This is the followup to "Herb & Dorothy" from 2008, in which New York-based documentary filmmaker Megumi Sasaki wowed the world when she introduced Manhattan art-collector couple Herb and Dorothy Vogel. For some reason, it took a full two years for that film to make it to Japanese theaters, and during that time, Sasaki was already hard at work on this sequel.
"Herb & Dorothy 50×50" picks up where its predecessor left off. The previous documentary had been as much about the now-elderly couple's story as art collectors (he was a postal clerk, she was a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library; together they amassed an astounding collection of American minimalist and conceptual art and then gave away the whole lot to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1992) as it was about their personal lives, though neither Herb nor Dorothy seemed to make a distinction between public and personal: They simply were who they were. The film also featured the Vogels' rent-controlled, one-bedroom Manhattan apartment crammed floor-to-ceiling with artwork and a menagerie to boot — a museum piece all by itself.
Sasaki's first work showed the couple so completely absorbed in their lives, their space and their mutual passion that at times it came off like a fictional love story.