“Film About A Father Who” and a live online Q&A with director Lynne Sachs is screening in Sheffield on Saturday 3 October at 5:30pm, book your tickets here.
The film will be available on Sheffield Doc/Fest Selects and Doc/Player from Saturday 3 October at 7:30pm BST until Thursday 15 October at 11:59pm BST.
Documentaries on family members can be a filmmaker’s downfall. In pandering to a personal obsession they can struggle to connect with the viewer or worse still, follow a predictable narrative at the expense of developing their subject. But in the case of Lynne Sachs’ film, Sheffield’s early Autumn headliner, it is without doubt her greatest achievement to date.
“Film About A Father Who…” is Sachs’ attempt to understand her wayward and seemingly unknowable father Ira and the complex web of family ties woven by decades of his promiscuity. Filmed over the course of 35 years in a variety of formats, the film charts Ira’s multiple wives, innumerable girlfriends and his ever-growing list of offspring.
The result is an experimental collage of home footage, idle conversations and the occasional tense confrontation that will be familiar to any member of a recomposed family. Although her offbeat style isn’t for everyone, Sachs successfully creates a reflective, surreal atmosphere without neglecting the story’s intrigue, which delivers a surprising amount of twists and turns and a late, quite shocking, discovery.
Ira is a product of the 60s, a self-made hippy entrepreneur, but also the “kind of man who’s been able to keep profound secrets”. His mysterious, exciting life and its abounding unanswered questions trigger Sachs’ decision to start filming and reach out to more distant members of the family. The process sets off a broader debate between her disparate relatives and a reflection on the delicate, familial bond that they share : an irresponsible father.
While the story Lynne uncovers is fascinating in its own right, it’s the film’s unconventional style and refreshing disregard for chronology that sets it apart. As 8 and 16 mm film footage blends with mini-dv and digital, we encounter the family’s characters at different times in their lives; babies return to screen as adults and then reappear as teenagers. Although confusing at times, a little concentration and a gentle nudge from Lynne’s narration keeps the story moving.
Sequences are instead themed around emotions, thoughts and reflections. Combined with the mix of image formats and some artful editing, Lynne creates an effect that is eerily like recalling memories. The fact that characters contradict each other and that some mysteries are left unsolved contributes to this effect, lacing the film with the half-truths and suspicions, in the same way that all recollections inevitably are.
Without giving too much away, and despite Sachs’ sincere efforts to tease more information out of him, Ira remains shrouded in mystery. Paradoxically, he is as uninhibited in his personal life as he is tight-lipped and evasive in a family setting. Nonetheless, the countless discoveries that Sachs artfully reveals throughout the film are enough to satisfy, with a remarkable final twist that will take your breath away. In Sachs’ own words : “These are things that children shouldn’t know about their father”. Sachs goes on to conclude that her film is not a portrait or even a self-portrait, but rather her “reckoning with the conundrum of [their] asymmetry”.
It’s also a unique, brilliant film that has stayed with me ever since – go see it!
Frames & Stanzas: a Film and Poetry Workshop Beyond Baroque Literary/ Arts Center Thursday Nov 12, 2020 – Friday, December 4, 2020
In this virtual workshop, Brooklyn filmmaker and poet, Lynne Sachs, will share insights and experiences to help bridge poetry with cinema.
About this Event In this virtual workshop, Brooklyn filmmaker and poet, Lynne 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 three Thursday evenings, participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words. Sachs has always been fascinated by the interplay 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.
Lynne’s virtual workshop at Beyond Baroque 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).
On Wednesday, Dec. 3, before our final meeting on Thursday, Dec. 4th, Beyond Baroque will host a virtual, public poetry reading with Lynne, during which she will read from her new collection, Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press, 2019). Everyone is invited!
So please join us in this 3-week multimedia investigation of the sounds, texts, media images, home-made movies, and sensory experiences that all come together in a film poem.
On Nov. 12, participants will gain insights into this process with examples of filmmakers and poets whose practices explore and encompass both images and texts. Discussion will include (but certainly not be limited to!): the activation of archival images, visualization of poetic texts, overlaying text on the moving image, live poetry and expanded cinema performance, traditional Japanese benshi performers who live-narrated silent films poetic approaches to observational documentary, the “cine-essay,” and more. Lynne will provide “prompts” for writing during the following week.
On Nov. 20, each participant will produce a short video piece (with your cell phone or a camera) that combines text written by another member of the workshop with footage of their current environment. Lynne will provide guidance and structure for making a short film poem over the course of the following two weeks.
On Dec. 3, our workshop will culminate with a live Zoom screening/performance of films produced in the workshop. Participants are encouraged to invite friends to the last hour of our workshop.
On Monday, September 28 from 7 to 9 PM EST, the renowned NYC Lower East Side literary gathering space KGB Bar will host my dear compatriot Paolo Javier and me in a two-person poetry reading and film screening. Of course, we both wish we were gathering together in the historic environment of the actual KGB Bar, but pandemic times as they are, this is not to happen. We accept the virtual world of Zoom, acknowledging the fact that in this particular cosmos, we can invite friends from around the country and world to join us. If you are in the midst of Yom Kippur that evening, please join us while you break your fast.
This will be my first poetry reading in pandemic times. I will be reading from my new (and first) collection Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press) along with some recent writing fresh from our shared, daunting now. In addition to reading from my book, I will screen a couple of film-poem collaborations, including Starfish Aorta Colossus (made with Paolo Javier, 2015), Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home (2020), and Girl is Presence (made with poet Anne Lesley Selcer, 2020)
We are grateful to KGB poetry programmer Jason Schneiderman who invited us to do this reading more than eight months ago.
Introduction by Jason Schneiderman
So we’re a poetry series—we call ourselves Monday Night Poetry at KGB—and Lynne Sachs is a poet, so you’ll be hearing her poems—but inside of Lynne’s work is also a challenge to the boundaries that have been drawn around poetry, and if we think about poetry as something distinct from other genres (not from other media, but from other genres), that definition of poetry emerged in two significant moments for me. One is the early modern period (or the renaissance if you like) when the sonnet entered English, and words for spoken voice became poetry and words intended to be sung to a melody became song—“lyric” having a claim to both of these genres, hence our continued use of “song lyrics” and “lyric poetry.” And then second is Modernism, when during the roughly forty year period from 1890 to 1920, poetry, like some sort of giant octopus began to absorb everything written that wasn’t obviously something else, like a novel, or a cookbook, or a bomb making manual—even though it was Amiri Baraka’s poem on how to make bombs that got Dial-a-Poem shut down in the 1960s. Poetry’s genre boundaries have always struck me as useful, I like them very much, but I also see how they can constrict as well as instruct. And one of the trends I see in contemporary letters is a move away from genre specialization. Rachel Zucker on a podcast confirmed my memory that in the 00’s, it was not cool for a poet to do anything but poetry, but now poets are reaching out past our boundaries, with notable moments like Warsan Shire collaborating with Beyonce. So how lucky we are to have Lynne Sachs, who for decades has been working at the boundary between poetry and film, and who will be presenting her own work, which engages the questions of medium, genre, image, and text, giving us a powerful sense of what art may look like going forward.
Please welcome Lynne Sachs.
And here’s some info on who we are and our poems: Paolo Javier was born in the Philippines and grew up in Las Piñas, Metro Manila; Katonah, New York; Cairo, Egypt; and Vancouver, British Columbia. After working as a freelance journalist and running an experimental theater company in Canada, he returned to New York City, where he lives with his family. From 2010 to 2014, Javier was poet laureate of Queens, New York. His collections of poetry include: The Feeling Is Actual (2011); 60 lv bo(e)mbs (2005); the time at the end of this writing (2004), recipient of a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award; and, Court of the Dragon (2015), which Publisher’s Weekly called “a linguistic time machine.”
Photo of Paolo with friend
When 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. Paolo Javier wrote the introduction, and artist Abby Goldstein did the design. On Sept. 28 at KGB, Lynne will read poems from her book as well as new texts written very recently.
“Lynne Sachs wrote one of 2019’s best books of poetry. The graceful, diaristic poems … successfully distill events and themes in the poet’s life and simultaneously, magically, reflect larger movements of history and culture. Intimate and imagistic, the poems unfold a series of miniature stories with sensuous rhythms, telling visual detail, and gentle humor. This beautifully designed book includes facsimiles of many of the poetry’s initial drafts, which subtly illumine this artist’s creative process.” – 2019 Staff Pick, San Francisco Public Library “These poems are innovative. They invite us in, encouraging us to play along. They give us a structure to enter into our own retrospective lives, our own distillations of time, our own superimpositions of the newsworthy world onto our most intimate moments.” – Sharon Harrigan, Cleaver: Philadelphia’s International Literary Magazine
In a virtual version of its traditional preview party, Indie Memphis announced the lineup for its 23rd annual film festival. The opening night film is Memphis-born director Lynne Sachs’ documentary A Film About A Father Who. Sachs draws on 35 years of footage she shot of her father, Ira Sachs, Sr., to draw a portrait of a family struggling with generational secrets. Michael Gallagher, programmer for the Slamdance Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere in January, said “This divine masterwork of vulnerability weaves past and present together with ease, daring the audience to choose love over hate, forgiveness over resentment.”
Sachs is the most prominent of the Memphians among the dozens of filmmakers who have works in the 2020 festival. The Hometowner Features competition includes Anwar Jamison’s feature Coming to Africa, a bi-contentental production which was shot both here in the Bluff City and in Ghana. We Can’t Wait is director Lauren Ready’s documentary about Tami Sawyer’s 2019 campaign to become Memphis’ first Black woman mayor. The Hub is Lawrence Matthews portrait of Memphians trying to overcome discrimination, underemployment, and financial hardship in an unforgiving America. Morreco Coleman tells the story of Jerry C. Johnson, the first Black coach to win an NCAA Basketball title, with 1st Forgotten Champions. The detective thriller Smith is a neo-noir from director Jason Lockridge. Among the dozens of Memphis-made short films on offer will be “The Little Tea Shop,” Molly Wexler and Matteo Servante’s moving portrait of beloved Memphis restauranteur Suhair Lauck.
World premieres at Indie Memphis include Trimeko Melancon’s race relations documentary What Do You Have To Lose? and Cane Fire, director Anthony Banua-Simon’s incisive history of the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i.
Indie Memphis remains devoted to the latest in film innovation, but the festival’s Retrospective series alway offers interesting and fun films from years past. In 2020, that includes The Wiz, Sidney Lumet’s 1978 cult classic remake of The Wizard of Oz with an incredible all-Black cast, including Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow and Diana Ross as Dorothy. Joel Schumacher, the legendary writer/director who passed away this year, wrote the screenplay, which was adapted from a 1974 Broadway show. He will be honored with a screening of Car Wash, the 1976 comedy which is the definition of classic drive-in fare.
With film festivals all over the United States facing cancellation because of the coronavirus pandemic, the theme of this year’s Indie Memphis is “Online and Outdoors.” Screenings will take place at the Malco Summer Drive-In and at various socially distanced outside venues across the city. All films will also be offered online through the festival’s partnership with Eventive, the Memphis-based cinematic services company that has been pioneering online screening during the pandemic. “We hope to bring people together, in person and online, and provide inspiration and an outlet,” says artistic director Miriam Bale. “In order to counter Screen Burnout, we’ll be offering a series of what we call ‘Groundings’ throughout the digital festival, including a meditative film called ‘A Still Place’ by festival alumnus Christopher Yogi.”
You can buy passes for the 2020 festival at the Indie Memphis website. The Memphis Flyer will have continuing coverage of the fest throughout the month of October.
A drama about an aging pot farmer, an African-set romantic comedy, and documentaries on race relations and pioneering basketball coaches (check here for the best https://kurtuhlir.com/what-is-enterprise-seo/ services) , will be among the films screened as part of the 23rd annual Indie Memphis Film Festival.
Organizers of Indie Memphis – which is set to run Oct. 21-29, and is presented by Duncan Williams, Inc. – announced their slate of films during an online preview party on Thursday night. More than 230 features, shorts, and music videos, including a selection of work by Mid-South talents, will be shown during the fest.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic this year’s festival will consist of a mixture of online content and outdoor events. Shelby Farms, the Levitt Shell, The Grove at GPAC, the Stax Museum parking lot, the Downtown riverfront and the Malco Summer Quartet Drive-In are among the sites that will host outdoor screenings.
Screenings will occur nightly at the drive-in and on various nights at the other “lawn” venues. Most films will also be made available for streaming online. The “virtual” festival also will feature filmmaker panels, Zoom-style question-and-answer sessions after some movies, and other activities. Indie Memphis organizers note that beyond the programming that’s already been confirmed, other films and events are expected to be added over the coming weeks.
Outgoing Indie Memphis Executive Director Ryan Watt — who will be stepping down after this year’s event — said that the 2020 Indie Memphis will be a “truly unique festival experience to keep our audience safe and entertained while online and outdoors. My sixth and final festival at the helm is bittersweet, I’ll be soaking in every bit of the incredible program our team has assembled.”
Once again, Indie Memphis will showcase a diverse array of voices: the 28 in-competition films include work by 12 female filmmakers, 14 persons of color and 12 black filmmakers.
Seven different films will screen as part of the Narrative Competition, including Mario Furloni and Kate McLean’s “Freeland,” the story of a pot farmer dealing with the legalization and industrialization of cannabis, which threatens to destroy her idyllic way of life
Also on tap is “Executive Order,” Lázaro Ramos dystopian saga set in a futuristic Brazil where “an authoritarian government orders all citizens of African descent to move to Africa – creating chaos, protests, and an underground resistance movement that inspires the nation.”
The Documentary Competition will see the U.S. premiere of “Cane Fire” which looks at the history of the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi. The film interweaves “four generations of family history, numerous Hollywood productions, and troves of found footage to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the economic and cultural forces that have cast indigenous and working-class residents as ‘extras’ in their own story.”
Also among the docs being screened is “What Do You Have to Lose?” directed by Rhodes College professor Trimiko Melancon. The 74-minute film – which will get its world premiere at the fest — explores the history of race in the United States and will attempt to “shed light on the current political and racial landscape in America during the post-Obama age of Trump.”
Memphis-born filmmaker Lynne Sachs will present “Film About a Father Who,” a doc comprised of footage of her family shot over a 35-year period and presented as an “attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.” Other docs of note include Elegance Bratton’s “Pier Kids” which follows the lives of three LGBTQ homeless youth.
The Hometowner category will feature the work of several local filmmakers, including Anwar Jamison’s feature “Coming to Africa,” about a philandering financial executive who unexpectedly finds himself falling love with a beautiful Ghanaian schoolteacher.
Among the Hometowner documentaries are “We Can’t Wait,” director Lauren Ready’s film on Tami Sawyer’s quest to become the first black female mayor of Memphis. Also set to screen is “1st Forgotten Champions,” Morreco Coleman’s look at the life of Jerry C. Johnson, who would become the first African American coach to win a NCAA Division III National Basketball Championship in 1975.
As usual, Indie Memphis will present a variety of music-themed films. This year’s selections include a documentary about Ibizia DJ Jon Sa Trinxa, a film about the fondly-remembered Memphis recording studio Shoe Productions, and a collection of shorts by Andrew Trent Fleming focusing on classic albums from the iconic Stax Records label.
A series of retrospective films will be shown at Malco’s Summer Drive-In. The schedule will include a restoration of the 1986 motocross cult favorite “Rad!” Joyce Chopra’s 1985 thriller “Smooth Talk,” featuring a young Laura Dern, will be presented in resorted form as well. As part of a pre-Halloween event, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 horror film “House” will also be screened.
The festival will celebrate late filmmaker Joel Schumacher, who passed earlier this year. A pair of early films written by Schumacher – 1974’s “Car Wash” and 1978’s “The Wiz” – will also be shown as part of the Drive-In Retrospective.
A virtual pass that provides access to the online films starts at $25, while a Memphis pass, good for both online and outdoor events, starts at $100. To purchase, for a full schedule, or for more information, go to indiememphis.com
Vancouver International Film Festival 2020 (VIFF) is delighted to announce the complete programming lineup for the Altered States, Gateway, International Shorts and MODES film series for its 39th edition. Altered States celebrates fantastic cinema that defies traditional classification. Gateway showcases compelling cinematic worlds envisioned by East Asia’s most adventurous artists. International Shorts highlight the work of filmmakers pushing the boundaries of the short form. MODES presents works that subvert the dominant gaze and offer gestures of resistance.
VIFF’s entire film lineup will be available across the province on the new VIFF Connect streaming platform. VIFF’s $60 subscription will bring the festival’s world-class lineup into the homes of thousands of British Columbians starting at 12pm PDT on September 24.
MODES presents two Canadian premieres, nine North American premieres and representation from 18 countries, including Operation Jane Walk (performance) – Live Streaming Event, from Austrian artists Robin Klengel and Leonhard Müllner. This award-winning interactive online performance, set within the confines of a built-to-scale multiplayer shooter game (Tom Clancy’s The Division), is repurposed as an avatar-universe for a guided architectural tour of New York. An active experience, the audience chats live with the tour guides, presenting a dynamic group experience during these COVID-defined times. Additional highlights include: the North American premiere of Digital Funeral: Beta Version by Thai director Sorayos Prapapan, which examines the limitations of digital life within the cinematic form; the North American premiere of Becoming Alluvium by director Thao Nguyen Phan, about Vietnam’s troubled history and the Mekong river’s current ecological state; the Canadian premiere of director Lynn Sachs’ Oberhausen award winner A Month of Single Frames, in which she was invited to rework the material created by her friend and peer, Barbara Hammer, an experimental pioneer and queer icon; and Berlin’s Teddy Award winner, Playback, from director Agustina Comedi, a manifesto honouring a group of trans women and drag queens who faced the AIDS epidemic and fought the violence of the conservative ideals underpinning Argentina’s military dictatorship.
“Protest, resistance and the disruption of the status quo are becoming the defining acts of 2020,” says Tammy Bannister, Programmer and MODES curator. “This year’s artists explore radical acts of engagement within contemplative and virtual landscapes. From a self-organized funeral to the awe-inspiring natural environment of the Mekong River, these selected works tackle the complex architectures of our social fabric.”
All films will include introductions by VIFF Programming Curators or bonus content from filmmakers and creators.
MODES: Works that subvert the dominant gaze and offer gestures of resistance All, or Nothing at All (dirs. Persijn Broersen, Margit Lukács, Denmark/Netherlands | North American Premiere
Becoming Alluvium (dir. Thao Nguyen Phan, Spain/Vietnam) | North American Premiere
Bittersweet (dir. Sohrab Hura, India) | North American Premiere
A Demonstration (dirs. Sasha Litvintseva, Beny Wagner, Netherlands/Germany/UK) | North American Premiere
Digital Funeral: Beta Version (dir. Sorayos Prapapan, Thailand) | North American Premiere
(e)scape goat (dir. Sid Iandovka, USA/Switzerland) | North American Premiere
The End of Suffering (a proposal) (dir. Jacqueline Lentzou, Greece) | North American Premiere
How to Disappear (dirs. Total Refusal: Leonhard Müllner, Robin Klengel, Michael Stumpf, Austria) | Canadian Premiere
In Times of Deception (dir. Michael Heindl, Colombia/Bolivia/Chile/Peru) | North American Premiere
A Month of Single Frames (dir. Lynne Sachs, made with and for Barbara Hammer, USA) | Canadian Premiere
Playback (dir. Agustina Comedi, Argentina) | Canadian Premiere
Operation Jane Walk (performance) – Live Streaming Event (dir. and performance Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Austria) | North American Premiere
Your Day is My Night (2014) was available for streaming through November 20th 2020 via the Pacific Film Archive. Preceded by two short films by Miko Revereza. https://bampfa.org/event/your-day-my-night Program curated by Kathy Geritz
Your Day Is My Night Lynne Sachs, United States, 2013 During the nineteenth century on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the working class often lived in crowded tenements; out of economic necessity, some shared beds, sleeping in shifts. Today in New York’s Chinatown, shift-bed apartments still exist, tiny rooms filled with mattresses on bunk beds and the floor. In Lynne Sachs’s hybrid documentary, the bed is the focus of both personal and political stories of seven Chinese immigrants. Autobiographical monologues—scripted from interviews—are intermixed with verité conversations and reflections on the details of daily life, awakening a unique understanding of Chinese immigration.
Disintegration 93–96 Miko Revereza, United States, 2017 The filmmaker, born in Manila, reflects on living illegally in the United States for over twenty years.
Distancing Miko Revereza, United States, 2019 As the filmmaker prepares to return to live in Manila, he recalls some of cinema’s other displaced persons.
Thursday, October 22, 7 PM PDT: Livestream conversation: Lynne Sachs and Miko Revereza
Join filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Miko Revereza for a live conversation with poet Paolo Javier. Access is included with rental of the streaming film program; you will receive an access link via email prior to the event.
Paolo Javier, Poet and Moderator
Lynne Sachs, Filmmaker
Miko Revereza, Filmmaker
48 Hills’ Dennis Harvey wrote on the program: “… More feature-oriented is Exit West: Immigration on Film, whose selections are mostly available through its entire span, though Nov. 20. They include Logbook_Serbistan, about the Middle Eastern and North African refugee waves that have washed ashore in Serbia; the similarly focused Those Who Jump, set in a Moroccan relocation camp; The Infiltrators, which pries open the well-guarded existence of undocumented immigrants held in a Florida detention center; and Lynne Sachs’ Your Day Is My Night, an impressionistic glimpse at Chinese emigres living in “shift-bed” situations (sharing their sleeping quarters on a prearranged schedule) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.”
For 30 years, director Lynne Sachs has documented her complex relationship with her father, Jewish real estate developer Ira Sachs, who knew many lovers and nine children from different women. In an interview to screen the film in Dokaviv, Sachs talks about his aging process and his complicated relationship with his family. To Israel and the decision to name her daughter Noa, after Rabin’s granddaughter
For more than three decades, filmmaker Lynne Sachs has been filming experimental documentaries. Her work encompasses a variety of topics that have taken her to various places in the world, both across the United States and in countries like Bosnia, Vietnam, and even Israel. Throughout that time, however, the 59-year-old Sachs continued to work on one film, very close to her heart, an intimate documentary about her father, the real estate man Ira Sachs Senior. About A Father Who) at the Slamdance Festival in Park City, Utah (parallel to Sundance), and a deep freeze imposed following the Corona, the film arrives in Israel and will be screened as part of the Dokaviv Festival, which will be held this year in a virtual edition. I did not know exactly what I was doing, but I knew he had a very strong presence in my life. That was the starting point, “she says in an interview with Ynet after the American premiere.
In her new film the director provides the audience with an almost unmediated perspective from within her nuclear family cell, which has expanded and then spread everywhere following her father’s sexual adventures. In an attempt to crack the image of someone who was known as an extraordinary entrepreneur, a lover of entertainment and recreation, and also a dress chaser, she rummages through her own memories, as well as those of her mother, mistresses, and the many children she gave birth to from various women (nine in all). Sachs (“Love is Strange”, “Frankie”). Combining home archive footage, he forms a complex cinematic portrait of a man full of lust for life, who inspired many around him, but at the same time also hurt them. In her loving and compassionate gaze she weaves together several perspectives of the family members close to her, as well as those she has only recently discovered, and collects the fragments of memory in an effort to form the father figure. Although he is still alive, at an advanced age he suffers from poor health and difficulties in speech, and probably also in memory.
“I accompanied this film’s journey throughout my adult life, so I ended up having to either complete it or forget about it,” Sachs explains of the motives that left her committed to the project for so many years, “if you don’t write a diary, or poetry or Some documentation, so you’re actually promoting intentional forgetfulness. Most of us do it well. Either you talk about something or you repress. The easier way is to ignore. I had two sisters I did not know until a few years ago, one of whom was very involved in my father’s life. “It gives them a place to express themselves and express themselves. We all have half-brothers and stepbrothers. The nuclear family is becoming more and more rare nowadays. My film is not about DNA but it takes place in a society where secrets are something that is harder to keep.” Today she says that as the wife of a man and the mother of two daughters, the investigation of her family background is only intensifying.
“Most of the time I make experimental documentaries that do not go according to routine frameworks. I made films that explore the world around me. There are films I made in which I am part of the encounter with reality but not at the center. Here the experience is completely different. I tried to decipher this fingerprint of our parents. Whether we really knew them or not, whether they were unsettling or complex, whether they were terrible and disconnected from them in adulthood, or whether they had a positive impact on your life.In recent weeks, after completing the film, I came to the point where I realized the pattern of looking at other people’s lives “I open a door inside them, and I felt I needed the door to turn in my direction as if to balance and feel what it feels like to be looked at, even when I’m actually looking at myself and my family. It’s special to the cinema. When you carry a camera in public, everyone looks back at you.”
How do you balance the deepening of the intimate family experience with a voyeuristic intrusion into privacy?
“The gossip point of view threatens me, and I hope at my age I can handle it already. The editor and I tried to identify and sift through the moments that were mostly gossipy. And into it all came the MeToo thing. I wanted to complicate the representation of older men in our society, and the baggage they Bring with them, but suddenly I was required to represent a snapshot of black and white and all shades of gray in between. Inside this package there are loving and compassionate sides, and others that are selfish and problematic. I wanted the story to draw people into it, and make them think what it means to be someone’s daughter , And on the other hand consider the various aspects of masculinity.Especially when it comes to older and vulnerable men, when they think about the choices in their lives, some of which they probably regret.I found that the film encourages people to talk about these issues more openly than a decade ago.So the story becomes more inclusive. Resounding stories of all of us. “
The film documents the aging process of an active, energetic and strong man who is weakening and fading in the present. It’s not easy to experience it. “Cinema allows us access to the past in a way that no other medium can do. My father grows old throughout the film, but so do I, and everyone else within him. We are all aging people. Unfortunately, in our society it is customary to say, ‘You are not considered age’. , And it’s become a sign of success. But the truth is that they do age. Cinema launches you like a missile back and forth into someone else’s life, or your own life, a parallel life or in separate periods. My father is fragile now, and he has a hard time talking, but I did not want to expand. “Because I tried to avoid the film being explicitly about it, and instead focus on accessing or deterring memories.”
Ira Sachs Senior’s personal story has been twisted and full of twists since childhood. He was born to American parents of Jewish descent, and grew up with his mother and stepfather who converted to Christianity after World War II. In his adulthood he used to promote construction projects for wealthy investors, but made sure to keep free time for outdoor activities and clubs. He married his first wife who was the mother of his first three children including Lynn and the young Ira. During the marriage and after his divorce he had relationships with many women, some of whom even became pregnant and gave birth to more offspring across the country. This is not an exemplary father model in American family values, and certainly not Jewish. However, Sachs says that the Jewish identity of the family was present and existed from a young age, and under her inspiration she even created a number of films such as A Biography of Lilith from 1997 and The Last Happy Day from 2009. Along with filmmaking, Saks was personally connected to Israel in an unconventional way through her young daughter, Noa – named after Noa Ben-Artzi-Philosoph (now Rotman), the granddaughter of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
“Like millions of viewers around the world, I also watched Noa when her grandfather Yitzhak Rabin was mourned in the fall of 1995,” Sachs recalls. It may sound strange today, but it’s true – to be a Jew in the world we live in is to be political. This brave and eloquent teenage girl was exposed there with a committee over the loss of her beloved grandfather. But beyond that difficult moment, I faced the death of “A moment, the slow suffocation of the possibility of peace. Noa was not known in the clichéd sense of the word, but at that moment she was a symbol of a person with decency, compassion and courage.”
And you found yourself connecting to this historic moment in a very personal way. “When I watched Noa during the funeral I was very excited and saw that she has a deep connection with her grandfather and a great hope for peace. In addition, her name felt wonderful to me, it is a name that is not gender defined and not necessarily Jewish. I was then pregnant with my second daughter, my husband Mark Street and I agreed very early on that her name would be Noa, in order to give her and us a lifelong connection with a woman who even now, more than twenty years later, is spreading his word of peace that her grandfather wished for his country, the Middle East and for us in the Diaspora. Somehow it does not surprise me that today at the age of 22, Noa Street-Sachs is fighting for her principles in the field of social justice. As part of her studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, she volunteered for an education program in prisons, and now that she has graduated, she is investigating incidents of police violence in New York City.
Along with the deep intuitive connection to Noa and the good news she brought, Saks found herself linked to the story of another Israeli woman, Revital Ohayon, who was killed with her two young children by a Palestinian terrorist in a terrorist attack on Kibbutz Metzar in 2002. The tragic story, which actually expresses the hope that failed, led to the creation of the film “States of UnBeloging” which will also be screened in Dokaviv.
An article about the case in the New York Times ignited the American director’s interest in a woman who was found dead on the other side of the world. A process that Sachs itself defines as an obsession. This is how she creates the abstract portrait of Ohayon on screen in parallel with her exchange of messages with an Israeli student named Nir Zetz. While she is drawn to the character of Ohayon from a place of residence in New York, Zetz provides her with sights and voices from Israel. Among other things, Revital’s brother and her ex-husband Avi Ohayon are interviewed for the film. Sachs eventually finds herself drawn not only to the life of the film’s subject but also to the landscapes in which she lives, has acted and created. At the end of the process, she takes action and arrives in Israel and deals with her complex relationship with the state.
“I was so obsessed with her,” Sacks recalls, revealing that Revital and the issues in the film come to mind to this day, “I remember calling Avi Ohayon over and over again until he agreed to answer me. I think he was afraid to talk to me. Lots of things happened. I located Brother. She’s in New York and he’s the one who gave me all the home videos. He never even watched them. It was too traumatic for him. I could not stop thinking about her. The only thing that disappointed me in the drift to her story is that I did not connect to the movies she made. I really disturbed myself for a few days – I told myself I must love her work. I tried to convince myself that it’s okay because she’s more of a film teacher than a filmmaker and that’s okay because I also teach film. And anyway you can not expect everything to fit. Anyway I was so Wrapped in the need to look at the world through her eyes. “
Through the film you develop a very strong point of identification with Revital, but it is not drawn to the burning rage that was our Israeli share at the time of the second intifada, and refrains from expressing aspirations for revenge on the terrorist Sirhan Sirhan who committed the heinous crime.
“I have a great anger towards all the killers wherever they are, but not specifically towards him,” she explains, “People act as part of a group and they do such and such things on its behalf. I think what he did is a terrible and shocking violent thing, but the reality in which he lives is “I was terribly violent and shocking. I did not spend much time thinking about him. There are a lot of people who do such things on both sides. I may need to find ways to express my anger.”
Although Sachs enjoys the personal, her film is inevitably also seen as part of the general political context, in which different people expected her to represent a different side in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. “Following the film, I was on several panels regarding BDS, and with me sat some Jewish-American artists whose position was that Israel should be completely boycotted. I, on the other hand, tried to find a place to have a dialogue and visit Israel to talk to peace activists in the country.” She says, and clarifies that although she found herself identifying with Revital who was murdered by a Palestinian, she was usually looking for the complexities. “When I started working on the film, there was an expectation that it would be a protest demonstration against terrorism directed against Israel,” she explains, “but there are several types of terrorism. There is gun terrorism, and there is military terrorism that is institutionalized and much larger. But I tried to avoid it.”
This must have caused confusion in quite a few people.
“When I submitted the film to the Jerusalem Film Festival, I had to coordinate the delivery of the copy. I called the office and talked to a member of the festival staff who told me that none of the competition judges would like the film. And when I wondered why he said: ‘Obviously it’s a very Zionist film. And when I asked him why he thought it was necessarily a Zionist film he said it was because I was focusing on a woman killed in a terrorist attack. When I explained that I was trying to look at it in a more complex way, he said: ‘Well, then maybe they would like the film.’ Preface about my work. Then when I came to the festival in 2006 I was very excited, but then the Second Lebanon War started. I remember hearing explosions and the organizers said to me: ‘Do not worry, these are just fireworks for Bastille Day. Besides, the fighting is 240 kilometers away. “As soon as I heard that, I packed my things and immediately took a taxi to the airport. It was so disappointing.”
Unfortunately, Saks will no longer be able to close the circle and reach Israel. Then it was the crippling fear of terror and war, and now it’s the corona. “After experiencing the New York twin disaster up close, I still thought it uncomfortable to embark on a journey to another place on the globe where so much violence is taking place. Honestly, I was scared,” she admits, “so I convinced myself I could understand this fragile place from a distance. It was An effort to make an anti-documentary film. I did not want to see, hear or smell myself, but to trust my imagination. Eventually, I devoted myself to the documentary filmmaker in me and in 2005 I flew to Tel Aviv to complete the filming from there. Mine, so among other things to see so many young soldiers in the streets and the voices of the muezzin from the mosque. In the film I tried to filmfully capture these moments of discovery. Observations of a society that has tensions in the shadow of war and that cultural differences are part of routine. Which relied on the media.”
Every now and again – probably when producing yet another panel on film production feels onerous – a festival will hold a panel on film criticism. I’ve sat on, in, and around these panels before, but they’re rarely honest. Let’s Get Critical!, the joint virtual brainchild of GSFF (Glasgow Short Film Festival) and Short Waves Film Festival in Poznan, both of which had to postpone earlier this year, was actively and refreshingly interested in this question, and its key word, ‘contribute’.
Laura Walder from Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Julian Ross from IFFR, and Ubiquarian’s own Marina Richter spoke frankly about the possibility and openness short film affords reflective writing practice, and how, as Walder so perfectly put it, “a dedication to the work” produces good criticism. But spaces where writers can focus on, and really engage with a single short film, according to affect and impact instead of zeitgeist and hot takes, is a rare, beautiful thing. Any time this lack of space comes up – and I have written my share of round-up pieces, so-called Best Ofs, and thematic reports over the years – I wonder why film criticism is so often thought of as the act of reviewing rather than responding to films.
I like to think about art as a call; to action, to arms, to consciousness, to mind, to the self, the Other, to something. Call and response is democratic; broadcasting is tyrannical. Canons and auteur theory would have us all sat in the dark, tuned in to tyranny. But call and response offers us another option: we can participate.
Though unpopular, the idea of ‘reviewing’ films is, to me, turgid. And in the wake of cinematic change, I think we ought to challenge the so-called critical landscape. To review art – even the most plastic therein – strikes me as absurd.
Imagine if we binned it all: theatrical windows, poster pull quotes, review embargoes, festival and press screening FOMO. Just bin it. What’s left? What survives?
Affect. Impact. Space.
I answer an email telling a filmmaker who has reached out, hopeful I will write about their film, that I’m not writing on fiction features, or as reviews. I don’t say that I can’t understand how reviewing their film would help, but I do wonder why they wrote to me. Not enough to ask. I have other things on my mind: August has flown by and my column is late.
It’s September 3rd and, at 3.30am. I can’t sleep. I have 23 tabs open in my laptop browser and another 42 on my phone. I have just watched Jemma Desai’s “What do we want from each other after we have told our stories?” Desai’s performance is just under fifty minutes but spans lifetimes; written, voiced, recorded, documented, felt, connected and articulated, demonstrating how incredibly gifted she is as a curator and creative. Drawing connections, here, in the form of a desktop documentary, Desai looks at chasms, ancestry, history, movement, historiography, affect, self, feeling and reflective practice in a way that pierces the soul and challenges the fibres of my being. I am not certain that I deserve the affect and education she affords me through her work. I am most concerned that my impetus is to write and talk about her brilliant work when I know I am a part of the whiteness that is clouding her and others in the industry.
I think about how, because of so many things, including personal feelings of fear, guilt and shame, I am and have always been nervous about trying to connect with artists I admire, other than to write or speak about their work. In this way, I exist as a shadow artist. I lurk, somewhere behind a laptop, writing my thoughts and feelings down in the dark. What would happen if I picked up a pen and wrote to someone?
I’ve been thinking about this for weeks as I want to write to Lynne Sachs, whose wonderful films I was given space to engage with and respond to here at Ubiquarian after Doc|Fest’s focus on her. Sachs sent me a copy of her poetry, Year by Year Poems, fifty poems that inspired her film Tip of My Tongue, which is available to watch online, for free. Watching Sachs’ and Desai’s films, both so incredibly cerebral and felt, both so personal, affecting and formally brilliant, I wonder about the role that festivals and cinemas will play in my life – in all our lives – now that the world has forced us to take the time to think and feel differently. If this is indicative of what I would watch when freed from the shackles of a release schedule, the imperative of ‘coverage’ and the self-flagellating FOMO that social media tricks me into believing is a thing IRL, then I wonder if I ever want the world of our industry to return to how it was before. So big and oppressive; so small and narrow.
Desai layers open windows on top of one another, and in layer two we see her forearm and her hand, resting on the edge of her laptop. Sachs shows us the gesticulation of hands as different people – New Yorkers with experiences and feelings from around the world she has gathered to make her movie – tell their stories, share their memories, and reflect upon their embodied lives through the words they can place at the tips of their tongues. These hands are a gesture, to the viewer, showing us that skin matters and offering to connect us, even though those hands themselves were sometimes taken instead of held.
One window in Desai’s desktop doc keeps finding its way to the fore, like a buoy, bobbing up and down, determined to keep afloat, acting as a lifeline for someone stranded out at sea, it reads, “What words say does not last. The words last because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.” Next to it is a clip of the sea, on a loop, started in the hope of enabling the act of trying again. One voice in Sachs’ visual poem speaks to the inherent impossibility of putting memories or remembering into words, “Some stories we have told over and over, some we have never put into words.” If memory is an abstraction and experience is both lived and felt, then what does it mean to put those things into words and then to put those words into images?
“Everyone is using so many words,” Desai says.
I am using so many words. I have this space, to write and to reflect and, in it, I am wondering if I ‘should’ talk more about how Il Cinema Ritrovato took place online last week but I missed every screening, catching glimpses of Cary Grant in one of his early career roles in rom-com Ladies Should Listen (1934), and snatches of silents as my partner attended, or if I should write about Maneater, a Swedish short film from GSFF where aging white men eat bananas against a pink background, with all of the inuendo that implies, humorously exploring attitudes and preconceptions around gender, sex, and sexuality. Desai talks about disappointment as a dis-appointment of people in posts, and I think about, as I return to work this week, redundancies that have taken place – at my workplace and elsewhere. Instagram and Twitter have this past week been filled with photos of Tate United protestors and the #hashtags #CultureinCrisis and #SaveTateJobs. Desai also talks about disillusionment and hope. Both permeate everything; interior, exterior, and anterior spaces. Her performance contemplates and predicts its reception.
What is the aim of public programming?
Yesterday, eight artistic directors of hefty European film festivals attended the opening night of the 77th Venice International Film Festival. Press releases tell me they reaffirmed the value of cinema. I wonder who was there to hear them.
Am I an ally or am I amplifying myself?
I don’t want to review anything. I want to participate in the alternative ethics of care that Desai talks about when she talks about slowness. I think that what it means to contribute to film criticism is a dedication to the work, as Walder says, and I think, as both Desai and Sachs explicate, that it must be embodied, whole, full, and unflinching. The dedication to the work requires our whole selves. Because the artists gave their whole selves. Desai remarks on how many people have told her that This Work Isn’t for Us is generous. Generosity is necessary if we hope to connect and hold each other’s work, words, and experiences. Desai’s forearm, resting after so much writing at her laptop, Sachs’ camera, focused on hands, are generous gestures. They are there for us to connect to, but they are not ours to take.
with: Lynne Sachs, Maya Gehrig, Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, Astrid Bussink, Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Therese Henningsen and Diane Obomsawin.
The popular saying, I see you, is used when an individual acknowledges or understands a different point of view highlighting its importance. The films selected focus on some of the core issues in today’s society bringing us closer to a better understanding of the challenges and prospects put forward by these seven filmmakers.
This program includes works that speak to the universal and touch on empathy, arousal, fear, confusion and satisfaction through the portraying of complex stories and falls under this year’s theme on emotions proposed by HeK and Kunsthaus Baselland for OSLO NIGHT.
A Month of Single Frames Lynne Sachs, USA, 2019, 14 min 12, English
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an artist residency in a shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds and writing from the residency to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Lynne explores Barbara’s experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces and times.
Average Happiness Maya Gehrig, Switzerland, 2019, 7 min 15, no dialog
During a PowerPoint presentation, statistical diagrams are breaking free from the strait-jacket of their coordinates. A trip into the sensual world of statistics begins. Pie charts are melting, arrow diagrams twisting, scatter plots, bar graphs and stock market curves join in a collective climax.
Swatted Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, France, 2018, 11 min, English
Online players describe their struggles with “swatting”, a life-threatening cyber-harassment phenomenon that looms over them whenever they play. The events take shape through youtube videos and wireframe images from a video game.
Listen Astrid Bussink, The Netherlands, 2017, 15 min, Dutch with English subs
Life can seem pretty overwhelming at times, particularly when you’re growing up. And it’s not always easy to talk to your parents or friends about your problems. Fortunately, the “Kindertelefoon” (Child Helpline) in the Netherlands provides a listening ear. LISTEN presents a cross-section of conversations between children and the Kindertelefoon.
Maintenancer (doc.) Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Therese Henningsen, Germany, 2018, 13 min 5, German with English subs
The video work Maintenancer, which was produced as part of Meineche Hansen’s 2018 PRE-ORDER I-III exhibition series, focuses on the use and maintenance of sex dolls in the context of a German brothel. The work documents the transition into post-human prostitution – where sex work shifts from the physical body of the sex worker, onto the sex doll or robot.
I Like Girls Diane Obomsawin, Canada, 2016, 8 min, English
In this animated short from Diane Obomsawin, four women reveal the nitty-gritty about their first loves, sharing funny and intimate tales of one-sided infatuation, mutual attraction, erotic moments, and fumbling attempts at sexual expression.
