A filmmaker opens up a box of business cards collected over thirty years and crafts a cinematic meditation on the fleeting connections that draw us to one another.
In the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade, “Contractions” takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic.
Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! documents the life and work of acclaimed filmmaker and curator Craig Baldwin (b. Oakland CA, 1952), an inspiring and influential figure in contemporary media arts.
A picture of parallels and swirls, two women touch with eyes closed, use cameras in motion, discover a holiday of optics.
Paolo Javier is a poet who thinks like a filmmaker. I am a filmmaker who thinks like a poet. In Swerve, we’ve come up with our own kind of movie language, or at least a dialect that articulates how we observe the world together as two artists using images, sounds, and words.
*World Premiere: Slamdance Film Festival 2020,
Opening Night Film, Park City ,Utah * NYC Premiere MoMA
Between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot film with her father, a bohemian businessman who sometimes chose to reveal less than was really there.
In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.
In Your Day is My Night, my collective of Chinese living in New York City explores the history and meaning of “shiftbeds” through verité conversations, character-driven fictions and integrated movement pieces.
A wabi sabi summer in Japan – observing that which is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete– produces a series of visual haiku in search of teeming street life, bodies in emotion, and leaf prints in the mud.
Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.
Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, “Wind in Our Hair” is an experimental narrative directed by New York filmmaker Lynne Sachs about four girls discovering themselves through a fascination with the trains that pass by their house. A story of early-teen anticipation and disappointment, “Wind in Our Hair” is circumscribed by a period of profound Argentine political and social unrest.
“A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story … a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy.” George Robinson, The Jewish Week
Co-directed by Lynne Sachs and Susan Agliata with the support of the New York Public Library Abecedarium:NYC is an interactive online exhibition that reflects on the history, geography, and culture – both above and below ground – of New York City through 26 unusual words. Using original video, animation, photography and sound, Abecedarium:NYC constructs visual […]
The core of this haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank. Director Lynne Sachs creates a film on the violence of the Middle East by exchanging letters with an Israeli friend. Together, they reveal Revital’s story through her films, news reports, and interviews, culminating in heartbreaking footage of children discussing the violence they’ve witnessed.
Atalanta: 32 Years Later 5 min. color sound, 2006 16mm film released on MiniDV & DVD A retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince. In 1974, Marlo Thomas’ hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children’s parable for mainstream TV’s “Free To Be […]
Over the course of three years, Sachs collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of Brooklyn with camera and costumes in hand. Noa’s grand finale is her own rendition of the bluegrass classic “Crawdad Song”.
Investigation of a Flame: A Portrait of the Catonsville Nine by Lynne Sachs 45 min. color and B&W, 2001 plus 5 min. Sundance Channel documentary on Daniel Berrigan and the making of the film On May 17, 1968 nine Vietnam War protesters led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board […]
Note: To watch the full film, click here or scroll to the bottom of this page. by Lynne Sachs in Collaboration with Dana Sachs33 min. “A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that thewhole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot.” In 1994, two American sisters – […]
An experimental documentary on Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Black Baptist minister from Memphis, Tennessee who was also an inspired filmmaker with an overwhelming interest in preserving the social and cultural fabric of his own community in the 1930′ s and ‘ 40’ s . I combine his films and music recordings with my own images of Memphis neighborhoods and religious gatherings, 1989 .
“Drawn and Quartered”, 4 min. color 16mm. by Lynne Sachs Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium, 1987 “Images of a male form (on the left) and a female form […]
Jonathan Marlow interviews Lynne Sachs about Every Contact Leaves a Trace
Programs surveying fifty plus years of filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute that will be held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on January 25, 2026.
This program will excavate and celebrate the invisible organizing labor, often done by women, that makes independent film and video production possible.