Thoughts on Tran Kim Trang’s Decade with Blindness: A Letter to Hélène Cixous from Lynne Sachs Published in More Than Meets the Eye: TheVideos of Tran T. Kim-Trang by Jesse Lerner, Trang Tran, and Holly Willis http://scalar.usc.edu/works/more-than-meets-the-eye-the-videos-of-tran-t-kim-trang/letter-to-hlne-cixous “I want to see what is secret. What is hidden amongst the visible. I want to see the […]
Hello fellow documentartians, We are gathering CINEMA OF RESISTANCE videos from all over the US/ World beginning with the historical Jan. 21, 2017 Women’s March.
In the words of renowned film avant-gardist Hans Richter, essay films “’make problems, thoughts and even ideas’ perceptible … they ‘render visible what is not visible.’”
I am in Greece with my sister Dana Sachs, my brother-in-law Todd Berliner and friend Jennifer Maraveyais, as part of Humanity Now: Direct Refugee Relief program.
In March and April, 2017 I was invited to be an artist-in-residence at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
As a filmmaker and a long-term progressive activist, I have been thinking and talking about the connection between our media practice and the crisis that is our current political situation. From the environment to reproductive health to immigration, Donald Trump is trying to dismantle every aspect of the Obama legacy.
Lynne Sachs’ latest film Tip of My Tongue, which has its world premiere as the festival’s closing night selection, is a beautiful, poetic collage of memory, history, poetry, and lived experience, in all its joys, sorrows, fears, hopes, triumphs, and tragedies.
My first viewing of Bruce Baillie’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) sent a shiver through my body and mind that ricochets to this very day.
Gunvor Nelson was an extremely influential teacher of mine. Between 1985 and 1995 I lived in San Francisco and was deeply inspired and supported by other artists and curators in the Bay Area experimental film community including Trinh T. Minh-ha, Karen Holmes, Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, Jeanne Finley, Craig Baldwin, and George Kuchar. It was in San Francisco that I met Mark Street my soulmate and collaborator. In 2015, I traveled to Sweden with Mark to visit and shoot film with Guvnor Nelson in her home studio, two decades after she had left the Bay Area.
Discovering Chantal Akerman’s films was such a vital part of my becoming a filmmaker. While I did not know her personally, I feel that I grew up with her as my guide for how to be in the world, as a woman filmmaker trying to articulate some aspect of my life and other women’s lives in the medium of film. I first saw Chantal’s films, along with those of Agnès Varda and Marguerite Duras, as a student in Paris in the 1980s.
