Two female laundry workers are wearing floral aprons and standing against a wooden wall. From Lynne Sachs’ ‘The Washing Society.’ Courtesy of The Criterion Channel.
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
At IDA, we deeply mourn the passing of Melvin Van Peebles, the “the godfather of modern Black cinema.” Van Peebles was an actor, poet, artist, filmmaker and playwright, among other things. Celebrate his humbling legacy with filmmaker Joe Angio’s How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)on Amazon Prime.
In Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, filmmaker Jia Zhangke speaks to three authors who, like Jia, all hail from China’s Shanxi province. Through their conversations and writings, the filmmaker reconstructs a portrait of his homeland from the prism of the 1950s social revolution and the unrest it brought along. Starting September 30, you can watch the film on Mubi.
Also playing on Mubi is Hannah Jayanti’s delightful science fiction documentary, Truth or Consequences. Taking off a fictional premise, the documentary takes place around the world’s first commercial Spaceport in New Mexico. Through its gaze set on a near future, the film unravels our histories and weaves them all with empathy and adventure.
Afro-Cuban musician brothers Ilmar and Aldo López-Gavilán grew up learning the violin and the piano—separated from one another; one in Russia and the other in Cuba. Los Hermanos, directed by Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider, follows the brothers as they collaborate (for the first time) and perform all across the US. The film is available to view on PBS starting October 1.
When filmmaker Sian-Pierre Regis’ mother, Rebecca, is let go from her job, Regis decides to take her on trips across the world. As the son helps take items off his mother’s bucket list, he reveals the dark underscoring of American society by ageism, the care crisis, and economic insecurity. Duty Free is a documentary that emerges out of the mother-son travels as Rebecca reclaims her life and dreams. Watch the film on Vimeo.
Familial relationships also form the core of many of Lynne Sachs’ experimental nonfiction works. Starting October 1, you can watch seven of her experimental shorts on Criterion Channel: Which Way Is East (1994), The Last Happy Day (2009), Wind in Our Hair (2010), The Washing Society (2018), Girl Is Presence (2020), E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021), and Maya at 24 (2021).
Each month, the programmers at the Criterion Channel produce incredible line-ups for their subscribers. For October, the Channel will feature films from Wayne Wang, Arthur Dong, Doris Wishman, and more!
Below you’ll find the programming schedule for the month, along with a complete list of titles that Criterion has in store for us. Don’t forget to check the Criterion Channel’s main page regularly though, as they occasionally will drop surprises that aren’t included in the official press release.
EXCLUSIVE STREAMING PREMIERES
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO
Featuring seven short films and a new introduction by the filmmaker
Over a period of thirty-five years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16 mm film, videotape, and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. Like a cubist rendering of a face, Sachs’s cinematic exploration of her father offers multiple, sometimes contradictory, views of a seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately shrouded in mystery. With this meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, Sachs allows herself and her audience to see beneath the surface of the skin, beyond the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.
This exclusive streaming premiere is accompanied by a selection of experimental short films by Sachs, many of which also reflect her probing exploration of family relationships
The U.S. lineup at MUBI next month has been unveiled, featuring films by Claude Chabrol, Paulo Rocha, Ulrich Köhler, and more. Notable new releases include Pedro Costa’s striking Locarno winner Vitalina Varela as well as the Julia Fox-led PVT Chat (check out our extensive interview with director Ben Hozie here.).
As part of their series Thrills, Chills, and Exquisite Horrors, the Martin Scorsese favoriteWake in Fright joins MUBI, along with Fabrice Du Welz’s Alleluia, Nicolas Winding Refn’s underseen Fear X, and Ben Wheatley’s trippy A Field in England.
Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.
October 1 | Alléluia | Fabrice Du Welz | Thrills, Chills, and Exquisite Horrors
October 2 | Styx | Wolfgang Fischer
October 3 | The Green Years | Paulo Rocha | Double Bill: Paulo Rocha
October 4 | Change of Life | Paulo Rocha | Double Bill: Paulo Rocha
October 5 | Your Day Is My Night | Lynne Sachs
October 6 | Hey, You! | Péter Szoboszlay | Fables, Folklore, Futurism: Visionary Hungarian Animations
October 7 | The Wall | Julian Pölsler
October 8 | Vitalina Varela | Pedro Costa
October 9 | The Third Lover | Claude Chabrol | A New Wave of Suspense: A Claude Chabrol Double Bill
October 10 | Landru | Claude Chabrol | A New Wave of Suspense: A Claude Chabrol Double Bill
October 11 | Moving On | Yoon Dan-bi | New South Korean Cinema
October 12 | In Search of the Famine | Mrinal Sen | Voice of the Unheard: A Mrinal Sen Retrospective
October 13 | Corporate Accountability | Jonathan Perel | Undiscovered
October 14 | I Like Life a Lot | Katalin Macskássy | Fables, Folklore, Futurism: Visionary Hungarian Animations
October 15 | Two Gods | Zeshawn Ali | MUBI Spotlight
October 16 | Fear X | Nicolas Winding Refn | Thrills, Chills, and Exquisite Horrors
October 17 | Séraphine | Martin Provost | Portrait of the Artist
October 18 | Cosmos | Manon Briand, Marie-Julie Dallaire, Denis Villeneuve, André Turpin, Jennifer Alleyn, Arto Paragamian
October 19 | Lucky Chan-Sil | Kim Cho-hee | New South Korean Cinema
October 20 | Endless Night | Eloy Enciso | The New Auteurs
October 21 | Panic | Sándor Reisenbüchler | Fables, Folklore, Futurism: Visionary Hungarian Animations
October 22 | Potiche | François Ozon | Performers We Love
October 23 | PVT Chat | Ben Hozie | MUBI Spotlight
October 24 | In My Room | Ulrich Köhler | Double Bill: Ulrich Köhler
Following career retrospectives at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 and the Museum of the Moving Image in 2021, Lynne Sachs is being paid tribute to by the Criterion Channel. A press release announced that her films will join the channel next month along with a newly recorded interview with the filmmaker, exploring her works. Her latest feature, “Film About a Father Who,” a documentary about her own father, will be making its exclusive streaming premiere on the channel on October 13.
“The Criterion Channel is thrilled to present the exclusive streaming premiere of Lynne Sachs’ ‘Film About a Father Who’ this October. This raw and deeply personal excavation of the filmmaker’s complex family history will be accompanied by a number of Sachs’ experimental shorts, many of which also focus on exploring familial dynamics and family histories” said Penelope Bartlett, Director of Programming at the Criterion Channel.
Shot over a period of 35 years, “Film About a Father Who” is a portrait of Sachs’ businessman father, who had nine children with five women. The film is described as “her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.”
“Over the course of my 30-year career in the film industry, it’s taken me an embarrassingly long time to move from seeing myself as a film student to a director,” Sachs wrote in a 2020 guest post for Women and Hollywood exploring the impact that artistic collaboration has had on her work. “As director, I acknowledge my dedication to my practice, the fact that I have made over 30 films ranging from three to 83 minutes long, the awards I’ve received, and the money I’ve been paid to do my job.”
Check out programming information about the film series below.
The Criterion Channel’s Directed by Lynne Sachs series programming includes:
Debuting on the Criterion Channel Oct. 13:
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (2020) Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.
Debuting on the Criterion Channel Oct. 1:
E•PIS•TO•LAR•Y: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO (2021) In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic Zero for Conduct in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers.
MAYA AT 24 (2021) Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.
GIRL IS PRESENCE (2020) During the 2020 global pandemic, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and her daughter Noa collaborated with Anne Lesley Selcer to create Girl is Presence. Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, the ‘girl’ arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things.
THE WASHING SOCIETY (2018) Collaborating together for the first time, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. With a title inspired by the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses, The Washing Society investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry.
WIND IN OUR HAIR (2010) 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 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.
THE LAST HAPPY DAY (2009) During WWII, the US Army hired Sachs’ Hungarian cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. Sachs’ portrait of Lenard, who is best known for his translation of Winnie the Pooh into Latin, resonates as an anti-war meditation composed of letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies of children, and interviews.
WHICH WAY IS EAST (1994) When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt.
Lumen by Richard Ashrowan. United Kingdom, 2018, 3’ A silent exploration of light and gesture; finding the light, losing it: moments of exploration, hesitation and connection. A collaboration with performers Sandra Johnston and Alastair MacLennan, Scotland, August 2018.
Apertures (a brighter darkness) by Karissa Hahn. USA, 2019, 3’ and just as the swelter plateaus towards vertical horizon the curtain falls flat in motion a hinge unlatches from sill and a slab of paint is finally relieved, alighting —the window continues to open
Fire Fly Eye by Kerry Laitala. USA, 2020, 7’ Fire Fly EYE is my response to the devastating re-making of the world brought on by anthropogenic climate change and corporate “stewardship” of our natural resources. A ritual of complaint in the face of overwhelming destruction, invoked through filming discarded consumer products, sifting spectacle out of catastrophe.
Amulets by Colectivo los ingravidos. Mexico, 2019, 5’ The magic life of the objects reanimate the ancestry of the aesthetic of dream.
A Study of Fly by Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu. Taiwan/USA, 2018, 13′ A Study of Fly is a reflection on the relationship between insect, human, environment and the universe. The fly in this film can be approached as a living being, a metaphor for human desire to reach beyond, and a state that demonstrates the capacity to move between the realms of life and death. Artifacts from hand-processing and color filters are emphases of our physical intervention, manipulation and violence against nature
Dusty Wave by Eeva Siivonen. Finland/Canada, 2017, 3’ My moving image works experiments with text, image and sound to create an experiential space—a kind of ontology—within which subjectivities and bodies as totalities don’t exist and connections and hierarchies are continuously undone and remade. Subjective experience exists as a dialogical and rhetorical relationship, as something scattered in time and space, emerging and disappearing, resisting language and definition. These works describe the complex, fluctuating, and interdependent relationships between living and non-living entities—relationships that defy linearity and boundaries. My practice is grounded in refusal and resistance to closed definitions and categories such as self/other, human/animal, interior/exterior,
It Matters What by Francisca Duran. Chile/Canada, 2019, 10’ Absences and translations motivate this experimental animation in an exploration of the methods and materials of reproduction and inscription. The inquiry is set within a framework of practical and critical human relationships with other-than-human-species elucidated by the theorist Donna Haraway.
A fragment from Haraway’s essay “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” is reworked here as a poetic manifesto. Enigmatic found-footage calls into question human violence over animal species. Plant life is both the subject matter of the images and assists the means of photographic reproduction.
The techniques used include in-camera animation, contact-prints and phytograms created by the exposure of 16mm film overlaid with plant material and dried for hours in direct sunlight.
Transcript by Erica Sheu. Taiwan/USA, 2018, 3′ I transcribe a relationship on film with what I found at home: the flower baby’s breath, love letters my father wrote and sun print papers my lover gave me. This film is a dedication to Shadow Film: A Woman with Two Heads (Nito-onna: Kage No Eiga), 1977, by Shuji Terayama.
Girl is Presence by Lynne Sachs and Anne Lesley Selcer. USA, 2020, 4’ During the global pandemic, Lynne Sachs and Anne Lesley Selcer collaborated remotely to create Girl is Presence, a visual rhythmic poem tinged by gender and violence. Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, the “girl” arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things. As the words build in tension, the scene becomes occult, ritualistic and alchemical. Commissioned by Small Press Traffic for Bay Area Shorts during the national shelter-in-place order caused by the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020.
As Long As There is Breath by Emily Chao. USA, 2020, 2′ An assembly of collected memories shatters the interior and open portals to the outside. Completed during shelter-in-place in Northern California. Commissioned by Small Press Traffic.
Wastelands No. 2 : Hardy, Hearty by Jodie Mack. USA, 2019, 7’ “Can it be true,” said the first leaf, “can it really be true, that others come to take our places when we’re gone and after them still others, and more and more?”
“It really is true,” whispered the second leaf.
“We can’t even begin to imagine it, it’s beyond our powers.” “It makes me very sad,” added the first leaf.
They were very silent a while. (Felix Salten, Bambi: A Life in the Woods)
Garden ghosts flirt with the weeds of spring, cycling matter[s] and lives and deaths.
_______________________________________
Curation
Founded in 2010, CROSSROADS is the San Francisco Cinematheque’s annual film festival that showcases contemporary film and experimental media produced by artists from the international art and film community. CROSSROADS is curated by the Artistic Director of the San Francisco Cinematheque, Steve Polta, with the intention of evoking the creative resonance between works by established artists and that of emerging artists, reflecting on the field and inspiring trends.
Consisting of eleven works presented at CROSSROADS 2019 and 2020, regeneration rituals evoke both the toxic and the transcendent, the violent and the sublime, while contemplating the contemporary psychic landscape. Intimacies and delicacies discovered in nature and domestic space contrast with the brutalities of the Capitalist Anthropocene Era as computational mythologies are explored.
Established in 2010, CROSSROADS is San Francisco Cinematheque’s annual film festival, presenting contemporary cinema and experimental media by artists from the international art and film community. CROSSROADS is curated by Cinematheque’s Artistic Director Steve Polta with the intent of evoking creative resonance between works by established and emerging artists while reflecting on and inspiring trends in the field.
Consisting of eleven works presented in CROSSROADS 2019 and 2020, rituals of complaint evokes both toxic and transcendent, violent and sublime, while contemplating the contemporary psychic landscape. Intimacies and delicacies discovered in nature and domestic space are contrasted with the brutalities of the capitalist Anthropocene were the mythologies of reckoning are explored.
STEVE POLTA CROSSROADS SAN FRANCISCO CINEMATHEQUE
An open letter from Cristiana Miranda on the 2021 DOBRA Festival
With which weapons can we overcome dismay? Arduous and uncertain struggle, in this Neo-fascist, pandemic and global warming context. About art’s vital power, we had many opportunities to read and write. Today, it rests the certainty that in this battle for the enchantment of living, we need to have feet that touch the land and eyes that see the sky, whose movable painting made of lights is overshadowed by the screens of our smart and portable communication equipment. If the 20th century seems to have finally ended with the pandemic, the 21st century’s odyssey is yet to be build. Many ancient wonders will survive as mere little active curiosities, cinema, however, continues to grow in practices more and more new and necessary.
In the massive presence of audiovisual language in the contemporary world, experimental film grows in shapes and lights, in an even more pandemic contagion that connects us, instead of separating us. Seven years ago, DOBRA – International Experimental Film Festival has been the author and witness of a history where the experimental language of film has become a fundamental tool of the artist’s action in critics and in the world’s transformation.
In 2021, DOBRA maintains its breath by bringing to the public a screening program where the artists’ voices from various locations of the planet toast us with films that stir the contemporary sore, practice critical exercise and propose different forms of comprehending and living the defies of the current world. Cristiana Miranda, Lucas Murari and Luiz Garcia, from the more than a thousand film submissions on the open call made by the festival, created 8 screenings where wefts, bodies and lines of flight bring a vanguard cinema that doesn’t fear being ahead in the construction of another world. To celebrate the force of encounters and bonds of friendship, we have the honor to receive the participation of Steve Polta as invited curator,
We are still moved by the consciousness of urgency, by the desire of retrieve life as an act of producing beauty. More and more convinced of the transforming power of experimental film, we invite all to one more edition of DOBRA, so together we can make the virtuality of online transmissions an encounter of thinking and emotions, a shared act of creation. May cinema infect us with luminous experiments.
Cryptofiction is excited to present five films by Lynne Sachs including: “Which Way is East” (1994); “Investigation of a Flame” (2001); “States of UnBelonging” (2005); “Your Day is My Night” (2013); and “Epistolary: Letter to Jean Vigo” (2021).
Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living and studying in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trihn T. Min-ha. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her body of work ever since.
From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing directly the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany—sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.
Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, and China Women’s Film Festival. Her 2019 film “A Month of Single Frames” won the Grand Prize at Oberhausen Festival of Short Films in 2020. In 2021, both the Edison Film Festival and the Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center awarded Lynne for her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields.
Cryptofiction: Interview with Lynne Sachs
ABOUT
Cryptofiction is an international distribution and production platform based in London, UK.
With over 25 years of combined experience as filmmakers and over a decade as distributors, our team is devoted to bring the attention and viewership deserved by the remarkable and courageous titles that we represent. In addition to distribution services, we offer a wide range of production support for rising and established moving-image makers.
OUR MISSION
We are dedicated to supporting and representing independent cinema from around the world.
Our top priority is to foster excellence amongst an intergenerational community of visionaries and to help younger talent meet and rise in conjunction with established filmmakers. Our on-demand platform is a virtual extension of our distribution agenda. Dedicated to supporting and promoting excellent independent cinema from around the globe, we have carefully curated an exciting set of programs consisting of a mix of young and established filmmakers. As part of our ongoing programming, we offer a new range of films and thematics every 3 months. Unlike similar commercial platforms, we do not and will not operate on a subscription basis. Our viewers are encouraged to browse and watch their desired programs whenever they wish. We are hoping this platform would become a viable means to generate passive income for the remarkable artists and filmmakers that we represent.
In addition to our on-demand services, we run an annual virtual film festival also dedicated to global intergenerational discourses on relevant thematics and contemporary issues. Supplementing these platforms are a series of one-off events and surprise programmings that bring timely attention to the work of filmmakers as unique socio-political struggles arise.
Mania Akbari (b. Tehran, 1974) is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. Her provocative, revolutionary and radical films were recently the subject of retrospectives at the BFI, Lon- don (2013), the DFI, Denmark (2014), Oldenburg International Film Festival, Germany (2014), Cyprus Film Festival (2014) and Nottingham Contemporary UK (2018). Her films have screened at festivals around the world and have received numerous awards including German Independence Honorary Award, Oldenberg (2014), Best Film, Digital Section, Venice Film Festival (2004), Nantes Special Public Award Best Film (2007) and Best Director and Best film at Kerala Film Festival (2007), Best Film and Best Actress, Barcelona Film Festival (2007). Akbari was exiled from Iran and currently lives and works in London, a theme addressed in ‘Life May Be’ (2014), co-directed with Mark Cousins. This film was released at Karlovy Vary Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary at Edinburgh International Film Festival (2014) and Asia Pacific Film Festival (2014). Akbari’s latest film ‘A Moon For My Father’, made in collaboration with British artist Douglas White, premiered at CPH:DOX where it won the NEW:VISION Award 2019. The film also received a FIPRESCI International Crit- ics Award at the Flying Broom Festival, Ankara.
This week’s memo is kind of wild – there was a lot going on. Some of the highlights include various conversations around truth and the ethics of documentary filmmaking, discussions about the lack of online screenings for fall film festivals this year, award announcements from BlackStar, Locarno and DokuFest, and an excellent piece from Isabel Ochoa Gold on cinema and its relationship to cat videos. There is much to dig through, so buckle up and enjoy!
– Jordan M. Smith
Octet Of Lynne Sachs Documentaries Coming to Criterion Channel Matthew Carey reports at Deadline: “A collection of documentaries from acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs is coming to the Criterion Channel in October. The streaming platform will showcase seven Sachs films beginning October 1, ranging from the 1994 short Which Way Is East to her most recent work, including E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo, an exploration of the French director’s classic 1933 film Zero for Conduct (Zéro de Conduite). On October 13, the Criterion Channel will exclusively stream her latest feature documentary, Film About a Father Who, which examines Sachs’ relationship with her unorthodox father, Ira Sachs Sr, whose children include Lynne and fellow filmmaker Ira Sachs Jr.”
What inspired A Month of Single Frames? I met Barbara Hammer in the late eighties in San Francisco. She was teaching a workshop on a film technique called optical printing. We were both part of the alternative, underground, experimental film community in San Francisco. We both moved to New York and stayed in contact, and when she was 70, I asked to shoot a roll of film [of Barabra and Florrie, her partner]. It took about five years, because Barbara was so busy and was also undergoing chemotherapy. When she was in her third round of chemotherapy and saw that the end was near, she gave me and three other filmmakers rolls of footage that she shot but never completed. She gave me the footage that you see in A Month of Single Frames, which she shot in 1998. She gave me the journal she kept, and I picked a few pages that she read. She got to see some of [the film], but died before I finished the edit. I thought about how I could use the film to talk to her; talk to her in the past in which she shot it, talk to her as a posthumous presence after her death, and talk to the people watching it about what we see through time. The edit and the text on the screen became a way to communicate on multiple levels.
What do you feel the gaze is within the film? Is there one gaze? Is it a meta-gaze? There are many different ways of seeing in the film. First of all, there is the gaze at nature, and the awe at nature – I love that she transforms nature for her needs. For example, she takes little gels and manipulates the grass. Then there’s the gaze that we have of a woman alone, in a place without running water, or electricity, in nature. It’s a romantic idea of survival. And then the film looks at the audience and asks [the audience] to be aware of itself, to be aware of watching a film. I always feel that I’m most successful when a person leaves one of my films and they doubt something that they believed before. With this, think about what it is to spend your time alone, which many people are intimidated by, what it is to face aging, what it is to have a relationship with nature that is delicate. So many movies are about climbing this or that, running from one place to another in the shortest amount of time….You don’t finish this and think “whoa, isn’t she brave?”, except that she was brave to think about the existential, about living, about relationships. Hopefully that brings out a different kind of empathy.
What else was important to you that you knew you wanted to see? How much did you plan, and what did you let reveal itself to you? In this kind of filmmaking, you think a lot about intention, but you also give yourself space to let the material surprise you. Usually, the obstacle that presents itself to you can indicate something about the complexity of the work. This project wasn’t just going to be about a woman spending a month in a pretty place, it was also going to be a piece that dealt with mortal coil, nature, decay. As we gaze at the human form, we’re trained to look for beauty. We’re constantly framing ourselves to be desirable. Something that Gunvor Nelson once said to me as I was filming flowers in her backyard, “why are you just filming the living flowers? The dead ones are so much more compelling.”
Were there certain things that you found yourself inspired by when you were starting out, and have those inspirations maintained the same or have they changed over the years? Early on in my filmmaking, I bought a 16 millimeter camera. I still have it. I bought it in 1987. I still use the same camera for almost every film I make. I have an intimate relationship with it, it’s a beautiful machine, and it sort of feels like it’s an extension of my body.
I made another film with Barbara Hammer, “Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor” in 2018. Carolee Shneemann is considered one of the great thinkers and practitioners of feminist performance art, and she is also a filmmaker – she made a film called Fuses which was very inspirational for many people. Gunvor Nelson is a Swedish filmmaker who lived in the United States for many years, another huge inspiration. Those three women are major heroes of mine. They were all super important women in my life, both as artists and as friends.
What made you want to be a filmmaker? I think that filmmaking found me. I didn’t go looking for filmmaking. When I was growing up, I liked going to the movies, but I was far more interested in photography, writing, poetry, and drawing. “The movies” felt like a way to entertain and fill time. Then, I went to college and I continued to do art, but I was also a history major. There was a rift that I was unintentionally trying to sew together, which was my interest in social issues and politics with the art classes I was taking at the same time. In my junior year, I went to live in France and discovered the films of Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras. I had no idea that this medium, “the movies”, was also this really articulate, raw, intimate, unpredictable and not-formulaic way of seeing the world, and that it could give me the opportunity to pursue some intellectual curiosities that painting, which I still love, didn’t foster so much. In a sense, it was a treasure chest, or garbage can, where I could throw all of these ways of being in the world into one.
You can purchase and stream A Month of Single Frames here through September 17, 2021. This film is made available by the distributor, Canyon Cinema. Proceeds from the rental of this film will go to supporting the Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Additionally, more of her films will be made available to the public this October, with The Criterion Channel’s showcase of her work. For more, click here.
A Month of Single Frames is featured on our August Playlist.
Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her work ever since. She is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems. From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NYFA, and Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center, the Walker the Getty, New York Film Festival, and Sundance.
Lynne lives in Brooklyn.
Solia Cates is the Editor-In-Chief of WomenDo, a graduate of Yale University’s Film and Media studies program, and a writer and actress based in Los Angeles. She sits down with WomenDo Founder and documentary filmmaker Rebecca Carpenter to discuss inspiration, mentorship, and the emotional impact of viewing women’s stories.
WomenDo is a film club that highlights bold, inspiring, and groundbreaking stories made by and about women.
Our mission is to celebrate female excellence by spotlighting female filmmakers and movies that focus on womanhood. Through our uniquely curated film “playlists”, members are exposed to the stories of trailblazing women who have pushed boundaries and challenged the status quo, whether their impact be personal, local, regional, or international. Through our conversation series, we sit down with women in all areas of the film industry to examine inspirations, motivations, and what it really takes to bring amazing stories to the screen.
EXCLUSIVE: A collection of documentaries from acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs is coming to the Criterion Channel in October.
The streaming platform will showcase seven Sachs films beginning October 1, ranging from the 1994 short Which Way Is East to her most recent work, including E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo, an exploration of the French director’s classic 1933 film Zero for Conduct (Zéro de Conduite).
On October 13, the Criterion Channel will exclusively stream her latest feature documentary, Film About a Father Who, which examines Sachs’ relationship with her unorthodox father, Ira Sachs Sr, whose children include Lynne and fellow filmmaker Ira Sachs Jr.
“Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings,” the director has written. “With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.”
Penelope Bartlett, director of programming at the Criterion Channel, commented, “The Criterion Channel is thrilled to present the exclusive streaming premiere of Lynne Sachs’ Film About a Father Who this October. This raw and deeply personal excavation of the filmmaker’s complex family history will be accompanied by a number of Sachs’ experimental shorts, many of which also focus on exploring familial dynamics and family histories.”
Sachs’ work was the subject of a career retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image this year and at Sheffield Doc/Fest last year. Sachs has been the recipient of support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation.
“Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry,” according to the director’s website. “Her highly self-reflexive films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.”
The Criterion Channel programming will include a newly-recorded interview with Sachs discussing her work. Complete details on the Sachs’ documentaries coming to the platform:
Debuting on the Criterion Channel Oct. 13:
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (2020) Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.
Debuting on the Criterion Channel Oct. 1: E•PIS•TO•LAR•Y: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO (2021)
In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic Zero for Conduct in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers.
MAYA AT 24 (2021) Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.
GIRL IS PRESENCE (2020) During the 2020 global pandemic, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and her daughter Noa collaborated with Anne Lesley Selcer to create Girl is Presence. Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, the ‘girl’ arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things.
THE WASHING SOCIETY (2018) Collaborating together for the first time, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. With a title inspired by the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses, The Washing Society investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry.
WIND IN OUR HAIR (2010) 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 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.
THE LAST HAPPY DAY (2009) During WWII, the US Army hired Sachs’ Hungarian cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. Sachs’ portrait of Lenard, who is best known for his translation of Winnie the Pooh into Latin, resonates as an anti-war meditation composed of letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies of children, and interviews.
WHICH WAY IS EAST (1994) When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt.
Filmmaker/poet Lynne Sachs will share a selection of short films and read selections from her poetry collection Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press). This free public event precedes an encore presentation of our Text Kitchen workshop—Frames & Stanzas: Video Poems, which begins the next day, Tuesday, Sept. 14.
The Flow Chart Foundation explores poetry and the interrelationships of various art forms as guided by the legacy of American poet John Ashbery. Through programs for both general and scholarly audiences showcasing innovative work by a diversity of artists of various kinds, The Flow Chart Foundation celebrates Ashbery and his art as an inspirational and generative force. We see poetry in particular as a conduit to exploration, questioning, and resistance to the status quo, and work to offer new ways to engage with it and its interplay with other artistic modes.
On Year by Year: Poems: “The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit. With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne Sachs shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.” —Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body and Against Joie de Vivre
“The highly acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs is also a captivating and surprising poet. Year by Year distills five decades into lyric, a lustrous tapestry woven of memory, wisdom, cultural apprehension and the delicate specificities of lived life.” —Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs and When the World Was Steady
“In Year by Year, Lynne Sachs selects and distills from larger fields of notation, acute scenes representing her life and the world she was born into. Her measured, spare account brings her to an understanding and acceptance of the terrible and beautiful fact that history both moves us and moves through us, and, more significantly, how by contending with its uncompromising force, we define an ethics that guides our fate.” —Michael Collier author of Dark Wild Realm
Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her highly self-reflexive films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living and studying in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trihn T. Min-ha. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her body of work ever since. In tandem with making films, Lynne is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems.
From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing directly the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany—sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.
Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, and China Women’s Film Festival. Her 2019 film “A Month of Single Frames” won the Grand Prize at Oberhausen Festival of Short Films in 2020. In 2021, both the Edison Film Festival and the Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center awarded Lynne for her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields.
