https://jilucommune.com/en/programs/44
https://jilucommune.com/en/library/works/10
Programmer & Curator: Huilin Chen
Sept – Oct., 2025 – three week workshop
Lynne Sachs has always defied easy labeling. She captures movement and skin texture, fragments of speech, casual moments, and hidden personal memories, weaving them into unexpected images… She elevates personal experience into dramatic expression… and uses a diverse range of cinematic languages to record and digest the world, presenting it to the audience through the beauty of performance.
—Excerpt from Ren Scateni’s 2020 article
Lynne Sachs, a master of experimental documentary, has carved a unique niche in the field of experimental nonfiction over the past four decades. Her work is diverse not only in form but also in subject matter. She uniquely interweaves the personal and the social, the poetic and the political. Her work often spans a variety of media, including sound, performance, correspondence, and archival footage, integrating nonfiction narrative, poetry, feminism, and experimental aesthetics. She frequently collaborates with diverse artists to explore the boundaries of her work.
Whether she shoots on her own or collaborates with others, her work often begins with an “accident”—a poem, a powerful emotion, a chance encounter with a vintage home video, or an encounter with a friend—rather than a neat documentary proposal. Her films often blur the lines between politics and poetry, family and society, inviting viewers to view cinema as a constantly fluid space of encounters, memories, and genuine emotional concerns.
This masterclass will offer an intimate glimpse into Lynne’s rich and profound oeuvre. She will recount her journey across media, from 16mm film to video to hybrid performance, weaving the stories behind key works such as “A Film About A Father Who,” “A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer),” “Your Day is My Night,” and “The Washing Society.”
Chat Box
Leee
The scene of the little girl playing under the table reminded me of my own childhood. Such
places always made me feel very safe when I was young, and that sense of security returned to me
through this image.
Zemin
A drop of water falling into a man’s mouth, exploring the shadow of the whale and the light of crab.
starfishsoup
有一个视频像在用鼠标滑动图片检查皮肤纹理很有意思
zhaowen
What impressed me most was the combination two seq: the shark and the fish in the ocean towards
infinity, and next sec it is the dead body of fish on the chopping board. They are all facing their destination
永恒吧，你们这些让人哭泣的，无限美丽的存在
Hester Kwok
What stuck with me was when the IUD was removed from the woman’s body and hammered into a
straight line, like a piece of precious metal. It was very metaphorical. Footage#18
The two children by the bonfire reminded me of Wang Bing’s The Diao People.
Filming dir’s own shadow makes me wonder — What kind of path is this? Am I walking in circles?
Jojo
A fun one: fire and chicken make me think of turkey huoji
Pei Yuan Zhang
Memorable moments: the connection between fish and sausage/pig bodies; two girls and a cameraman
dance with a reed, flashlight, and moon; a girl plays with fire; the oldman smiles to the camera with his tone
Lynne
The girl under the bed is so happy to be hiding. The girl hopping is enthralled by her own movement. The
young women in the plaza are transformed by their costumes, they become people from another time in history.
I love the period blood!
The meat products in the market makes me realize again the cruelty and injustice we have done to other
animals.
Ping Ho
Shadow play in motion, yellow bleeding to purple, am I being watched?
Shine
Harbin princess very interesting scene!
sally zhong
After shooting out almost 100 people’s life, this one-minute is so far the boldest film I’ve ever made.
Pei Yuan Zhang
making the film is not intentional, it is an improv from spontaneoty, and unpredictability; we dance with
each other and the cameraman (who is my partner)
Jojo
Waking up, planning to film my own body, instead, walking out of the door, walking into the market and
see the animals in the market and felt a lot about them.
Shine
(Space and body definitly reminds me of club nights. To edit all the phone-shot footage in the past five
years into one minute feels crazy hehe.
Workshop Outline
Career
- How did you first learn documentary filmmaking, and why did you choose the
experimental path? - Which artists or thinkers have influenced your creative vision?
Trinh T. Minha, Chris Marker, Rainer Fassbinder Jia Zhangke, Maya Deren, Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha, Yvonne Rainer, poet Bernadette Mayer, W.G. Sebald, Douglas Sirk,
Wim Wenders, Ken Jacobs, George Kuchar, Bill Greaves, Christopher Harris - What advice would you give to university students studying film and media
today? - When making experimental documentaries, how much do you consider the
audience?
Inspiration & Creative Process - Where do you find inspiration for your work, and how do you transform it into
films? - How do you present a sense of everyday poetry in your films?
- How do you approach the relationship and transitions between different media in
your practice? - How do you establish a clear narrative thread when working across multiple
media? How important is storytelling in experimental documentary? - In experimental filmmaking, how do you avoid overwhelming the audience with
too many layered images or metaphors? - In your film Film About a Father Who, you used family recordings, poetic
narration, and silence—how do you approach sound design as part of
storytelling?
Personal vs. Collective - How do you navigate the relationship between personal archives and collective
historical memory in your films? - How do you view the role and challenges of women creators in experimental
cinema?
Technology - How do you view the impact of AI on documentary filmmaking and ideas of truth?
SPARK: “the body in space”
In filmmaking, we are always negotiating the photographing of images that contain the
body. We bring experiential, political or aesthetic contingencies to both the making and
viewing of a cinema that contains the human form. If a body is different from our own –
in terms of gender, skin color, or age – perhaps we frame it differently without even
realizing it. We all know that looking at a body on screen affects us emotionally,
psychologically and physically. When we speak of “space,” we must consider three
dimensional issues of the here and now as well as more speculative conditions that
arrive when we contemplate the future.
You are invited to make a film inspired by the theme of “the body in space”. Your film will be
part of a collective film made by our entire group.
- Your film should be exactly one minute. Not shorter. Not longer.
- Use any camera including your cell phone
- Your film can be one single shot multiple edited shots.
- Your film should be silent.
- Please do not add credits with your name. We will have all names at the end of
the collective film. - Please label your file (under 300 mb) in this way: Last name_first name.mp4
- Please upload your completed file by Oct. 17 to this online folder:__
- We will all meet again to watch and discuss our collective film which will
premiere on Oct. 24 at 8 am EDT/ NYC Time).