Titus Kaphar is best known as a painter, but he made his first film, “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” when he decided his sons were old enough to learn the story of his life and his difficult relationship with his father.

Kaphar is a MacArthur “genius” award recipient whose innovative paintings offer incisive commentary on race and America, often by coopting and subverting classics of American and European art. His work has been displayed everywhere from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., to the cover of Time magazine to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

But Kaphar rose from humble beginnings, which he documents in the film. He was born in Michigan and his family struggled to get by. He earned money by lugging barrels of trash to the dump; he lived with different family members and left his father’s home after watching his father hurt his girlfriend. It wasn’t until Kaphar was at San Jose State that he discovered art and began painting, learning by watching a class from the window and then modeling to get inside the door.

Eventually, he earned a master’s in fine art from Yale and found success on canvas, but he was haunted by his tumultuous relationship with his father, to whom he did not speak for decades. In this powerful and provocative film, André Holland plays Tarrell, a successful painter struggling to parent well after the damage done by his childhood; Andra Day plays his wife, Aisha; Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Tarrell’s mother, Joyce; and John Earl Jelks plays his father, La’ Ron

“It’s not a line-by-line autobiography, but it is most certainly the truth of my experience,” Kaphar said in a recent video interview.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Your actual paintings are at the heart of the movie. What was it like to watch André Holland “paint” — and did you get him to copy your process?

A: Some of our early conversations were about the relationship between a blank canvas and realizing a painting, and how it’s similar to André pulling a character out of a text, so we connected as artists. Then he committed himself to learning how to paint. For three months, he came to my studio and watched me, and I taught him and he made the sketches and he read the books and he did the exercises.

We talked a lot about the connection between your mind, hand and breath, and that when you are making that mark, it’s a meditation. You can’t rush your way through it, but have to think about every nuance, every edge. When you see him in this film, it really looks like he knows what he’s doing. That was necessary for me because I’ve seen so many films where you think, “There’s no way this person has ever held a brush in their life.”

What happened on set is I’d say “Action” and he’d start painting, then I’d say “Cut” and put on my coveralls, run over and work on it because obviously, I’m much faster. Then I’d go back and say “Action” and André would come back and make some more marks. It was a back and forth but I was never not a painter on set. I was a director, but I was always looking through the lens of a painter.

When I was making this film, I was thinking about making a painting in motion. That was the thing that was exciting for me for the first time, to be able to tell the before and after.

Q: Did you have the same confidence in storytelling that you did in creating the visual canvas of the film?

A: This didn’t start as a script. It was a letter to my sons.

When my sons have asked things like, “Why don’t you call your father ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you more when you’re older.’ And it was about time. I started by waking up at 5 o’clock and writing for a couple of hours, then I drove my kids to school, and then I’d go to my studio and this app allows me to listen to what I had been writing while I was sketching or painting. That brought back memories and I started making more sketches and it became a loop for five months. Then I had what was a narrative.

Confidence would’ve been required if my initial thought was that this was going to exist in the broader world. I wasn’t approaching it that way, so I maybe didn’t need confidence. I just needed diligence.

Q: Was transforming that into a film to be seen by the world nerve-wracking or cathartic?

A: Making my paintings is cathartic. As a painter, I feel privileged because I have this space to work through my issues, alone in my studio grinding through whatever challenges of the past or of my mind arise. It is an extraordinary gift to be able to have a career that allows me to do that.

I don’t know that making this film was cathartic, but what surprised me is how many people who have been through similar things have said this film is cathartic for them. And it goes beyond just being Black people saying that. This film will resonate in the Black community for sure, but when we screened this film in Birmingham, older White guys kept coming up to me saying, “I know our life circumstances are different, but that’s my father, too.”

This is a story of healing and forgiveness that anyone can really relate to.

Q: Without giving away the ending, did you consciously seek to leave the final scene between Tarrell and La’Ron open for debate?

A: My aunt, who’s my father’s sister, and my cousin, who’s like a little brother to me and who was also there, had totally different reactions when they saw the movie and they started having an argument about what it meant. And I just sat there thinking, “I did my job,” because I didn’t want a film that gives you easy answers.

I’ve restrained from stating what I think about the final scenes because I appreciate that ambiguity at the end of the story and that people can take from the film what they need. People are using this film to process their own experiences.