction of a unique artist and the country he witnessed.