The latest cinematic adventures of some of the most original filmmakers of our time. Signed celebrates those with a unique artistic signature, beyond the canon.
Synopsis
Since 1990, filmmaker Lynne Sachs has collected 600 business cards—from a hairdresser, a therapist, a textile artist. Together they form an archive of encounters. The title of this imaginative essay film, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, is a basic principle of forensic science, coined by Edmond Locard, a pioneer in the field. And any trace can link a person to a place, another person or an object. If that’s true, Sachs wonders, might every personal encounter not also leave a trace on your being?
To find out, she tracks down some of the people behind the business cards. The thread connecting these hundreds of cards is Sachs herself, so the filmmaker naturally becomes the center of the film. Yet the focus is not on her; as in many of her works spanning more than three decades of film making, she merely provides the perspective—the point of departure.
With her warm, contemplative voice-over and playful visual invention, Sachs weaves countless faces and voices into a patchwork of connections. These encounters—whether forgotten or remembered, faint or vivid—have become part of her being.
“The title of this imaginative essay film, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, is a basic principle of forensic science, coined by Edward Locard, a pioneer in the field. And any trace can link a person to a place, another person or an object. If that’s true, Sachs wonders, might every personal encounter not also leave a trace on your being?” – IDFA International Documentary Festival Amsterdam
Contact— tactile, evocative of one person touching another, physically and emotionally. Trace—a reckoning with the residue of that initial encounter, filtered by time and the imperfection of memory. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs has lived most of her life before the internet brought people together. She’s also saved every business card anyone has ever given her. Each card is a portal to her past, a reminder of how someone she actually met in person shifted her consciousness and left a residue of their being in hers: a German woman grappling with the history of her country; a therapist who erased all records of her own life; an artist faced with government censorship. Sachs selects seven cards from hundreds and throws herself into finding out how and why they’ve left an imprint. When she is able, she embraces clues and seeks out reunions. Replaying fleeting experiences in a kitchen, a park, an office, or a festival, she carries her cards to a forensic scientist’s lab to find out more about their DNA remains. In both real and imagined ways, her essay teases apart resonances almost forgotten but somehow felt, entwining emotional memory with geopolitical history through visual abstraction, music, and a poet’s sense of introspection.
Director’s Statement
For most of my adult life, I’ve collected business cards strangers have pulled from their wallets and placed in my hand. I sometimes remember the precise moment they were offered to me, other times they are a mystery. Now in this virtual era, being in the same space with others happens less and less. Filled with hundreds of names, numbers and addresses, the small plastic box that holds the cards takes on an uncanny resonance. Chance meetings become distinct and revealing punctums, each physical interaction an encounter that pricks.
I select seven cards from the hundreds and throw myself into finding out how and why they’ve left an imprint on my consciousness. In the spirit of a documentary practice, the facts leftover from a haptic engagement are an enticing beginning. I’m curious to find out if there are still fingerprints on the cards so I visit a forensic scientist who excavates their DNA residue. It takes months of detective work and travel, but eventually I reconnect face-to-face with some of these people who passed through
my life. A German woman born in the early 1940s grapples with the war she witnessed as a child. Our conversation opens up my own thinking, as an American Jewish woman, about the situation in Gaza today. I speak with an artist who faced censorship and persecution from Homeland Security. In listening to his candid and vulnerable account, I reckon with his psychic trauma.
When research does not provide access to who these people have become, I turn to cinematic inventions that can shape the fragments I have in my grasp in speculative and revealing ways. I can’t forget one woman therapist whose advice once changed my life, so I imagine what it would be like to visit her apartment, create a set and perform with an actor embodying her presence. The resistance of a Syrian chef to engage with my camera forces me to think about the inherent power imbalance between a director and her subject. To conjure a memory of this woman, I cook one of her tried and true recipes and film my own culinary incompetence in the kitchen.
Throughout the years of making this film, my young niece and nephew come to my home to discuss what an accumulation of fleeting encounters – like mine — might really mean in their lives. Like a chorus in a play, their youthful and insightful interpretations across generations put my investigations into perspective.
When I am able, I embrace clues and seek out reunions. But when there is no trace, I gamble with the imaginary histories of my unwitting protagonists. My film “Every Contact Leaves a Trace” confronts a lifetime of tactile encounters with small pieces of paper – distillations of identities passed from hand to hand.
Credits
Written and directed by Lynne Sachs
Featuring Lawrence Brose, Bradley Eros, Angela Haardt, Juan Jiang, Betty Leacraft, Felix and Viva Torres, Rae C. Wright, Irina Yekimova
Editor Emily Packer
Camera Jeffery Cheng, Yumeng Guo, Sean Hanley, Tiffany Rekem, Lynne Sachs, Rebecca Shapass, Mark Street, G. Anthony Svatek
On Saturday, October 25th, at 7pm, you are invited to The Film-Makers’ Cooperative for a screening of Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker’s experimental documentary THE WASHING SOCIETY, followed by a performative conversation with Mark Street and book signing, by Sachs, of their new book HAND BOOK: A MANUAL ON PERFORMANCE, PROCESS, AND THE LABOR OF LAUNDRY.
This is not a play. It is something else.
Call it a blueprint, a map, a documentation
of something that has already happened
but could happen again —
a rendering in book form of a film and a performance.
Making a mark, words on a page instead of bodies in space.
A book that contains what’s remembered and what could be.
All of it written down and placed here, into this
Hand Book: A Manual.
“I’ve been creating with playwright Lizzie Olesker since 2014. Together, we’ve discovered a shared interest in making work that magnifies quotidian elements of life in NYC. In those early years, we couldn’t yet know that our first site-specific pieces would lead to a ten-year collaboration in which we produced Every Fold Matters, a live film performance, and The Washing Society, a hybrid film. Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry marks our third iteration. For us, our book offers space for readers to think about the politics and history of service work, art-making, and aesthetic experimentation.”
You are the audience now,
reading a book instead of watching and listening,
turning the page,
moving from one discourse to another,
holding a container,
its contours informed by our thoughts,
and in turn,
shaping your experience.
The Washing Society (co-directed by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs, 45 min. film, 2018)
When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Sachs and Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there.
“The legacy of domestic work, the issues surrounding power, and the exchange of money for services are all potent themes which rise to the surface and bubble over in dramatic, thrilling escalations of the everyday.” – The Brooklyn Rail
“An exercise in high-concept cinema to which Olesker and Sachs devote three quarters of an hour of film stock and many more quarters in tips, revealing the stains (of racism and classicism) on an American Dream that seems to want to scrub away every last trace of its own identity.” – Otro Cines Europa, Punto de Vista International Film Festival)
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A performative reading and book signing from: Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process and the Labor of Laundry by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs. (punctum books, 2025).
Hand Book guides us through the making of a hybrid performance and film focused on laundromat workers – those who are paid to wash and fold for others. This illuminating dialogue between cinema, theater, and labor invites us to think about the intimacy of touching other people’s clothes. Turning a page becomes an interactive, quasi-cinematic encounter, calling to mind the intimacy of touching other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body.
“This generously kaleidoscopic offering invites readers to think through the labor of laundry via an impressive array of modes in an interactive collage of perspectives, histories and bodies” –Christopher Harris
“The best of art manifests an ordinary devotion to experiences that become extraordinary given enough care and attention, or an extraordinary devotion to conveying the genuine depth of what passes for the ordinary. Here it is, both at once.” –Paul Chan
Lynne Sachs – The Washing Society + Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry 7pmTuesday, November 11, 2025 Shapeshifters Cinema, Oakland
Along with a screening of The Washing Society, Lynne will present a performative reading, with Shapeshifters Programming Director Kathleen Quillian, of excerpts from Hand Book as well as engage in a discussion about the book, film, and process with Canyon Cinema Executive Director Brett Kashmere.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase and can be signed by the artist after the event.
SHAPESHIFTERS CINEMA provides a venue and support for contemporary artists working with experimental and artist-made film, video, sound, music and other types of mediated performance. We host screenings and performances by local and visiting artists in our intimate 40-seat theatre and offer workshops on a variety of experimental and DIY moving image and sound production. Our storefront shop specializes in print publications, DVDs, sound recordings and other kinds of media made by artists who have screened or performed in our venue.
SHAPESHIFTERS BREWERY makes a variety of small-batch, seasonal, hand-crafted beers, brewed on-site in a space right behind the cinema. These are served (to 21+) at all our events as well as some off-site events. Find out more at shapeshiftersbrewery.com
SHAPESHIFTERS CAFÉ, is right next door to our cinema! We offer freshly-made salads, sandwiches, coffee, tea, pastries and more. Open Monday-Friday 6am-2pm and every Saturday 10am-2pm. Find out more at shapeshifterscafe.com
John Fiege (Dir), 84 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere
Director John Fiege in attendance.
Aniya is a young dance artist in Houston, Texas, who embarks on a journey to heal her spirit and find her voice after being displaced by a hurricane. With guidance from her mentor, Aniya investigates impacted communities on the Gulf Coast and develops a dance performance inspired by her experiences and the complex legacies of environmental injustice. Family, religion, sexuality, and mental health collide as she strives to transform dark histories into beautiful expression and movement. Through intimate observational cinematography, evocative dance sequences, and a haunting score, Aniya’s story traces the agony and the ecstasy of growing up, while revealing the power of art and community.
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“This Side of Salina”
Lynne Sachs (Dir), 12 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere
Director Lynne Sachs, and Featured Performers J’Viona Baker, Vernahia Davis, Ja’Rhea Dixon and Angela Stroman in attendance.
Four women from the city of Syracuse, New York, reflect on sexuality, youthful regret, emotional vulnerability, raising a daughter, and working in reproductive health services. In a series of their own choreographed vignettes, each woman thoughtfully engages with the neighborhoods she’s known all of her life. Two performers flip through classic 1960s titles by Black authors in a bookstore. Others sit in a hat store finding time to pour into each other, as mentors and confidantes. Together they look down at the city from its highest point and wonder how to battle its inequities. For them, it’s a place they hold dear but always cautiously doubt. Produced with the support of Layla’s Got You and Light Work, Syracuse, New York.
SKIN IN THE GAME IS screening GIRL IN A DAUNTING NOW
October 24–25, 2025
Millennium Film Workshop
What does it mean to put your body—your real, pulsing, breakable body—on the line?
SKIN IN THE GAME is a two-day program of screenings, performances, a group exhibition, and the release of a risograph poetry leaflet (Bad Saturn Media), presenting work by 21 international artists, filmmakers, and poets. The event takes place October 24–25, 2025 at Millennium Film Workshop in Brooklyn, a historic nonprofit arts space dedicated to experimental film and the moving image.
Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel, the program explores the body as archive, threshold, and offering. Saint-Michel’s curatorial practice draws on her own work across somatic memory, feminist ecologies, and quantum poetics, creating exhibitions that bring vulnerability, resistance, and intimacy into sharp relief.
The works in SKIN IN THE GAME speak from the surface of the skin and the space just beneath it: the site of contact, exposure, rupture, and healing. Across media—including moving image, sound, performance, poetry, sculpture, and text—the participating artists engage questions of embodiment as resistance, surreal and speculative self-mapping, fabric and clothing as vessels of memory, and gestures of intimacy, care, and protest.
Millennium Film Workshop Founded in 1966, Millennium Film Workshop has been a cornerstone of New York’s experimental film community for nearly six decades. As both a screening venue and a hub for independent creators, Millennium has fostered generations of artists pushing the boundaries of the moving image. Today, the Workshop continues its legacy of supporting radical practices through exhibitions, residencies, and educational initiatives.
Bad Saturn Founded in 2020, Bad Saturn Media is a small press and publishing initiative, dedicated to releasing experimental books, poetry collections, and collaborative zines for a more care-full world. Bad Saturn works with artists and writers to bring intimate, challenging, and beautifully designed projects to our community.
Event Details Dates: October 24–25, 2025 Location: Millennium Film Workshop, 167 Wilson Ave, Brooklyn, NY Program: Screening series, gallery exhibition, live performances, and risograph poetry leaflet release featuring 21 artists, filmmakers, and poets.
Join us for LAUNDRY CYCLES, a lively afternoon literary performance and conversation celebrating two new books that look inside neighborhood spaces where the work of laundry gets done.
Author Alvin Eng will read from OUR LAUNDRY, OUR TOWN: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond, a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of his upbringing in Flushing, Queens, in the 1970s. Eng will also present songs and monologues from his acoustic punk raconteur performance piece, HERE COMES JOHNNY YEN AGAIN (or How I Kicked Punk).
“Powerful, funny at times and consistently inspiring… Alvin Eng’s memoir looks back at the past to envision a better future.” David Henry Hwang, playwright
Co-authors Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs will read fromHAND BOOK: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry, a collection of writings and images from a performance and film set within New York City laundromats. Their book is a quasi-cinematic encounter, calling to mind the intimacy of touching other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body. Actor-collaborators Ching Valdez-Aran and Tony Torn will perform from the book’s playscript, a rumination on the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire. With clips from Olesker and Sachs’s hybrid documentary THE WASHING SOCIETY.
“A generously kaleidoscopic offering of perspectives, histories and bodies.” Christopher Harris, filmmaker
Alvin Eng is anative NYC author/playwright, songwriter, educator and performer. His plays and performances have been seen Off-Broadway, in Paris, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China.As a 2024-25 New York Public Library Fellow, he began researching a companion book to his memoir, Our Laundry, Our Town (Fordham University Press).
Lizzie Olesker makes theater reflecting on the politics and poetry of everyday experience, seen in NYC at New Georges, the Cherry Lane, and Public Theater. Her most recent plays include 5 Stages of Grief, Night Shift, and the collaborative Language of Dolls.
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet who investigates the connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Embracing archives, found images, letters, and journals, her work enacts a critical journey through reality and memory. Her feature film Every Contact Leaves a Trace will have its world premiere at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam in November.
Ching Valdes-Aran is aFilipino-American actress of stage, television, and film, who was trained as a dancer. Her many credits include an international tour of Geoff Sobel’s Home, Lav Diaz’s film From What is Before, and multiple appearances at La Mama, Mabou Mines, and New York Theater Workshop.
Tony Torn is an actor and director with more than 100 stage and screen credits including Ubu Sings Ubu, King Lear, Mud, and In the Solitude of Cotton Fields at Hudson River Park Pier 45. He recently directed the acclaimed play The Whole of Time at Torn Page and the Brick Theater, and is known for his extensive work with legendary experimental theater artists Richard Foreman and Reza Abdoh.
Join us on Saturday, October 11, for a screening by The Abortion Clinic Film Collective, a group of feminist filmmakers with diverse backgrounds and distinctive styles who came together from around the country in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade. In the ACFC series, we hear from medical directors and staff, mothers and daughters, criminal defense attorneys and advocates, about how their personal and professional lives have been affected post-Dobbs. Each portal provides a window into the broad and life-threatening ramifications of that Supreme Court decision and its devastating legacy for the health and well-being of our country and people.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with filmmakers Cali M. Banks, Lori Felker, KellyGallagher, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, Đoan Hoàng, Luiza Parvu, Raymond Rea, Lynne Sachs, and Sasha Waters.
About:
The ACFC was born out of rage. After the overturn of Roe V Wade and the end to a woman’s federal right to abortion, I began reaching out to filmmakers from across the country. I asked if they would contribute to a project looking at the impact from different states’ perspectives, especially in those areas most affected. The Abortion Clinic Film Collective was born. In haste and with limited access to resources, seven films were created focusing on states from Arizona to Tennessee, South Dakota to Texas, and beyond.
-Kristy Guevara-Flanagan
Films
A Mile and a Half by Raymond Rea
Contractions by Lynne Sachs
As Long As We Can by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan
Retracing Our Steps by Kelly Gallagher
Longest Walk by Đoan Hoàng Curtis
We Are About to Commit a Felony by Sasha Waters
Hemorrhage by Ruth Hayes
Catch Us On The Way Down by Cali M. Banks
What Was (Working Title) by Lindsay Opoku-Acheampong
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.”
