“AM I a cult director?” American filmmaker Samuel Fuller asks rhetorically. “Yeah, I love that, I want to join the cult of the $100-to $200 million grossers and still make an artistic picture.”

Fortunately for film lovers — if not profit-driven Hollywood studios — Fuller, the American-born son of Russian immigrants, concentrated on making films he wanted to make rather than bloated-budget moneymakers.

Which led to his being hailed as an auteur for gritty low-budget classics like Shock Corridor, Pickup on South Street, The Big Red One and Run of The Arrow, where story and message were more important than stars and profit-seeking Tinseltown gloss.

Fuller’s daughter Samantha celebrates her father with this fascinating journey through his life and career, based on his award-winning biography A Third Face.  Actors and writer-directors such as Bill Duke, Constance Towers, James Franco and Tim Roth and filmmakers William Friedkin and Wim Wenders read persuasively to camera from that work, intercut with film sequences

.But it is Fuller’s life and, notably, the documentary footage used to illuminate his journey from newsboy to pulp novelist to film-maker that ultimately lingers.