Great idea for a documentary - but the arc of the story flat-lines

Gaston Solnicki has a good idea for a documentary and I greatly admire his stylistic and narrative integrity but that the end of the day I think is film Papirosen just doesn't work - perhaps two shapeless, perhaps too opaque, but I could just never make sense of it, and, when the pieces started coming together toward the end, I had to wonder whether the destination was worth the journey. We've seen many great family documentaries in recent years - thinking of Finding the Friedmans, Dear Zachary, that one set in Long Island in which the children learn about their parents' various affairs and crushes, Stories We Tell - each with its own rules of narration, and among them Solnicki's is the most pure: unlike the others there are no voice-overs, no interviews, no re-enacments, the entire documentary is built of contemporary film of family members, living in Argentina (there seems to be a segment of a visit to the U.S., but Solnicki never gives us any context or grounding) and toward the end visiting Poland, from which the family fled after WW II, mixed with some archival family footage, on what seems to be grainy Super 8 transposed to video. There are a few marvelous scenes that it's hard to believe any filmmaker could capture and I suspect Solnicki was able to do so because he shot so much footage over so long a period of time that his family "learned" to ignore his shooting: father disciplining the young boy Mateo for calling him a liar, the family gathered with some English-speaking refugees and remembering the old country and its songs (including the title song, which they translate as "cigarettes" - perhaps it was a brand of cigarette? - but what a poor and obscure title for this film), arguments about one of the women's addiction to shopping, the father - main character - trying to persuade his elderly mother to start living off her savings rather than off contributions from her children (i.e.,him); this father is the main character, but we don't really begin to focus on him till well into the film and I didn't feel I got a clear sense of how his childhood and his family history as refugees shaped him - no great family secrets revealed, either - we just, in the end, see the father as a cranky, moody, 70-year-old man who has a soft spot for and is very tender with his young grandchild. If ever a movie needed more of a narrative arc, it's this one.