DIRECTED BY Trinh T. Minh-ha and Lynne Sachs with Barbara Hammer
A film from the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection is paired with a contemporary work that is not in the collection. The two works resonate with timeless, conceptual connections.
Whose film is it? Contemporary artists Trinh T. Minh-ha, Lynne Sachs, and the late Barbara Hammer address various forms of truth-telling and collaboration in cinema. Minh-ha challenges traditional ethnographic films, drawing attention to ways they are conspicuously shaped by the storyteller’s colonial standpoint. Sachs and Hammer elevate the possibility of shared authorship by conceiving a film shaped by Sachs’s vision of Hammer’s material.
Screening right here for free beginning at 10 am (CDT) April 20 until May 4.
Produced, written and directed by Lynne Sachs; cinematography by Lynne Sachs, Ira Sachs Sr., and Ira Sachs Jr.; edited by Rebecca Shapass; music by Stephen Vitiello; sound collages by Kevin. T. Allen; featuring Ira Sachs Sr., Lynne Sachs, Dana Sachs, Ira Sachs Jr., Diane Sachs, and Rose Sachs. Color, 74 min. A Cinema Guild release.
As the British say about buses, you wait ages for an experimental film about an aging patriarch by his daughter, then two come along at once.
In October 2020, Netflix dropped Dick Johnson Is Dead, wherein long-time documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson confronted her retired father’s dementia and mortality by staging elaborate tableaux of his imagined death, involving angels, heaven, funeral services, and missiles falling from the sky. By continually casting her father in these fantasy scenarios, Johnson hoped to postpone his real and inevitable death—and, by the end of the film at least, had succeeded in doing so.
Three months later, Lynne Sachs’s Film About a Father Who was also released virtually. It too centers on a charismatic older man in physical and mental decline. Kirsten Johnson is the co-parent of twins with Lynne’s filmmaker brother Ira, so presumably Lynne knew all about Dick Johnson Is Dead when she was making her own work. Still, it still must have been a little galling to see her three-and-a-half-decades-long project eclipsed by a film that was not only released on the world’s biggest moving image distribution service, but also widely featured and reviewed in the press, culminating in a place on many best film of the year lists, such as Sight & Sound’s, where it ranked number six.
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Filmmaker Lynne Sachs with her father Ira Sachs Sr., the subject of her documentary.
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Kirsten Johnson’s Dick Johnson is Dead, about her father, appeared a few weeks before Sachs’s film (Kirsten Johnson with Dick Johnson).
That said, even had Film About a Father Who been released first, or without Dick Johnson Is Dead as competition, it would not necessarily have attained that film’s visibility or reach. This is partly due to Sachs’s career-long assertion of creative independence and her reluctance to court major studios or platforms like Netflix as so many of her peers have. Sachs is one of those awkward filmmakers with one foot in the art world, where many of her films are screened and even generated (through grants, residencies, fellowships, and the like), and the other in the documentary or essay film world. In practical terms, this means that she has a foot in neither; the art world doesn’t recognize her as a moving image artist (she is not represented by a commercial gallery, the sine qua non for institutional recognition), and her documentaries and essay films don’t conform to the rigid formulae demanded by studios and networks. As a result, Sachs’s exemplary body of work over thirty years has been largely ignored—as far as I am aware, she is yet to receive a feature, interview, or full-length review from any of the major English-language film periodicals. Compare this to the widespread coverage granted the fiction films of her brother Ira, who has engaged with both mainstream distribution and the star system (one movie even stars a former James Bond!). The price for Lynne Sachs’s preciously guarded independence has been critical invisibility. We must try harder.
But the film also resists mainstream co-option by its refusal to offer simplistic characterization or narrative. Dick Johnson is a model of probity, as a professional (he worked as a clinical psychiatrist), husband, and father; a religious man, his path never deviated from accepted norms of middle-class respectability. Ira Sachs Sr. is a sketchier figure, and as a result, Film About a Father Who is a sketchier film. Dick Johnson may feature in various fantasy scenarios, but he remains the same, recognizable person, physically and morally. Ira Sr.’s elusive identities are first signaled by his sundry business cards—he worked as a “hippie” entrepreneur, buying up unpromising tracts of land in remote areas and developing them—as if he were some sort of undercover agent. His latter-day presence as a beaming, seemingly vacant good ol’ boy is supplemented by footage from half a century’s worth of home movies in diverse formats (mostly shot by Lynne and both Iras), interviews past and present with Ira Sr. and his family, photographs, letters, and even vintage commercials.
The documentary or essay film is often compared to a detective story, with an investigator uncovering or sifting through evidence, parsing essential information from a mass of raw data, before arriving at a singular truth and resolution. Film About a Father Who is an antidetective story—the more we discover about Ira Sr., the less we know. A better metaphor for his narrative might be an endless Russian doll, or a defective onion—layers of skin are peeled away to reveal only more layers, although the peeler still ends up in tears.
This ambiguity and indeterminacy is indicated by Sachs’s title—Film About a Father Who. “A” father, not “my father,” not All About My Father or something. “A father” distances the subject from the film in the manner of a fairy tale or myth, appropriate for a man who wanders in and out of assorted lives with little thought for the havoc he wreaks. “Who”—a father “who” did what? “Who” is Ira Sachs Sr.? The “who” may also reference the popular BBC/NBC television series Who Do You Think You Are? This genealogy format is structured around a subject–detective’s search through the archives and historical sites in order to construct their family tree. These subjects may find out more than they wanted to, but the format—question, quest, revelation, affirmation—never changes. Film About a Father Who shares similar themes and motifs, but its outcome couldn’t be more different.
The film’s conceptual and narrative structures are introduced by two sequences that, at first, seem uncharacteristically labored and literal, but resonate powerfully as the film develops. In the opening sequence, before any voice-over contextualizes what we see, an old man sits having his hair cut by a woman who is eventually revealed as the man’s daughter, and the film’s director Lynne Sachs. The hairdresser’s attempts to unravel the sitter’s matted hair mirrors the work the filmmaker will have to do on the clotted narrative strands of Ira Sr.’s life story. This sexually potent, Jewish alpha-male winces as his hair is manipulated, perhaps reminding us of the Old Testament story of Samson and Delilah, the emasculation of a virile hero by his treacherous lover. In its quiet, patient, loving, intimate way, Film About a Father Who is a work of emasculation and betrayal, a feminist critique of patriarchal structures embedded in the family as rigorous as anything by Yvonne Rainer, whose 1974 classic Film About a Woman Who inspired Sachs’s title.
But that very quiet, patience, love, and intimacy is part of the sequence too—for Lynne Sachs at least, Ira Sr. is a man worth spending time with, not least because he was not always there. The profusion of home movies in Film About a Father Who is misleading, as it occludes the unfilmed gaps when Ira Sr. was not present, when he left his first wife Diane (mother of Lynne, Ira, and their writer sibling Dana) for a trail of other women, including at least one other wife and numerous children. The media-savvy Sachs family—if nothing else, the film can be watched as a history of communications technology, as succeeding generations of cameras, televisions, video formats, and mobile phones appear as part of the familial mise en scène—shoot hungrily today because there may not be anything to shoot tomorrow. The fact that Ira Sr.’s other families were not as technologically adept as the Sachs’s mean that these parts of his life are not visually represented, their documentation dependent on hearsay, rumor, speculation, and oral histories that are occasionally, understandably, embittered. Such camera-free environments may have been part of the appeal of these other lives for a showman who is happy to perform for the camera but shrinks when it tries to peer behind the mask of bonhomie.
In the second key sequence, the now middle-aged Lynne, Ira Jr., and Dana sit on a bed like children, discussing their parents. They differentiate their characters in terms of grammar and punctuation:
Ira: Mom was providing an example that was much more linear.
Dana: And stable. There were no question marks when you were in [Mom’s] house, and with Dad’s, there was all question marks. You didn’t know what could happen.
Lynne: With Mom there was a sense of…I was obsessed with grammar [as a child]. Grammar was worth understanding because once you had grammar you had total transparency. And Mom understood the grammar of…
Dana: In Dad’s life there was no grammar. There was no punctuation—
Lynne: There was no grammar…
Dana: Well, there was punctuation…
Lynne: Exclamation marks!
Dana: And question marks!
Lynne: Exclamation marks and questions marks. With Mom…periods and commas…and the comma gave you a sense, you knew where things went. The thing was, you had the commas and the pause and they were exquisite. They were just right, and you felt affirmed.
Dana: Well, she was steady, and she would keep things in discrete pieces. Life was very…you knew where the boundaries were, and his was always opening up into something. Like a colon opens onto something else—
If the first sequence signifies Lynne’s attempt to unravel the multiple strands of her father’s life, the film proper is an attempt to find a new grammatical form for the unsettlingly open, nonlinear, exploratory, unstructured, opaque, irregular, boundaryless narrative of Ira Sachs Sr., one that could not be contained by conventional film grammar.
This grammar is structured by its subject’s and the film’s relation to time. The classic detective story is defined by time—a crime has been committed that disrupts the flow of time; the detective establishes a chronology of events that restores it. In Dick Johnson Is Dead, Kirsten Johnson tries to stop the flow of time altogether, resulting in a deliberately static, repetitive work—the longer I keep things the same, the longer Dad will stay alive. Film About a Father Who, by contrast, can’t stop time. As edited by artist Rebecca Shapass, it is a vertigo of time, a criss-crossing of past, present, and future, producing a hall of mirrors wherein present-day Ira Sr. confronts his former selves, the time-traveling Father Who as Doctor Who. He never stands still, and neither does the film, resulting in a work as mercurial and fugitive as life itself, resistant to harmonious closure.
Sachs’s focus on her own family is typical of a certain strand of American avant-garde filmmaking—think of Jonas Mekas’s diaries, Stan Brakhage’s processed home movies, or Stephen Dwoskin’s ghostly portraits of long-deceased family members. In an interview with Reverse Shot, the house magazine of New York’s Museum of the Moving Image—which hosted a virtual retrospective of her work in January—Sachs discusses other experimental films about difficult fathers by Su Friedrich (Sink or Swim, 1990) and Alan Berliner (Nobody’s Business [1996]—Berliner is credited as an artistic advisor on Film About a Father Who). The joys and travails of family life are a recurrent subject in Sachs’s work—as it is, indeed, of Ira Jr.’s, with his films’ weak or difficult husbands and fathers. In particular, Lynne has confronted her own parenthood with portrait films of her children, such as a series that captures her daughter Maya at various ages (Photograph of Wind, 2001; Same Stream Twice, 2012; and Maya at 24, 2021), that anticipates in reverse many of the procedures of Film About a Father Who.
Film About a Father Who could have been a monumental film, a “summa” of a life’s work (Sachs will be sixty this year) as well as a multilayered portrait of a complex man. Such finality and thematic bombast is anathema to Sachs, however. This is a film, after all, as interested in the ritual of an old woman putting on a pair of stockings as it is in the great themes of Family, Identity, Time, or American Masculinity. Sachs’s aesthetic has always been defined by the fleeting and provisional, by the rejection of a saleable authorial style, and by formal and philosophical “lightness,” what the French praise as légèreté, the ability to find forms that critically distance subject matter that is emotionally volatile, even traumatic, with wit, illumination, empathy, and nimble intelligence. To call Film About a Father Who Sachs’s “best” or “breakthrough” film would be to miss the point. Like her great predecessors Jonas Mekas and Chris Marker, each work by Sachs—whether it is a film, a poem, a performance, or a Web installation—is a fragment of a larger body of work that is simply “the work.” One hopes that someday Sachs’s achievement will be recognized as the major contribution to modern American cinema it is.
Darragh O’Donoghue works as an archivist at Tate Britain in London.
MUBI, the go-to film subscription service, has revealed their list of films for March. The list includes Notturno (2020), a superb documentary by the award-winning filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi. To accompany Notturno, MUBI will also stream Rosi’s Boatman (1993), Below Sea Level (2008), and El Sicario, Room 164 (2010).
March for MUBI will also include Chloé Zhao’s debut film Songs My Brothers Taught Me. Whilst also adding two films, The Girl (1968) and Binding Sentiments (1969), by feminist Hungarian director Márta Mészáros who is celebrating her 90th birthday this year.
The current list of films on MUBI in March 2021.
1 March | The Imperialists are Still Alive! | Zeina Durra
2 March | Chinese Puzzle | Cédric Klapisch | The Spanish Apartment Trilogy
3 March | Inflatable Sex Doll of The Wastelands | Atsushi Yamatoya | Keiko Sato: Pinku Maverick
“Lynne Sachs has always eluded easy labeling…. She focuses on capturing gestures, inches of skin, fragments of conversations, casual moments in time, personal memorabilia, and weaving them into unexpected patterns….. (She) sublimes the personal into the theatrical …. (and) embraces variegated renditions of filmic language, recording the world, digesting it, and offering it to viewers in its performative beauty.” How Lynne Sachs Turns Spoken Language into Cinematic Language – A retrospective of the feminist artist and filmmaker demonstrates how she explores communication in her work. Hyperallergic, 2020.
My Body, Your Body, Our Bodies: Somatic Cinema at Home and in the World by Lynne Sachs
When filmmaker Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she dedicated herself to writing a poem for every year of her life, so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in Sachs’ life and the swirl of events beyond her domestic universe. Published by Tender Buttons Press, Year by Year Poems juxtaposes Sachs’ finished poems, which move from her birth in 1961 to her half-century marker in 2011, with her original handwritten first drafts. In this way, she reveals her process of navigating within and alongside historical events such as the Moon Landing, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., streaking, the Anita Hill hearings, the Columbine shootings, and controversies around universal health care. In Year by Year Poems, Lynne Sachs realizes the long anticipated leap from her extraordinary career in filmmaking to this, her first book of poems.
About Ten-Ish
This site came about during a conversation with lifelong friend, artist, and collaborator Jack Waters. We were discussing ways in which organizations and funders access artists and their work and why some work is promoted and others get scant recognition. My son said, “who needs another platform?”… so here it is.
TEN-ISH.com is a digital platform for women working in the arts – painters, sculptors, dancers, filmmakers, writers, poets, performance artists, gallery owners, critics, auction house experts, and philanthropists – to present examples of their work, proposals, ideas about the art-making process, or the business of art.
A main objective of TEN-ISH.com is to create a network / community of artists who support each other’s work by sharing information, studio opportunities, gallery spaces, collaborations, creating panel discussions, finding greater representation, funding, and equity in pay and exposure.
Participation is by invitation and there are no fees. Participants are encouraged to recommend other artists.
TEN-ISH: What’s in the NAME? Ask any woman what a 10 means and she’ll reference a rating system men apply to women. And the “ish” ? – Never being quite good enough. Rarely getting those primo jobs, commissions, …
“E•pis•to•lar•y: letter to Jean Vigo” a film by Lynne Sachs 5 min. 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. Thinking about the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol by thousands of right-wing activists, Sachs wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can turn so quickly into chaos and violence.
Commissioned by the Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival of Navarre program “The letters that weren’t and also are”. Spain, 2021.
Original idea Garbiñe Ortega with the collaboration of Matías Piñeiro
This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.
International Premiere: Punto de Vista (Pamplona, Spain)
aemi’s second Year in Review programme continues to wrestle with the impact and consequences of this particular moment in time while also showcasing some of the best international artist moving image works that have helped sustain us through a period of profound change. The films in both Year in Review programmes evolve thematically; where the first programme largely dealt with a more singular psychological space: pursuits of personal development often pointing to stimulation and isolation survival tactics, Programme 2 suggests some pathways to a future defined by collective forms of participation.
We begin then with Onyeka Igwe’s No Archive Can Restore You effectively interlinking concerns common to the two programmes. Several of the films in this programme speak to the potential of spaces that connect people, considering also the roles of interlinking past and present communities within these spaces, and the future value and affect of culture developing within these environments. Music also continues to play a significant part in this programme, however the emphasis now is on highlighting togetherness through creativity and publicness, and through shared experiences of political resistance, intent and play.
This programme is available in the Republic of Ireland
A special thank you to LUX, London, and to Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago vdb.org, supporting partner of this screening
Works featured No Archive Can Restore You – Onyeka Igwe (2020, 5 min 54 sec) A Month of Single Frames – Lynne Sachs with and for Barbara Hammer (2019, 14 min) Lore – Sky Hopinka (2019, 10 min 16 sec) Queering di Teknolojik – Timothy Smith (2019, 8 min 30 sec) Seize Control of the Taj Mahal – Glenn Belverio (1991, 12 min) Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical – Rhea Storr (2020, 11 min) They Parlaient Idéale – Laure Prouvost (2019, 28 min 30 sec)
about aemi on demand aemi-on-demand is an online platform through which aemi makes curated programmes of experimental film and artist moving image work available to Irish audiences. This initiative increases and diversifies access to aemi programming and guarantees artists’ revenue for their work outside the context of in-person events. Programmes on aemi-on-demand will remain live for a fixed duration on a long-term basis, thereby giving audiences the time necessary to engage with a rich variety of content.
http://www.kinorebelde.com/lynne-sachs-complete-filmography/ Kino Rebelde has created a retrospective that traces a delicate line connecting intimacy, power relations, violence, memory, migration, desire, love, and war in Lynne’s films. By looking at each of these works, we can see a director facing her own fears and contradictions, as well as her sense of friendship and motherhood. Moving from idea to emotion and back again, our retrospective takes us on a journey through Sachs’ life as a filmmaker, beginning in 1986 and moving all the way to the present.
With the intention of allowing her work to cross boundaries, to interpret and to inquire into her distinctive mode of engaging with the camera as an apparatus for expression, we are delighted to present 37 films that comprise the complete filmmography, so far, of Lynne Sachs as visual artist and filmmaker. Regardless of the passage of time, these works continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent and radical in their artistic conception.
About Kino Rebelde
Kino Rebelde is a Sales and Festival Distribution Agency created by María Vera in early 2017. Its exclusively dedicated to promotion of non-fiction cinema, hybrid narratives and experimental.
Based on the creative distribution of few titles by year, Kino Rebelde established itself as a “boutique agency”, working on a specialized strategy for each film, within its own characteristics, market potential, niches and formal and alternative windows.
This company supports short, medium and long feature films, from any country, with linear or non-linear narratives. They can be in development or WIP, preferably in the editing stage.
The focus: author point of view, pulse of stories, chaos, risk, more questions, less answers, aesthetic and politic transgression, empathy, identities, desires and memory.
Kino Rebelde was born in Madrid, but as its films, this is a nomadic project. In the last years María has been living in Lisbon, Belgrade and Hanoi and she’ll keep moving around.
About María Vera
Festival Distributor and Sales Agent born in Argentina. Founder of Kino Rebelde, a company focused on creative distribution of non-fiction, experimental and hybrid narratives.
Her films have been selected and awarded in festivals as Berlinale, IFFR Rotterdam, IDFA, Visions Du Réel, New York FF, Hot Docs, Jeonju IFF, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Sarajevo FF, Doclisboa and Viennale, among others.
María has a background as producer of socio-political and human rights contents as well as a film curator.Envelope
Lynne Sachs (1961) is an American filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances.
Working from a feminist perspective, Lynne weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with renowned musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project.
Between 1994 and 2009, Lynne directed 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 perception.
Over the course of her career, she has worked closely with film artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Min-ha.
“For more than thirty years, artist Lynne Sachs has constructed short, bold mid-length, and feature films incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, and observational documentary. Her highly self-reflexive films have variously explored the relations between the body, camera, and the materiality of film itself; histories of personal, social, and political trauma; marginalized communities and their labor; and her own family life, slipping seamlessly between modes, from documentary essays to diaristic shorts.” (Edo Choi, Assistant Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image)
Note: The following programs can be rented individually or as a package. A new video interview and between Lynne Sachs and series curator Edo Choi is also available as part of the rental fee.
For rental and pricing information, please contact: info@canyoncinema.com
All films are directed by Lynne Sachs. Program notes by Edo Choi.
Lynne Sachs in Conversation with Edo Choi, Assistant Curator at the Museum of the Moving Image
Program 1: Early Dissections In her first three films, Sachs performs an exuberant autopsy of the medium itself, reveling in the investigation of its formal possibilities and cultural implications: the disjunctive layering of visual and verbal phrases in Still Life with Woman and Four Objects; un-split regular 8mm film as a metaphorical body and site of intercourse in the optically printed Drawn and Quartered; the scopophilic and gendered intentions of the camera’s gaze in Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning. These experiments anticipate the range of the artist’s mature work, beginning with her first essayistic collage The House of Science: a museum of false facts. Itself an autopsy, this mid-length film exposes the anatomy of western rationalism as a framework for sexual subjugation via a finely stitched patchwork of sounds and images from artistic renderings to archival films, home movies to staged performances.
Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986, 4 mins.) –New HD transfer Drawn and Quartered (1987, 4 mins.) – new HD transfer Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987, 9 mins.) The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991, 30 mins.) – new HD transfer
Program 2: Family Travels One of Lynne Sachs’s most sheerly beautiful films, Which Way Is East is a simultaneously intoxicating and politically sobering diary of encounters with the sights, sounds, and people of Vietnam, as Sachs pays a visit to her sister Dana and the two set off north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. The film is paired here with a very different kind of family journey The Last Happy Day, recounting the life of Sachs’s distant cousin Sandor Lenard, a Jewish Hungarian doctor who survived the Second World War and was ultimately hired to reassemble the bones of dead American soldiers. Here Sachs journeys through time as opposed to space, as she assembles a typically colorful array of documentary and performative elements, including Sandor’s letters, a children’s performance, and highly abstracted war footage, to bring us closer to a man who bore witness to terrible things. This program also features The Last Happy Day’s brief predecessor, The Small Ones. Program running time: 73 mins.
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994, 33 mins.) – new HD transfer The Small Ones (2007, 3 mins.) The Last Happy Day (2009, 37 mins.)
Program 3: Time Passes Twenty years unspool over nine short films: portraits of Lynne Sachs’s children; visits with her mother, brother, niece and nephew; a tribute to the city where she lives; and scenes of sociopolitical trauma and protest. Nearly all shot on super 8mm or 16mm, and often silent, each work is at once a preservation of a moment and a record of change, seamlessly weaving together the candid and the performed gesture, the public and the private memory, in a simultaneously objective and subjective posture toward the passing of time. Program running time: 51 mins.
Photograph of Wind (2001, 4 mins.) Tornado (2002, 4 mins.) Noa, Noa (2006, 8 mins.) Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008, 11 mins.) Same Stream Twice (2012, 4 mins.) Viva and Felix Growing Up (2015, 10 mins.) Day Residue (2016, 3 mins.) And Then We Marched (2017, 3 mins.) Maya at 24 (2021, 4 mins.)
Program 4: Your Day Is My Night 2013, 64 mins. “This bed doesn’t necessarily belong to any one person,” someone says early in Your Day Is My Night. It could be the metaphorical thesis of this film, perhaps Lynne Sachs’s most self-effacing and meditative work. A seamless blend of closely observed verité footage, interpretive performance, and confessional monologues and interviews, the film doesn’t document so much as create a space to accommodate the stories and experiences of seven Chinese immigrants from ages 58 to 78 who live together in a “shift-bed” apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Sachs’s quilted sense of form achieves a new level of refinement and delicacy in collaboration with her cameraman Sean Hanley and her editor Amanda Katz, as she works with the participants to exhume a collective history of migration and struggle.
Program 5: Tip of My Tongue 2017, 80 mins. Sachs’s richly generative Tip of My Tongue finds the filmmaker responding to her 50th birthday by gathering twelve members of her generational cohort—friends and peers all born between 1958 and 1964, and originating as far as Cuba, Iran, and Australia—to participate in the creation of a choral work about the convergent and divergent effects history leaves upon those who live it. From the Kennedy assassination to Occupy Wall Street, the participants reveal their memories of, and reflections upon, the transformative experiences of their lives. Set to an ecstatic, pulsing score by Stephen Vitiello, the film interweaves these personal confessions with impressionistic images of contemporary New York, obscured glimpses of archival footage, and graphically rendered fragments of text to create a radiant prism of collective memory. Preceded by Sachs’s frantic record of accumulated daily to-do lists, A Year in Notes and Numbers (2018, 4 mins.).
Join us on Friday February 19th at 2pm PT for an intimate conversation about personal storytelling in the documentary space with Film Fatales members Elan Bogarín (306 Hollywood), Lynne Sachs (Film About a Father Who) and Tiffany Hsiung (Sing Me A Lullaby). Moderated by Film Fatales member Judith Helfand (Love & Stuff).
This conversation will focus on the unique and nuanced experiences of documentary filmmakers creating personal films. With insight into the ethical and artistic decisions that filmmakers make, we will explore the complex relationship between directors and film participants. How do filmmakers approach delicate subject matter, building trust and setting boundaries? What are the responsibilities that come with sharing personal histories with the world? How do relationships change throughout the course of a film?
This event is open to the public and will be accessible with live captioning.
About the panelists:
Elan Bogarín’s first feature,306 Hollywood, premiered on opening night of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival as the first documentary ever to be included in the festival’s NEXT section. In 2017 she, along with her brother Jonathan, was chosen for Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Film and their projects have received support from the Sundance Institute, Just Films/Ford Foundation, Latino Public Broadcasting, NYSCA, Artemis Rising Foundation, Experimental Television Center, IFP. They won the audience award for best pitch at the 2017 Hot Docs Forum. Elan is the co-director of El Tigre Productions, a digital strategy/production company that creates innovative non-fiction films and content for the world’s leading museums and cultural institutions. Clients include MoMA, the Whitney, The Getty, Colección Cisneros, and The New York Times. Elan co-founded The Wassaic Project, an arts festival/residency program that has hosted thousands of artists and in 2009 was nominated for the Gotham + Spirit Awards for producing Big Fan which premiered in competition at Sundance.
Lynne Sachs makes films and writes poems that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Her work embraces hybrid forms, combining memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include a live performance with moving images. Sachs has made 35 films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, BAM Cinemafest and Art of the Real at Lincoln Center. Her work has also been exhibited at the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts and other venues nationally and internationally. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana and China Women’s Film Festival have all presented retrospectives of Lynne’s films. In 2020, Lynne had her sixth NYC premiere at the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight with herFilm About a Father Who, a feature-length experimental documentary. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts. Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems in 2019. Lynne lives in Brooklyn with her husband filmmaker Mark Street with whom they have two daughters, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs.
Tiffany Hsiung is an award-winning filmmaker based in Toronto, whose approach to storytelling is driven by the relationships she builds with people. Since 2009 Hsiung has been researching and documenting the lives of 3 survivors of military sexual slavery in Korea, Philippines and China during World War II by the Japanese Imperial Army for her debut feature length documentaryThe Apology (2016) A National Film board of Canada production. Since the world premiere at Hot Docs, where the film was runner up for the audience award, the apology took home the Busan Cinephile Award for best documentary at the 21st Busan international film festival. The film has gone on to winning several other awards around the world. Hsiung’s work is fundamentally based on cross-cultural and intergenerational themes set to inspire younger generations and viewers to learn about their own cultures – and social responsibility in the global community.
Judith Helfand is best known for her ability to take the dark worlds of chemical exposure, heedless corporate behavior and environmental injustice and make them personal, highly-charged and entertaining. Her films include the Sundance Award-winningBlue Vinyl (co-directed with Daniel B. Gold) and its Peabody Award-winning prequelA Health Baby Girl, as well asEverything’s Cool, also co-directed with Gold. In 2007 she received a Rockefeller Media Fellowship and a United States Artist Fellowship, one of 50 awarded annually to “America’s finest living artists” and more recently a MacArthur grant for her current film-in-progress Cooked—an exploration into extreme heat, extreme disparity and the politics of “disaster.” An educator and activist, Helfand is as dedicated to building the field as she is to her own body of work. She’s taught undergraduate documentary filmmaking at NYU for seven years, Doc Boot Camp at New School University for three summers and was Filmmaker-in-Residence at UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies in 2007 and 2009 where she taught graduate students how to make “environmental films” and co-designed a unique hands-on engagement class built around the bi-annual Tales from Planet Earth Environmental Film Festival. “How to most effectively leverage a local film festival” was based on her work at Working Films, which she co-founded in 1999. In 2005 she co-founded Chicken & Egg Pictures, a non-profit film fund dedicated to supporting women.
“Sachs achieves a poetic resignation about unknowability inside families, and the hidden roots never explained from looking at a family tree.”- Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times
“This is not a portrait. This is not a self-portrait. This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry.” So experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs describes her beguiling new documentary and its profoundly personal intent: to reconcile the complicated relationship between herself and her bohemian father. Blending an array of home-movie footage shot between 1984 and 2019 (a veritable showcase of evolving media formats, from 8mm to digital), Film About a Father Who offers a kaleidoscopic view of Sachs’s hippie-businessman father, onetime “Hugh Hefner of Park City, Utah,” whose knotty, often contradictory identities are slowly untangled by the documentarian and her network of equally bewildered siblings — many born from different mothers, some kept secret from each other. Throughout this candid, bravely public act of introspection, Sachs expresses conflicted empathy for the aging patriarch, a jovial but emotionally reticent man now in his eighties, and interrogates the bond implicit in father-daughter, and sibling-to-sibling, relationships. Its open-ended title is a nod to Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 study of female multiplicity, Film About a Woman Who.
This rental includes a Q&A between Lynne Sachs and film critic Ela Bittencourt.
Watch an introduction to the film from Lynne Sachs below.
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This film is available to stream in Canada only.
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“[A] brisk, prismatic, and richly psychodramatic family portrait.” Ben Kenigsberg, New York Times
“Formidable in its candor and ambition … A chapter in a continuing stream of work by an experimental, highly personal filmmaker.” Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily
