Category Archives: SECTIONS

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.”

RELATED STORY

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.

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. 

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]

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. 

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

  1. 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?
  2. 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?
  3.  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?
  4. 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?
  5.  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.

# PESAROFF57 / THE WITCHES OF THE ORIENT AND THE MEETINGS OF JUNE 24TH

FRIDAY, JUNE 25, 2021 6:09 PM
PUBLISHED IN PRESS RELEASES
https://www.pesarofilmfest.it/en/press/comunicati-stampa/733-pesaroff57-the-witches-of-the-orient-e-gli-incontri-del-24-giuno

THE “WITCHES OF THE EAST” CONQUER THE SQUARE OF PESARO
EMERGENCY PRESENTS CAPITAN DIDIER BY MARGHERITA FERRI
LUCA FERRI AND LYNNE SACHS TELL THEIR FILMS IN COMPETITION

Last night in Piazza was presented one of the most anticipated films of the Competition of the 57th International Exhibition of New Cinema , or The Witches of the Orient , the new “sports” documentary with which Julien Faraut returns to Pesaro two years after the success of John McEnroe – The Empire of Perfection , with which he won both the professional and student jury awards.

As the director of the exhibition Pedro Armocida recalled on stage, that was the Italian launch of a film that would later garner numerous acclaim and distribution in theaters, and he therefore wished this new work, also in an Italian preview, to undertake same lucky path, having already secured destruction thanks to Wanted Cinema. Julien Faraut, in connection from France, first recalled the good times spent in Pesaro and its ice cream parlors: (“the French know how to do many things, but I miss your ice creams”), then introduces his “witches” with irony , questioning the audience and explaining how in this case it is neither an Anjelica Houston figure in Who’s Afraid of Witches?, nor of those that fly in the sky on a broom like in Kiki – Home delivery by Miyazaki. Her “witches of the East” are those of the Japanese women’s volleyball team and their incredible ride to conquer the Tokyo 64 Olympics, so nicknamed by their Soviet rivals.

A story made of suffering and sacrifice, in which a group of girls who would later form the core of the Japanese national team worked every day in a textile factory and then underwent grueling training for the company’s volleyball team until late at night, under the the watchful and severe eye of a coach with a militaristic manner. Faraut discovered this story ten years ago thanks to a volleyball coach and was able to deepen it over time by working in the film archive of the Institut National du SportFrench. The story struck him to such an extent that he came to develop the conviction of making this film not only to spread its story to an international audience, but above all as a “tribute” to the athletes themselves. Already entered the Japanese collective imagination, in fact, this mythical team has inspired a series of cartoons and comics that then successfully landed in Italy, first of all Mimì and the national volleyball team , of which Faraut takes up numerous sequences to superimpose them on those of the real matches of the national team. To these are mixed, with the precise eye of an archivist and historian, but also with great formal refinement, interviews with some of the survivors of that team and numerous period films.

Previously, the evening had been opened by an event dedicated to EMERGENCY , from this year the official charity partner of the Festival , with the screening of Captain Didier , the short film produced by LYNN, the all-female division of Greenland (Matteo Rovere). To present him on stage, in addition to Michela Greco of Emergency, there were also the director Margherita Ferri , the screenwriter Roberta Palmieri and the composer of the music Alicia Galli. The screenwriter was the first to be interviewed, from whom the entire project started as the winner of the second edition of the “A story for Emergency” competition. Palmieri told how he wanted to give voice to the invisibles of our society which are the figures of the riders , to help the public think that the history and life of many of the migrants arriving from the Mediterranean does not end only in their tragic journey and in the their landing in Europe. A story that required great sensitivity in the staging created by Margherita Ferri, currently working on the set of an Amazon Prime series, capable of returning great emotions, to which the music of Galli also contributes, who has freely re-arranged sounds. typical of Eritrea.

In the morning, on the other hand, there was the usual meeting with the directors of the Pesaro Nuovo Cinema Competition and the Festival had the pleasure of welcoming one of the three Italians competing, Luca Ferri , who presented his new work Mille Cipressi in Pesaro. , with which he continues his research on the image started with Abacucand continued with other works presented in Venice, Berlin and Locarno. The short follows a man visiting the Brion Tomb, in the monumental funeral complex built by the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, in the cemetery of San Vito, in the province of Treviso. “It is not a film about architecture, but about the meaning of things, about why we are in the world”. The director’s tight formal research, which takes up a series of details of the tomb in 4: 3, starts a reflection on our way of knowing and seeing the world: “The lack of a total shot of Scarpa’s work serves to emphasize the impossibility of being able to grasp its entirety “. This choice marks the departure from a superficial vision, which must leave room for a deep penetration of what one looks at. “There is no new”, he explained in response to a question, “but only a conscious revival of the classic”; exactly as Scarpa himself declared, whose words were taken up by Ferri for the narrator of Assila Cherfi. 

The poet and director Lynne Sachs then participated in connection from New York to the second part of the meeting to talk about Film About a Father Who, her new feature film presented in competition. The film is an autobiographical documentary and tells the complex figure of the director’s father, Ira Sachs Sr., using heterogeneous materials collected over more than thirty years: “Every time my father and I have been together, over the thirty years old, I was filming. The result is hours and hours of shooting on 8mm and 16mm film, video and digital ». Over the course of his life, the man has had numerous women from whom nine children were born. Through this home movie, the director carries out the attempt to understand, analyze and deal with the elusive father figure and with that of the various brothers. The goal, as Sachs said, is to relate his memory to that of Ira’s other children in an attempt to grasp their father’s personality: “I wanted to make a film that would investigate the various ways that each of us uses to understand a person and show how you can play with them ». Finally, the director wanted to underline how the choice of using the generic “a father” in the title, as well as being a tribute to Yvonne Rainer’s Film About a Woman Who … their families to deal with that “mysterious figure that parents can sometimes represent for their children”.

PesaroFF57 – Meeting with Luca Ferri and Lynne Sachs

Sentieri Selvaggi 
June 24, 2021 
by Veronica Orciari
https://www.sentieriselvaggi.it/pesaroff57-incontro-con-luca-ferri-e-lynne-sachs/

The Bergamo director is in competition with a film dedicated to the monumental Brion Tomb by the architect Carlo Scarpa, also the work of the American director Lynne Sachs

“Postmodernism is evil, it is betraying all the rumors that were there before you, it is making a smoothie without putting anything personal in it” . Luca Ferri likes to provoke, there is no doubt. In competition with the thirteen-minute short film Mille Cipressi, the director explained its genesis and realization, also discussing the relationship between classicism and modernity. “When I went to the Brion Tomb for the first time I did not have a defined architecture in front of me and in fact I was unable to collect it all in the film” , said Ferri regarding the monumental building by the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, located in the cemetery of San Vito, in the province of Treviso. The short is punctuated by a female voice, that of Assila Cherfi, already present inColombi:  “I wanted the words to break away from the“ Scarpa man ”, using a female voice I wanted to enter a territory of non-emulation, to take the text to another level”.

UNICINEMA – A NEW UNIVERSITY IDEA 

“One of the things I share most about Scarpa’s speech is the criticism of everything that doesn’t fit into the classic. I find a lot of my vision in it, in my opinion there is no new, there is no experimentalism. There is only the possibility of entering a classic canon with its own style. ” Ferri did not mince words to describe his idea of cinema, a cinema (indeed, an art in general) that must necessarily deal with what preceded it: “You have to be aware of the past, a word that in this contemporaneity seems to be a dead word ” . According to the filmmaker, Scarpa’s thinking is lucid and theoretical and his architecture reflects the consequences and in this sense he is very close to this approach.

However, architecture is an element that needs time to be understood and admired, in this regard the director said he was amazed to have one day seen a group that remained inside the Brion Tomb for only 15 minutes. “I found it absurd, for art it takes time. Having made this film myself, I feel I have been disrespectful of a place that deserves even more time. This hit and run of culture is no good. ” Speaking of his cinema, Ferri concluded:“I believe that in all my films there is the comic, not the ironic. In serious and busy cinema, the comedian is always pornographic, it always seems that laughter, especially fat laughter, demeans you. Just think of experimental cinema, how seriously certain authors are taken. Experimental cinema adheres to the genre and for me it is reprehensible. “

The meeting was concluded by another protagonist of this year’s competition, Lynne Sachs, with her Film About a Father Who . An intimate and personal film about an important father figure, influenced by Film About a Woman Who , by filmmaker and choreographer Yvonne Reiner. “This film is an attempt to understand what it means to try to be a man today, putting anger on one side and forgiveness on the other,” said Sachs, who also explained how for her the reflection on the parent-child relationship is a constant in his life.“There were aspects of my family that I wanted to investigate, although there was a sense of ambivalence and shame inside me, there was an unease that needed to be analyzed. I have allowed myself to be vulnerable in two senses: form and content. Looking at my 80s footage I thought they looked awful when compared to the clean high definition images. But on the one hand we got tired of clean images and I’m happy to have embraced this work. “

“The Washing Society” Screening at Kinesthesia Moving Image Festival

Kinesthesia Moving Image Festival
16 – 18 July 2021
Middlesex University, London
https://kinesthesiafestival.org/

Program

Screening 1
Friday, 16 July, 6.30pm

Falling
Mary Trunk, United States, 2020, 05:19
Intertidal. Barene
Collettivo Confluenze Paloma Leyton & Lucrezia Stenico, Italy, 2019, 14:50 
We Are Ready Now
Jack Thomson, United Kingdom, 2020, 01:39
Unfurling
Alexa Velez, United States, 2019, 02:18

Screening 2
Saturday, 17 July, 12p

Reasonable Adjustments
Anna Macdonald, United Kingdom, 2020, 05:21
LAND/SCAPE
Michal Krawczyk, Italy, 2020, 07:10
Jam upload download upload jam
Sumedha Bhattacharyya, India, 2020, 06:00
notes on symptoms
Alice Gale-Feeny, United Kingdom, 2020, 12:51
This dance has no end
Fenia Kotsopoulou, Greece, 2018, 10:58

Screening 3
Saturday, 17 July, 4pm

WHITE CANE
Bo Lee Germany / Republic of Korea / Kenya, 2017, 08:16
the moon rises in four parts
Michaela Gerussi and Tracy Valcarcel, Canada, 2019, 10:00
Canis Major
Charli Brissey, United States, 2019, 10:00
Chickadee
Chan Sze-Wei, Singapore, 2018, 03:22
LIQUID PATH
Filomena Rusciano, Italy, 2013, 04:00

Screening 4
Saturday, 17 July, 7.45pm

The Washing Society
Lynne Sachs, Lizzie Olesker, United States, 2018, 44:00

Screening 5
Sunday, 18 July, 12pm

Far Flung Dances – II (The Wood)
Mary Wycherley, Ireland, 2020, 06:00
Water,logged
Sandra Alland, United Kingdom, 2020, 08:07
That’s how I remember her 
Naomi Midgelow, United Kingdom, 2020, 04:38
My Days
Katsura Isobe, United Kingdom, 2020, 05:18
Dirt
Helanius J. Wilkins, Roma Flowers, United States, 2020, 12:00

Screening 6
Sunday, 18 July, 3.30pm

Chapter 2: A Wet Bio Coder
Better Lovers, Hsin-Yu Chen, United States, 2020, 8:28
SUNLESS
Corina Andrian (Red-Cor), Romania, 2020, 07:27
Observations
Davide Belotti, Belgium, 2020, 04:08
Lorelei – Persona
Gustavo Gomes, Germany, 2020, 07:03
Custard Is This (Custard at Dawn)
Emma Lindsay, United Kingdom, 2019, 03:15


About

Kinesthesia is a new moving image festival taking place at Middlesex University and online 16 – 18 July 2021.

Kinesthesia puts focus on the body as the agent of seeing rather than as an object of display, inviting audiences to experience film and moving image work from an embodied perspective.  

Initiated by artists Dominique Rivoal and Claire Loussouarn, this new festival has been curated and produced collectively by them, freelance film curator Gitta Wigro and co-directors of Independent Dance Heni Hale and Nikki Tomlinson. The contributing artists were found via an international open call, and selected by the festival team with guest panellist Adesola Akinleye.  

As a team we are exploring how film can be made and viewed kinaesthetically. Bringing together wide interests in dance, somatic practices, experimental film and sensory ethnography, Kinesthesia focuses on movement beyond visual impact and narrative, to consider the whole range of sensory experiences, including visceral, proprioceptive and haptic awareness.   This edition of the festival combines screenings, short workshops, installation and discursive sessions that attend to the subtler felt sense of the body. We are delighted that it will be framed by keynote speaker Karen Wood, author of Kinesthetic Empathy : Conditions for Viewing, who will speak about meeting points between screen-based practices, eco-somatics and empathy.  

We are excited to present a distinctive and truly international programme. We thank all the contributing artists, and and all those who submitted work through the call-out. We acknowledge that as a new festival with micro-funding, work is being contributed on a voluntary basis; this not-for-profit festival is also made possible through in-kind work by the whole festival team, and through partnership support from Middlesex University.  

Kinesthesia will take place in hybrid form; in person and online. In keeping with Covid-19 safety protocols, there is a limited capacity for in-person festival tickets. If circumstances allow, further tickets will be released in the coming weeks.   We look forward to welcoming you to Kinesthesia and to experiencing it with you, virtually or in person!

Kinesthesia team

Dominique Rivoal – dance and dance film maker and scholar
Claire Loussouarn – movement artist, filmmaker and anthropologist
Gitta Wigro – freelance dance film programmer and lecturer
Henrietta Hale – dance artist and co-director of Independent Dance
Nikki Tomlinson – co-director of Independent Dance

“A Month of Single Frames” Reviewed in Echinox– Romanian Cultural Magazine

“I am overwhelmed by simplicity”
By. Georgiana Bozîntan
JUNE 18, 2021
https://revistaechinox.ro/2021/06/i-am-overwhelmed-by-simplicity/

Echinox is a Romanian Cultural Magazine published by the students from “Babeş-Bolyai” University. It has been published since December 1968.

A Month of Single Frames is a short film by Lynne Sachs, released in 2019. The filming belongs to the director Barbara Hammer, who made it in 1998, during an artistic residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, when she lived for a month in a shack in the Duneshacks, without electricity and running water. The short film is a collage of the shots filmed there.

In voice-over , Barbara Hammer reads from the diary she wrote during her residency, describing how she feels, what she sees, recounts dreams or explains the process and filming techniques she uses, for example, to capture the light of sunrise, “This forever wonder of sunshine”, or to superimpose colored lights over the filmed landscapes.

In her speech there are also phrases that remain in your head like a poem: “I am overwhelmed by simplicity. There is so much to see ”. Nothing happens in the movie. Barbara Hammer just shows us what she sees in her time spent alone: a dragonfly, shadows, landscapes, blades of grass in the wind, clouds and planes crossing the sky, the sea, dunes, raindrops, lichens, insects, tree trunks, leaves, flowers , plastic toys.

Text also appears on the screen, as a dialogue between Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer, through which the intimacy between the two occupies the space of the film: “You are here. I am here with you ”,“ You are alone. I am here with you in this film. ”

Experimenting with filming techniques, the short film then increasingly turns into a meditation on the artistic view of nature, mediated by the camera and which Barbara Hammer questions, asking “Why is it I can’t see nature whole?” and pure, without artifice? ”

The film finally flows towards a discussion about time, about the process of aging and death, “the sadness of departure, the inevitable ending breath, […] the complete and thorough blankness”. As explained at the end of the short film, “in 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive”, and the film made by her friend is part of this process.

A Month of Single Frames is a short film about many simple and emotional things, but especially about how we perceive, through different artistic or emotional filters, the places where we live and how they are always changing.