October 17th 2024 from 11 AM to noon at the CODE^SHIFT Lab (425, Newhouse 3, Reading Room)
The Newhouse School’s CODE^SHIFT lab invites you to an interactive discussion with Lynne Sachs, a documentary filmmaker and Light Work commissioned artist. Using her film “Which Way is East,” Sachs will discuss how to establish trust with sources and conduct interviews with empathy while working on media projects. The session will conclude with a discussion on her latest collaboration with Light Work/Urban Video Project, “This Side of Salina.”
This session is co-hosted by Profs Lauren Bavis (MND) and Srivi Ramasubramanian (COM) for CODE^SHIFT Lab in collaboration with Light Work
Established in 1993, Women Make Waves Int’l Film Festival, Taiwan has been one of the major film festivals in Taiwan and has established itself as the biggest one dedicated to supporting female talents. It is also the longest running and largest issue-oriented film festival in Taiwan. Women Make Waves Int’l Film Festival aims to celebrate the achievements of outstanding female talents, to explore different aspects of female experiences, feminism, and beyond, and to promote equality and rights of all genders. By covering a wide range of genres, issues, and representations of gender, WMWIFF seeks to promote great cinematic arts by female talents and to advocate gender equality through films with feminist consciousness and various subjects.
In 1993, the inaugural Women Make Waves, jointly organized by the Awakening Foundation and B&W Film Studio, was the predecessor of Women Make Waves Int’l Film Festival Taiwan. In 2000, Women Make Waves was renamed as Women Make Waves Film/Video Festival. This marked the first time the film festival hosted screenings at the cinema. The film festival expanded significantly, solidifying itself as one of the major cultural events. In 2012, the film festival was officially renamed as Women Make Waves Int’l Film Festival Taiwan.
In 1998, as the film festival entered its 5th edition, gender studies and discourses had become prominent in Taiwan. To ensure the prospect of the film festival, Taipei Women’s Film Association was founded in September of the same year. HUANG Yu-Shan served as the first chairwoman of the Association. In 2001, the film festival established the model of nation-wide film tours, marking one of the first film festivals to do so in Taiwan. It has jointly held screenings with local theaters, organizations, universities, educational institutions, and cultural venues, in order to reduce rural-urban differences and promote gender equity through films beyond Taipei.
The Body in Space——An Interactive Workshop
In this fast-paced, exhilarating, collaborative and interactive workshop, experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs will guide her participants through her own evolution as a filmmaker, her own conception a “somatic cinema,” and work as a group to create our own live film performance, which will be presented to the public on 10/26.
Words from Lynne…
In filmmaking, we are always negotiating the photographing of images that contain the body. We bring experiential, political or aesthetic contingencies to both the making and viewing of a cinema that contains the human form. If a body is different from our own – in terms of gender, skin color, or age – perhaps we frame it differently without even realizing it. We all know that looking at a body on screen affects us emotionally, psychologically and physically? When we speak of “space,” we must consider three dimensional issues of the here and now as well as more speculative conditions that arrive when we contemplate the future.
Join us for an intensive workshop led by renowned filmmaker Lynne Sachs, where we will explore how one of the most challenging yet enthralling aspects of the documentary process can be the investigative nature of the practice.
In this workshop Lynne Sachs will take us on her own journey through the making of her soon-to-be-completed essay film “Every Contact Leaves a Trace”. By laying bare her own revelations and disappointments, she will help us to navigate how the “search” in and of itself can be as interesting as the discovery. While celebrating the shared sensibility of the documentary maker and the detective, Sachs will ask us to expand our understanding of forensics, evidence, and proof within the parameters of her own artistic practice.
On Friday, interdisciplinary artist A.S.M. Kobayashi (Say Something Bunny!) will share her approach to incorporating forensics into performative work, focusing on how research can function as a form of proof and artistic expression. On Saturday, Jennifer Reeves (The Time We Killed, When It Was Blue) will discuss the psychological dimensions of her filmmaking process, shedding light on how she navigates the inner lives of her subjects while investigating deeper themes of introspection. On Sunday, director, producer and cinematographer Miryam Charles (Cette maison) will explore how filmmakers can refract aspects of reality, offering innovative ways to think about representation and storytelling.
Over the course of the workshop, we will engage in discussions about hybrid approaches to depicting reality, experiment with techniques that challenge conventional expectations of documentary, and reflect on the role of performance in the creative process. Whether you are just beginning a project or are already in the midst of production, this workshop provides a space to investigate your own work through new and creative methods.
The workshop is open to filmmakers, media artists, scholars, and creatives at any stage of their projects. It will offer practical tools, fresh ideas, and a supportive environment for those eager to explore the investigative aspects of documentary filmmaking.
Seats are limited, so be sure to sign up soon. Please note that this workshop requires in-person participation, and all attendees must present proof of vaccination. For any questions, feel free to reach out to raphaelle@uniondocs.org.
With Lynne Sachs, Miryam Charles, Jennifer Reeves & A.S.M Kobayashi
SFFILM’s celebrated collaboration with the New York Times continues into its tenth year to present another showcase of their award-winning short-form documentary series, NYT Op-Docs. This year, SFFILM has curated five films that provocatively explore the complex and precarious spaces that various women occupy in an ever-modernizing world. The constant ebb and flow of progress and regression characterizes these stories of perseverance in the midst of trauma and heartache, collision with antiquated tradition, the murkiness of a new digital frontier, a fight for bodily self-determination, and a friendship uncompromised by generational boundaries. As women continue to fight for autonomy globally, we invite you to this appropriately bold addition to our festival program. —Jordan Klein
Guests Expected
Director Faye Tsakas and Producer Rowan Ings for short Christmas, Every Day are expected to attend. Films are listed in order of play.
Christmas, Every Day Faye Tsakas, USA 2024, 14 min A quotidian exploration of what it means to be an influencer, from the perspective of two tween girls from rural Alabama
A Move Elahe Esmaili, Iran 2024, 26 min Iranian filmmaker Elahe Esmaili challenges long-standing cultural norms when she arrives at her family’s gathering without a hijab.
Contractions Lynne Sachs, USA 2023, 12 min Reproductive rights activists present a timely and poetic expression of grief and dismay in the midst of the overturning of Roe v Wade.
The Final Chapter Frøydis Fossli Moe, Norway 2024, 14 min Frøydis receives a phone call that her father is dying from cancer, which forces her to confront her past traumas experienced during her upbringing.
Madeleine Raquel Sancinetti, Canada 2023, 15 min Madeleine stubbornly refuses to leave her retirement home. Her friend Raquel, who is 67 years her junior, finds a creative way to take her on the journey of a lifetime.
CODE^SHIFT is Collaboratory for Data Equity, Social Healing, Inclusive Futures and Transformation. CODE^SHIFT is a multidisciplinary col(lab)oratory research space for communication and data justice and or addresses contemporary social issues using data, media, design, technologies, art, and storytelling. CODE^SHIFT is a research project led by Dr. Srivi Ramasubramanian and hosted at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.
The full video of Chai with Srivi episode 10! Lynne Sachs, an American experimental filmmaker and poet, discusses unconventional approaches toward filmmaking and how a feminist lens can bring life to cinema. In Episode 10 of Chai with Srivi, she shares her thoughts on the battle for bodily autonomy and how she hopes her films help educate people on the women’s plight.
PERSO is an international event dedicated to documentary and auteur cinema that will involve three historical theatres in the city of Perugia and numerous other locations for nine days of free admission programming, with two competition categories, 55 national and international titles, 13 Italian premieres and an official selection with works from 22 countries. But that’s not all, the festival also includes a theatrical performance, 1 cine-concert, 1 retrospective, special events and more than 50 guests in meetings with the public.
The PerSo – Perugia Social Film Festival aims to play an active role in cultural transformation processes both within and outside its own community, towards a fairer and more inclusive society. Going beyond the audiovisual aspect, the Festival sets out to foster dialogue within the realm of art, creating a space for creative social development, discussion, and knowledge exchange among the most diverse perspectives.
Participants will explore how sound and image can be used to bear witness poetically and politically. Ages 15 and up. No filmmaking experience required!
This workshop is FREE but requires an RSVP to register.
Please RSVP using the form linked in the button above.
Join Light Work in Watson Theater on Thursday, October 17 2024 for a screening by The Abortion Clinic Film Collective, a group of six feminist filmmakers with diverse backgrounds and distinctive styles who came together from around the country in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade to document the impact of the ruling on their own communities. The program includes new work by award-winning filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who shot footage in Syracuse with local reproductive justice advocates from Layla’s Got You.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with filmmakers Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, Đoan Hoàng, Raymond Rea, and Lynne Sachsas well as reproductive justice advocates J’viona Baker, Ja’Rhea Dixon, Vernahia Davis, and Angela Stroman.
Light refreshments from Recess Coffee & Roastery will also be served. This event is FREE & OPEN to the public.
Street parking is available on Waverly and Comstock Avenue outside of the building. This special event is held in conjunction with the exhibition of Sachs’ This Side of Salina at Light Work UVP’s architectural projection site on the Everson Museum facade October through December 2024.
Program Notes
A Mile and a Half (5:31), dir. Ray Rea The border between North Dakota and Minnesota is physically only a narrow river but legislatively a canyon. In the sister city straddling that border a move of a mile and a half saved lives.
Contractions (12:00), dir. Lynne Sachs In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, we listen to an OB-GYN who can no longer perform abortions and a “Jane” who drives patients across state lines while a group of activists perform outside a women’s healthcare clinic.
As Long as We Can (10:30), dir Kristy Guevara-Flanagan As the Arizona state supreme court hears arguments on whether to reinstate an abortion ban that originated in 1864, we glimpse into the day-to-day activities of this for-now still functioning clinic, one of just two left in the state that provides surgical abortions.
Retracing Our Steps (8:30), dir. Kelly Gallagher A woman reflects back on her time spent assisting abortion seekers when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land.
The Longest Walk (6:00), dir. Đoan Hoàng Curtis A filmmaker returns in the wake of Kentucky’s total abortion ban to the site where she had an abortion on her own due to assault at age 13, and finds the male classmate who witnessed the aftermath of her assault decades earlier.
This Side of Salina (11:50), dir. Lynne Sachs Four Black women from the gritty and tenacious city of Syracuse, New York, reflect on sexuality, youthful regret, emotional vulnerability, raising a daughter, and working in reproductive health services. In a series of their own choreographed vignettes, each woman thoughtfully engages with the neighborhoods she’s known all of her life.
This past weekend was the Chicago Underground Film Festival, which I look forward to every year. Partly, of course, for the appropriately motley programming, and partly because I always know a lot of people whose work is in the festival, so I get to see them and other mutual friends over the span of a few days at the place I love most: a movie theater.
This year and last, the festival took place at the Harper Theater in Hyde Park. I hadn’t been there in a while, so the reclining chairs—complete with self-controlled heating!—were a welcome surprise. (Looks like it’s recently been renovated.) Such features at a soulless multiplex trying to re-create the comforts of home at a movie theater? Bad. But at a small arthouse theater kept just cool enough for the heated seats to feel like a kiss on the forehead? Perfection.
Anyway, my husband and I had a festival guest staying with us this year, friend and brilliant filmmaker Lynne Sachs. (No relation.) On Saturday, we caught a few shorts programs. At the first, I especially liked films by Kelly Sears, Saif Alsaegh, and Usama Alshaibi. Sears, whose collage-based animation accounts for some of my favorite experimental work ever, explores the dystopian effects of climate change in The Lost Season (2024). Her conceit is a world experiencing its last winter, which filmmakers are hired to document so that these now-fleeting moments can be streamed. It’s a simple but evocative premise. Alsaegh’s film, The Mother-fucker’s Birthday (2024), explores a similar kind of inanity but in the not-so-distant past as opposed to the disconcertingly not-so-distant future. In showing footage of Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush dancing, he reflects the humanity of evil—it’s terrifying that such people can even still hear music amid the roar of their atrocities.
Alshaibi’s short, Testimony (2023), is an ethereal take on the idea of AI becoming sentient and wanting the full human range of physical and emotional dynamism. Specifically, Alshaibi’s use of footage of ballerinas from the early 1900s creates a dreamlike effect that to my mind seems like something a sensitive robot might have stored in its subconscious.
My friend Lynne’s film screened in the second program. Contractions (2024), featured earlier this year as a New York Times Op-Docs selection, beautifully—and woefully—considers the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic in Memphis two years after Roe v. Wade was overturned. There’s a certain tempo to her work that makes still the subjects she explores; in this stillness, they become ripe for contemplation, in the purest sense of the word. Time spent with her work is time spent deep in thought on some of life’s most pressing subjects.
Before seeing Lori Felker’s Patient (2023), I had no idea what standardized patients were. They’re people specifically trained in acting as patients so that med students can practice patient care. Felker’s short does a lot with this concept, shedding new light on questions of veracity, performance, and even health care itself.
So that was great. I also made it out to Roy Ward Baker’s Inferno (1953), playing as part of Noir City at the Music Box Theatre. It was in 3D, so I got to experience not only the newly renovated Theatre 1 but also its incredible, recently installed 3D capabilities. It was a great night back at one of my favorite places to be—now with cup holders!
TENGGER is a family of traveling musicians. The pair, Itta from South Korea and Marqido from Japan, create psychedelic New-Age drone magic using vocals, Indian harmonium, toy instruments, synthesizers and electronics. The duo started out as “10”, but since the birth of their son RAAI in 2012 (who accompanies them on tour and contributes vocals, synths, and also dances on stage), they have rechristened themselves TENGGER; which means “unlimited expanse of sky” in Mongolian, to mark the expansion of the family.
The family’s annual pilgrimages influence every aspect of their art.
FOREVER OVERHEAD
Forever Overhead is the meeting of head and sky, the in-between space where boundaries blur and anything seems possible. Seeking to recapture the utopian imagination of childhood wastelands, the brother-sister duo explore the infinite variations of songwriting and improvisation, weaving a pop-folk-noise landscape rich in contrasts and ambitious harmonies. With two voices, and playing every instrument they come across, their music is made up of suspended moments where sweetness rubs shoulders with the strange, and nothing is ever quite ordinary.
PROJECTION
“A Month of Single Frames” by Lynne Sachs 14mn
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer took up an artist residency in a shack with no running water or electricity. There, she shot films, recorded sounds and kept a diary. For decades, these documents remained in her personal archive, until, as she neared the end of her life in 2018, she entrusted her friend, renowned American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, with the task of making a film from them. Through her own film, Lynne explores Barbara’s experience of solitude. She places the text on screen as a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces and times.
