Category Archives: SECTIONS

“Girl is Presence” at DOBRA – Festival Int’l de Cinema Experimental (Brazil)

September 6-30th 2021
https://festivaldobra.com.br/rituais-de-regeneracao/

RITUALS OF RECLAMATION

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.

Best regards,

_ Cristiana Miranda

Cryptofiction Presents Five Films by Lynne Sachs

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/lynnesachs2
https://www.crypto-fiction.com/on-demand

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.

Doc NYC’s Monday Memo Features Sachs’ Criterion Channel Octet

Doc NYC: Monday Memo
August 15, 2021
https://mailchi.mp/docnyc.net/mondaymemo-2021-08-16?e=dfb43bb105

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.”

Lynne Sachs Featured August Interview on WomenDo Film Club

Women Do
August Interview
By Solia Cates
https://womendo.com/august-interview

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.

Deadline Exclusive: “Raw And Deeply Personal”: Octet Of Lynne Sachs Documentaries Coming to Criterion Channel

By Matthew Carey
August 13, 2021 5:43pm
https://deadline.com/2021/08/criterion-channel-director-lynne-sachs-streaming-debut-news-1234814823/

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.”

Cinema Guild Acquires Lynne Sachs’ Slamdance Docu ‘Film About A Father Who’

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.

The Flow Chart Foundation presents “Films + Poems = Lynne Sachs”

Films + Poems = Lynne Sachs
The Flow Chart Foundation
https://www.flowchartfoundation.org/events-public-programs-2021
Monday, September 13, 6 – 7PM (EDT), via zoom

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.

The Flow Chart Foundation’s “Text Kitchen” with Workshops by Lynne Sachs

https://www.flowchartfoundation.org/workshop-checkout/0xwihp0y2zgaxgr0tgxgjs3gsrukqr

The Flow Chart Foundation’s Text Kitchen hands-onWorkshops provide writers and other art-makers opportunities for deep exploration into poetry and interrelated forms of expression.

UP NEXT:

Frames and Stanzas: Video Poems—encore presentation!
a virtual filmmaking and poetry writing workshop with Lynne Sachs

Tuesday, September 14 & Tuesday, September 21, 2021 (registration includes both sessions)
6:30pm – 9:30pm (EDT) on Zoom

In this two-part virtual workshop, Sachs will share insights and experiences she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words over the course of two three-hour evening meetings (participants must be able to attend both sessions). Lynne will guide the workshop on a creative journey that will include writing several poems in conjunction with shooting moving or still images using an iPhone and simple editing software. Lynne has always been fascinated by the conversation between large-scale public events beyond our control and our subsequent, internal responses to those experiences. Her workshop will build itself around this public/private convergence.

Participants are encouraged to join us for a free, public presentation of Lynne’s short films and poetry taking place virtually at 6PM (EDT) on Monday, September 13th. More info here.

Workshop fee (includes both three-hour sessions): $80

PREVIOUS:

Frames and Stanzas: Video Poems
a virtual filmmaking and poetry writing workshop with Lynne Sachs

Thursday, June 10 & Thursday, June 17, 2021 (registration includes both sessions)
6:30pm – 9:30pm (EDT) on Zoom

When award-winning Brooklyn filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs first discovered The Flowchart Foundation’s enthusiasm for poetry as a conduit for an interplay with other artistic modes, she knew that we would be a great place to offer a workshop that would nourish a deeply engaged dialogue between the written word and the image.

In this two-part virtual workshop, Sachs will share insights and experiences she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words over the course of two three-hour evening meetings (participants must be able to attend both sessions). Lynne will guide the workshop on a creative journey that will include writing several poems in conjunction with shooting moving or still images. Lynne has always been fascinated by the conversation between large-scale public events beyond our control and our subsequent, internal responses to those experiences. Her workshop will build itself around this public/private convergence.

We encourage those with backgrounds in either or both poetry and image-making to sign up. Participants will need only a smartphone for creating their short films. Because creative collaboration between participants is a vital part of the experience, Lynne will carefully pair participants based on a questionnaire sent after registering. Note that this is not a tech-focused workshop, though some basic tech instruction will be shared.

Lynne’s virtual workshop will include the screening of some of her own recent short film poems, including “Starfish Aorta Colossus” (2015), “A Month of Single Frames” (2019), “Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home” (2020), and “Girl is Presence” (2020) as well as excerpts from her feature “Tip of My Tongue” (2017).

Join us in this 2-week multimedia investigation of the sounds, texts, media images, home-made movies, and sensory experiences that all come together in a video poem. We could not be more delighted to be launching the Text Kitchen workshop series with this event.

Workshop fee (includes both three-hour sessions): $80 [event SOLD OUT]

Edinburgh International Film Festival screens “A Month of Single Frames”

Edinburgh International Film Festival
18 – 25 August 2021
https://www.edfilmfest.org.uk/2021/shorts-interconnections/08-21_16-00/

SHORTS: INTERCONNECTIONS
Part of the Shorts Strand
71 mins

Body

A programme of short films, exploring collaboration, communication and interrelation.

With their fluid approach to structure and close attention to rhythm, the films in this programme demonstrate different ways of expressing connection and interconnection – with oneself, with another, between humans and non-humans, and with both the urban environment and natural surroundings. They ask us to be attentive to the relationship between exterior and interior worlds, transforming perception through new languages of observation and contemplation. 

A Month of Single Frames / Lynne Sachs / USA / 2019 / 14 min / English
A poetic dialogue between two female filmmakers from different generations – Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer. Sachs reworks Hammer’s unfinished film project, weaving together a tapestry of interconnected subjectivities that reflects on the memory and legacy of the iconic lesbian artist.

Autoficción / Laida Lertxundi / USA, Spain, New Zealand / 2020 / 14 min / English, Spanish with subtitles
Employing her signature deadpan style and experimenting with the boundary between fiction and documentary, Lertxundi allows a series of intimate perspectives on the female experience to emerge against a backdrop of urban ennui.

Signal 8 / Simon Liu / Hong Kong / 2020 / 14 min / No dialogue
The flux and flow of everyday life on the streets of Hong Kong is transformed into a mysterious spectacle of discovery in Liu’s celebration of 16mm film.

Tri-Alogue #4 / Caryn Cline, Linda Fenstermaker, Reed O’Beirne / USA / 2020 / 3 min / No dialogue
Masking the frame to divide the image, three filmmakers collaborate on the same roll of 16mm film. A compelling triptych portrait of Seattle in summer.

Redbird and other birds / Julieta María / Canada / 2019 / 13 min / English
Reflecting on the relationship between the natural and the manmade, and between the human and non-human, this experimental documentary offers new perspectives on the practice of birdwatching.

LE RÊVE / Peter Conrad Beyer / Germany / 2020 / 8 min / No dialogue
Semi-abstract and dreamlike impressions of natural forms, both animate and inanimate, are interwoven in a tapestry of tactile encounters that open up new forms of perception and understanding.

Of This Beguiling Membrane / Charlotte Pryce / USA / 2020 / 5 min / English
Pryce’s poetic observations of the natural world continue with this investigation of striders that inhabit the surface of water. What lies beneath this delicate boundary between one world and another?

Mimesis Documentary Festival to host “Film About a Father Who” and “Day Residue” workshop

Mimesis – Documentary Festival
August 2021
https://www.mimesisfestival.org/2021-program/#opening-night

Opening Night: Lynne Sachs + Workshop

Film About a Father Who
by Lynne Sachs (2021, 74’)Wednesday 4 August 6:00 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Drawing on a painstaking personal archive of images, home movies, and interviews, Film About A Father Who is a rare kind of cinematic portrait: one that succeeds in expanding our understanding of the filmmaker, her protagonist, and their relationship through its structure, aesthetic, and method. A beautiful accumulation of time, contradictions, and a multitude of perspectives reflects the all-too-familiar operatic dynamics of family.

This screening will be followed by a conversation with the artist and a reception with light refreshments.

Recorded by Marc Vidulich.

Mimesis Documentary Festival, Aug 4 2021
Q & A with filmmaker Lynne Sachs for Opening Night screening of “Film About a Father Who”
moderated by Maryam Muliaee, PhD
Post-doctoral AssociateDepartment of Critical Media PracticesUniversity of Colorado Boulderwww.maryammuliaee.comEditor, MAST journal www.mast-journal.org

Can you talk a little about the process of archiving for Film About A Father Who in the course of three decades? My emphasis is on the word archiving (rather than archive) with an interest in the process, duration and change — a quality that also involves encounters with the unexpected and unplanned. I can imagine it must be an incredibly enormous amount of footage, images and sounds that needed your considerable time, patience and focus for re-listening, re-watching and final selection. How did you manage these demanding processes of archiving, organizing and reviewing your materials within three decades?
There is sometimes this wrong assumption that films made up of home movies and family footage are hard to be directed or involve less direction. However, as a director you have sculpted the film with incredible attention to details. Your orchestration of the materials and visual rhetoric are so strong, thoughtful and distinct, revealed as an individual touch. How did you direct the film, and come to decision(s) about selection, order and function of home movies and family footage in your film?
There is an aesthetic of fragmentation in your film. You also mentioned to cubist paintings in your statement referring to your film and way of portraying your father. This fragmentation brings in dynamic variation, multiplicity and process – embodied in your way of engaging a variety of different materials (in terms of format, quality, time, order, aspect ratio, cut, collage, etc.); in a fragmented and unfinished image of your father; in the voice and view of multiple narrators the viewers encounter such as siblings some of whom remained disconnected for twenty years. I also find a meaningful association between this fragmental or fragmentary aesthetic and the way memories are always in pieces, ephemeral and collective. Can you talk more about the aesthetic of fragmentation (or variation) in your film, and why does it matter to you as a filmmaker?
While the film title gives this assumption that your main protagonist is a man — obviously your father — I was surprised by and enjoyed far more and many encounters with women in the film, from your grandmother to your mother, your sisters and your father’s other wives, and of course yourself as a woman (as well as a mother and a daughter). Discovering this distinct feminist standpoint through which you connect the viewers more strongly with the female characters in the film was so remarkable for me. Can you talk about this feminist touch?
Can you talk about your use of aging/decaying videotapes? How did you find it aesthetically important or meaningful to deploy the disintegration of videographic materials? What is at stake in their tactile qualities (e.g. blurriness, incoherence, failure and dispersion) and how have their grainy textures helped your film narrative or aesthetics?

Workshop: Day Residue
A filmmaking workshop on the every day with opening night artist Lynne Sachs.
Thursday 5 August 9:30 – 11:00 AM
Grace Gamm Theater

According to Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams, our day residue is composed of the memory traces left by the events of our waking state. In this workshop, we explore the ways in which fragments of our daily lives can become material for the making of a film poem. While many people in the film industry rely upon a chronological process that begins with the development phase and ends with post-production, our Day Residue workshop will build on an entirely different creative paradigm that encourages artists to embrace the nuances, surprises and challenges of their daily lives as a foundation for a diaristic practice.

The workshop will include screenings of some of Lynne’s recent short film poems, including Starfish Aorta Colossus (2015), A Month of Single Frames (2019), Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home (2020), and Girl is Presence (2020) as well as excerpts from her feature Tip of My Tongue (2017).

Register for “Cinema Garage” with Lynne Sachs through SPHERE

Cinema Garage with LYNNE SACHS
Curated by Sphere
https://form.typeform.com/to/IgsqRr7u

Sphere presents CINEMA GARAGE WITH LYNNE SACHS, an opportunity for open exchange with the experimental filmmaker and her latest feature, Film About A Father Who. Shot over a period of 35 years, this film is a mesmerizing exploration of the director’s relationship with her father, touching upon larger questions of family structures, morality, polyamory etc. Participants of this interactive programme will get to watch her film and engage in a live conversation with Lynne. We are looking forward to an open flow of ideas and discussion, like sitting in a garage and thinking through literature, cinema, and relationships.

The event will take place on 18th July at 7 PM IST and the film link will be provided to the participants a day before that. Along with, some live screening links of her work will be shared during the session to make this experience more engaging and experimental.

As you have reached the registration portal already, let’s watch the trailer first.

Register (free) yourselves before 5th July. The slots are limited.

Curated by SPHERE

ABOUT SPHERE

https://spherefestival.com/

We strive to identify the problems of multidisciplinary objects and find a concrete and practical panacea with the extensive and experiential applications across the streams of science, art and social philosophy to construct an alternative culture in earth.

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs