Category Archives: SECTIONS

Rob McLennan Interviews Lynne Sachs – Year By Year Poems

02/27/2020

Rob McLennan’s Blog

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lynne Sachs

By Rob McLennan

https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2020/02/12-or-20-second-series-questions-with_27.html

Lynne Sachs makes films and writes poems that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Her work embraces hybrid form and combines memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include live performance with moving image. Lynne was first exposed to poetry by her great aunt as a child in Memphis, Tennessee. Soon she was frequenting workshops at the local library and getting a chance to learn from poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Ethridge Knight. As an active member of Brown University’s undergraduate poetry community, she shared her early poems with fellow poet Stacy Doris. Lynne later discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneeman, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Lynne has made thirty-five films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Festivals in Buenos Aires, Beijing and Havana have presented retrospectives of her work. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship. In early 2020, her newest movie, Film About a Father Who, will premiere on opening night at the Slamdance Film Festival and in NYC at the Museum of Modern Art. Lynne lives in Brooklyn. Year by Year Poems is her first book of poetry.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?Writing YEAR BY YEAR POEMS did not just change my life, it was my life. When I turned 50, I decided to reconnect with every year of my life, so far, by writing a poem that explores the relationship I had had with something beyond my control, outside my domestic universe. The personal confronts the public, and vice-versa. Writing these poems forced me to carve out precise distillations of these moments in my time and our shared time.

2 – How did you come to filmmaking first, as opposed to, say, poetry, fiction or non-fiction?
I have been writing poetry since I was a child and filmmaking is actually an extension of this desire to process my bewilderment and occasional understanding of the world that spins around me. The personal, experimental, essayistic, documentary approaches I bring to my filmmaking are extensions of the thinking involved in writing a poem.

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I adore first drafts and for this reason I try to write my poems by hand, with a pen on paper. I return to them like an archeologist, relishing every gesture that I see on the page. With this in mind, I included many of my first drafts – as images almost – in YEAR BY YEAR POEMS. So far, readers have generally appreciated seeing these visualizations of the process of writing, moving back-and-forth between the inchoate first draft to the finished, edited, typed version. My mother was the only person who thought some of the poems were better and more fleshed-out in the original drafts. I thought this was apt, since her perspective on my life is probably the most complete.

4 – Where does a poem, work of prose or film-script usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
Each poem in YEAR BY YEAR POEMS begins with a year. In fact, I gave myself the pleasure of inventing a new graphic font for each of these 50 years, and these designs/ doodles became the cover of the book. Limitations or constraints on the writing of a poem actually allow me to work in a more expansive way. I feel less overwhelmed by the daunting challenge of trying to say something. In terms of my filmmaking, I have made 35 films, the shortest being 3 minutes and the longest 83. I just completed FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO which is 74 minutes and will premiere next month as the opening night film at Slamdance Film Festival in Park City and then at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in February. Believe it or not, I started this film in 1984 and just finished it. The only way I could find its structure was to create many short films and then to find search for compelling transitions.

5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I have finally discovered the joy of reading from my book in front of an audience. I have never ever been an actor so it did not really appeal to me before. Now, when I am reading from my own book, I feel deeply connected to the listeners in the room. It is so much fun to watch people responding. I have recently read or will read at Berl’s Poetry Bookshop, Topos Books, McNally Jackson Bookstore, KGB Lit Bar, Court Tree Gallery, Penn Book Center, and Museum of Modern Art Buenos Aires (with a translator). I will be reading from my book and showing my films at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library for National Poetry Month in April, 2020.

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I think my deepest concerns stem from my visceral devotion to feminism.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
A writer should stir of up thought and encourage a fascination with language. Writers who have found a place in the community should also encourage others with less experience through workshops that bring in people who have not yet named themselves as “writers.”

8 – Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I absolutely adore working with an editor, both people I know and trust to be honest and kind and people who care only about one thing – making the text better. In writing my first book of poems, I worked with my Tender Buttons Press editrix Lee Ann Brown who had some uncannily astute suggestions that included line breaks, word choices, finding clarity, carving way too much explication and everything in between. Working with her as well as my poet friends Michael Ruby and Michele Somerville was a gift. In addition, very early on, I actually hired a graduate student in creative writing to meet with me just a few times. She would read the poems with such distance and objectivity. It was refreshing, and I didn’t feel guilty asking her to explain what she thought since I was paying her.

9 – What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Read your poems out loud to yourself. Listen to the rhythm and feel it in your body.

10 – How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to filmmaking to multimedia)? What do you see as the appeal?
Oh, you really ask such insightful questions. What do I call myself? Am I filmmaker who writes poems? Can I be more than one thing? Can I just be an artist? Can I change according to my surroundings? I think our culture is actually becoming more open to these permutations. Patti Smith (musician and author) and Tony Kushner(playwright, screenwriter and children’s book writer) are two of my heroes in this respect. Finding visual or textual distillations is at the foundation of both my writing and my filmmaking. In neither situation do I ever call myself a storyteller.

11 – What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
On a writing day, I do what so many other writers do. I am not particularly ingenious in any way. I go out to a café, buy a cup of tea (preferably in a teapot) and begin to write. As long as the music is good and people are not talking on their cell phones, I am happy.

12 – When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing feels hampered by the clutter of my life, I set limits. I frame my ambition by a constraint, like only thinking about one particular conceit or finding my way to the bottom of the page. I try, though I am rarely successful, not to read what I have written as a reader but rather as co-conspirator with absolutely no taste. Taste is dangerous. So is the internet, so I try to reject that in any way possible.

13 – What fragrance reminds you of home?
About twenty-five years ago, I was visiting the Glen Canyon Dam at Lake Powell in Utah. It’s a very strange and other-wordly lake, mostly because it is artificial and built by recreation lovers who didn’t mind filling in a canyon in a naturally arid landscape to create a place for water-skiers. My sister Dana Sachs and I were together in the elevator descending to its lowest level. When the elevator doors opened, we immediately turned to one another and remarked that this dark, intimidating, cement space smelled like our grandparents’ home in Memphis, Tennessee, a place we had not been inside since we were children. Recognizing that “fragrance” concretized our sensory bond as sisters who were carrying so many of the same memories.

14 – David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I am very influenced by the conceptually rigorous approaches of Vito Acconci, Ana Medietta, Carolee Schneemann, Adrian Piper, and Hans Haacke.

15 – What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Last week, I finished reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. It took me six months and the experience was fantastic and awful, ultimately ending with ecstasy. The experience was convulsive and exasperating. I was transformed in a way that was truly extraordinary. I am a different person now that I have read Molly Bloom’s treatise on her body in the book’s last chapter; her one-sentence no-punctuation 25,000 word spin through the sensual made me reel and dream and sing. I would add to that a few other writers who come to mind today: filmmaker and poet Trinh T. Minh-ha, author and scholar Tera W. Hunter, author Claire Messud, poet Lee Ann Brown, and poet Katy Bohinc.

16 – What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?
Canadian film director François Gerard completed his highly successful film Thirty-TwoShort Films About Glenn Gould in 1993. In an interview, a reporter asked him what he planned to do next. His response was that he planned to donothing. Doing nothing for an artist can be transformative. I envy people who claim to be bored. I do not have ahorror vacui. I search for emptiness and find a sense of tranquility. Ultimately, it is very productive.

17 – If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I did consider being a human rights attorney, a pediatrician or an anthropologist. I also wish I could cook well, though I don’t aim to be a chef.

18 – What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?Writing gives me so much oxygen. When you write, you feel like you added one minute to the 1440 minutes in a day.

19 – What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
As written above, I recently completed Ulysses, but you know that is a great one. I also was very taken with Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts which showed me how to weave together intimate personal writing with more theoretical investigations. I return over and over and over again to filmmaker Ken Jacobs’ Star Spangled To Death, which is his opus film that he bravely refuses to complete.

20 – What are you currently working on?
Oh Ida: The Fluid Time Travels of a Radical Spirit, an experimental, sci-fi essay film that will trace the erasure and recent emergence (in the form of monuments) of the story of activist and journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett who spent her early years in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee and committed her life to nurturing a spirit of liberation in the face of resounding racial violence. I am making this film with author Tera Hunter and a few weeks ago we started shooting. It’s a blissful, intense collaboration.

Film Forward: Film About a Father Who, Queen of the Capital – Slamdance 2020

02/27/2020

Film Forward

Film About a Father Who, Queen of the Capital – Slamdance 2020

By Phil Guie

http://film-forward.com/film-festival/film-about-a-father-who-queen-of-the-capital-slamdance-2020

(Feel free to also check out our feature on a trio of Slamdance documentaries reflecting on the challenges facing the county here.)

Daring and intimate, Film About a Father Who probes the life and times of the filmmaker’s father, erstwhile hotelier, and playboy Ira Sachs Sr. Director Lynne Sachs assembles a collage using more than three decades worth of home videos, which often result in a raw and ragged look. Yet there is also an undeniable sense of immediacy from having the principals involved in her father’s series of broken marriages and illicit affairs speaking directly to the camera; some have vivid enough personas that they seem bigger than life.

Sachs presents multiple perspectives by liberally jumping backwards and forwards in time, capturing Ira at different ages and points in his life. In doing so, the film doesn’t draw attention to how he changes so much as what stays the same: how he seems cut off from his own emotions, never running too hot or cool. The theme of numerous observations also applies to the interviews of past wives, lovers, children both legitimate and illegitimate, and, perhaps most unforgettably, Ira’s mother, each of whom contribute a different facet to what is ultimately a complex portrait of a serial philanderer who simultaneously had multiple families.

At the same time Ira is being deconstructed, the film builds toward an epiphany about the nature of family via a parallel narrative involving Sachs and her two siblings from Ira’s first marriage. They recount how they first learned about their father’s affairs, how they subsequently navigated his existence as the Hugh Hefner of Park City, Utah, and how alienating it was for the Sachs children as he cycled through women.

The director’s attitude toward her father—who in the present day has become elderly and senile and, as such, even more enigmatic than he had been in earlier years—never approaches hostile, but she reserves most of her genuine warmth for her brothers, sisters, and half-siblings. Some are considerably younger than her and were kept secret from her. As the camera frames them side-by-side with Sachs, it lingers on their faces as if to marvel at the physical traits they all share.

Eventually, all of Ira’s progeny come together to ponder weighty themes—whether or not they share a parent is enough to make them family. But the documentary seems to argue that due to the complexity of familial bonds, only those caught inside should get to define them. That’s a universal message that will resonate with most viewers, who will likely find Sachs’s objective considerably more admirable than her main subject.

The mostly upbeat Queen of the Capital centers on Daniel Hays, a Washington, DC–based drag artist who performs exclusively to raise money for charity. Hays is also a member of his city’s chapter of the Imperial Court, a nonprofit consisting of and run by his fellow drag queens and kings. Director Joshua Davidsburg follows Hays as he embarks on a campaign to be elected as the organization’s next leader, although given what friendly terms all of the members seem to be on with each other, the end result is quite possibly the least suspenseful documentary about an election ever made.

The film does, however, boast considerable insight into life of a modern-day drag artist in our nation’s capital, including the way in which “drag families” here grow and develop, which is often through established performers taking younger ones under their wings. Hays’ drag father, Jon Shelby, though only a year older than Hays, comes across world-weary enough that their father-child relationship is completely believable. The more we learn about Shelby, especially some of the darker incidents of his life, the more touching are his scenes with Hays, who had his own share of troubles during his youth.

Through a combination of archived footage as well as interviews, Queen of the Capital also provides a rousing history lesson about drag’s place in the city, including such colorful episodes as the bitter war between rival clubs from which the Imperial Court emerged. But we also get an idea of how the day-to-day lives of drag performers—and LGBTQ men and women in general—have improved significantly from decades past, with Hays and others having jobs in the federal government in which they can openly discuss what they do outside of the office. The extent to which they have become comfortably integrated into the fabric of Washington, DC, is apparent in the footage of the Imperial Court’s charitable events, in which people of all stripes engage with them warmly.

Though the film’s election season story line isn’t a nail-biter, Davidsburg seems to be eyeing something that’s more inspiring than politics, and he largely captures it.

http://film-forward.com/film-festival/film-about-a-father-who-queen-of-the-capital-slamdance-2020

“Five Star Book:Year by Year — Poems by Lynne Sachs”

By Kathryn W Dennett
February 25, 2020
Can’t Shut Up About
https://cantshutupabout.wordpress.com/2020/02/25/five-star-book-year-by-year-poems-by-lynne-sachs/

I had never heard of experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs before stumbling upon her poetry collection at McNally Jackson on a day when I finished my commute book on my way downtown, but if her films are anything like these sharp, personal, evocative time capsules then I can’t wait to watch them.

This collection, which is comprised of a poem for each year of Sachs’s first fifty, is a perfect example of how making art that’s specific and personal somehow feels universal. She, in telling her own stories of milestones both political (how watching the Watergate hearings with her dad she, “finally became real to him”) and personal (love lost and kept, children’s births, friends illnesses) perfectly captures the way that all of our lives interweave with larger events.

I read this book through 2 times on the day I bought it. Then I copied out lines I liked and took up 2 full pages of my notebook. I have a feeling it will be sticking with me for a long time. Highly recommended.

48 Hills: “What We Saw at Sundance Pt. 2: A Sidetrip to Slamandce”

02/23/2020

48 Hills

What we saw at Sundance, Part 2: A side-trip to Slamdance

By Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

Culling through the forty features viewed at both the Sundance and Slamdance Film Festivals last week has been as much fun as watching them in the first place. Here is a spoiler-free account of some the fest’s best to bookmark in your calendar for the upcoming year. Read part one here.

Allotting some of my precious “Sundance movie going time” to make the hop-skip-and-a-jump up Main Street to attend rivaling venue Slamdance, has been immensely important since its inception in 1995. Slamdance’s commitment to “emerging artists and low-budget independent cinema” was born out of the inevitable missteps made by the ever-growing Sundance Institute. Every year I am rewarded with a truly remarkable debut that Sundance passed on, such as Christopher Nolan’s Following (1998), Bong Joon-ho’s Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), Jared Hess’s Peluca (2003), the nine-minute short film that inspired Napoleon Dynamite, and Ben Zeitlin’s Egg (2004)—a thesis project which led to creation of Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)—Marilyn Agrelo’s crowd-cheering Mad Hot Ballroom (2005), and Oren Peli’s low budget phenomenon Paranormal Activity (2008).

To my absolute astonishment, I can easily say that this year’s 2020 festival delivered the most moving amount of films of any previous year. Returning again and again to program after program, I found the rough edges, bold moments, and surprising personalities that I often find lacking from many of Sundance’s US Premiere and US Dramatic categories. (Thankfully Sundance re-invented their “Spectrum” category in the late 2000s and conceived the “NEXT” program, which provides a showcase for what the festival calls “pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to story-telling.” Or in other words, the Slamdance Film Festival.

Film About a Father Who (USA)
Experimental filmmaking legend Lynne Sachs kicked off Slamdance on opening night with an emotionally striking feature exploring the complexities of her narcissistically charming father. Using 8mm, 16mm, videotape, and digital footage, and shot over 35 years (from 1984 to 2019), her perennial process of documenting “bon vivant and pioneering Utah businessman” Ira Sachs Sr. will undoubtedly hit quite a nerve with anyone who’s grown up with an egotistically captivating fountainhead for a father. But Sachs isn’t just airing her family’s dirty laundry here—including interviews with Lynne’s younger brother, iconic indie filmmaker Ira Sachs: see The Delta (1997), Forty Shades of Blue (2005), Keep the Lights On (2012), and Love Is Strange(2014). This unique and epic familial expedition masterfully employs an experimental inventiveness that swims through a myriad harrowing home movies captured within more than a few fascinating formats, and diverse decades. Sachs, referencing the title of Yvonne Rainer’s landmark feminist feature Film About a Woman Who (1974), practices what Rainer was preaching—and in turn has constructed one of the most powerfully pertinent documentaries of recent years.

McNally Jackson – Double Trouble in the Roaring Twenties: Valery Oisteanu and Lynne Sachs

Double Trouble in the Roaring Twenties: Valery Oisteanu and Lynne Sachs (PRINCE)

02/18/2020

New York poets Valery Oisteanu and Lynne Sachs make distillations, sometimes with words, sometimes with images. As a collagist, Valery imbibes the detritus of visual culture, using the materials he has consumed to construct surreal, oneiric designs. As an experimental filmmaker, Lynne collects images and sounds and reshapes them into cinema poems that warp and enliven our awareness of reality. In the mid 1980s, Lynne’s father Ira Sachs met Valery and his wife Ruth in Bali, Indonesia at the beginning of their shared multi-year engagement with the island and its rich culture. Soon, Ira introduced Valery to Lynne during his visits to New York City. It was during these regular familial interactions over thirty years that Lynne and Valery discovered their shared passions for making image-based work as well as writing poems. Tonight’s Double Trouble reading at McNally Jackson marks their first public poetry convergence, as they celebrate the beginning of the Roaring Twenties!

When Lynne 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. With intro by Paolo Javier and design by Abby Goldstein.

Israel’s Ynet Looks Lynne Sachs’ “Film About a Father Who”

Ynet
“Coming Back to Father’s House”
by Amir Bogen
English translation by Nir Zats
February 14, 2020
https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-5677686,00.html

For more than 30 years the Jewish filmmaker Lynne Sachs followed her father with her camera. Her father is Ira Sachs Senior, the lauded, and hedonistic Real Estate entrepreneur. From this intimate footage grew her last film, which combines memories, discoveries of siblings and a self examination of her family and herself. In an interview before her NY premier, she shares her personal doubts and her timid feelings regarding the film’s revealing quality. In this interview, she also discusses the documentary she made in Israel about Revital Ohaion who was murdered in a terror attack in 2002.

For more than three decades filmmaker Lynne Sachs have been making experimental documentaries. Her films that deal with political conflicts, social and personal matters took her to various places in the US, Bosnia, Vietnam, and Israel. However, throughout that period, 59- year-old Ms. Sachs kept working on a film that was most close to her heart: an intimate documentary that deals with the story of her father Ira Sachs Sr.

After the premier of “Film About a Father Who” at Slamdance in Park City, Utah, which occurs concurrently with the famous Sundance film fest, the film travels to Sachs home, New York City, where it will screen on Friday at the Museum of Modern Art. “As I stand shortly before the film’s first NY screening, among my community, I still think ‘have I made a mistake?’. Said Sachs in an interview before the film’s NY premier.

In her new film, Sachs provide the audience with an almost unmediated point of view into her family cell. A nuclear cell that sprawled with her father’s sexual adventures. In an attempt to capture the character of Sachs Sr. who had a reputation of a unique entrepreneur with a hedonistic lifestyle and of being a womanize. She digs into her memories, her mother’s, her father’s lovers, and that of her eight siblings from several women. She includes her brother Ira Sachs the well known film director (Love is Strange, Frankie), and her sister the writer Dana Sachs. The film that was constructed among others from a vast home video archive is a portrait of a man with lust for life. A man that inspired but also hurt many around him. Through her loving and compassionate look, Sachs weaves the perspectives of her close relatives, including some she discovers while making the film. She collects pieces of memories in an attempt to create the figure of her father. Ira Sr. is still alive, but being in old age his health deteriorates. He has difficulties to speak and difficulties to remember.

“I walked the path of this film most of my adult life. Eventually I had to either accept it or forget about it”. Sachs explains. “If you don’t write a diary, poetry, or other kind of documentation, you basically advocate intentional obliviousness. Most of us do it very well”. Those were the motives that kept her committed to this project for so many years. “Either you speak out or you repress. The easy way is to ignore. I have two sisters whom I haven’t met till a few years ago. One of them was very involved in my father’s life. The film gives them a space to express their point of view. We all have step siblings. The nuclear family became a more rare thing nowadays with DNA support. My film is not about DNA, rather it takes place in a society where secrets are harder to keep”.

The Family dynamic around your father is very complex, and it brings some strong, mixed emotions, from your family and from yourself.

“I have been working on this film about my father for 30 years. I didn’t know exactly what I’m doing. But I knew it had a strong presence in my life. It was the starting point to start deciphering our parental fingerprint. No matter how unstable or complicated they were, or if they were awful and you disengaged from it in adolescence, and if so does if it had a positive effect on your life.

The last few weeks after completing the film, I had come to the realization that the frame of contemplating other people’s lives opens a door inwards. I felt the need that this time my door will open within. In order to see how it feels to be watched. As I myself watched my family and myself. This is one of the special merits that cinema possesses. When you carry a camera in public everybody is looking back at you.

The film also shows the process of an active man getting old. It is not an easy experience.

Cinema has the possibility to allow us to process things unlike any other medium. My father is getting old along the film, but so do I, and so all the other characters in the film. We are all getting old. Unfortunately, in our society it is common to hear “you don’t look your age’. It became an antonym to success. The truth is that we do get old. However, cinema launches you backwards and forwards into somebody else’s life, or your own, to parallel or different periods in life. Nowadays, my father is quite frail and has a hard time articulating his words. However, I didn’t want the film to be about that, rather I wanted the film to focus on the access and repulsion from the memory itself.

*Still from Film About a Father Who (2020)*

The biography of Ira Sachs Sr. Is full of twists and turns even from his childhood. He was born to an American parents from Jewish heritage, and grew up with his mother and stepfather. Both were converted to Christianity after WWII. As he got older, he promoted large scale developing projects for wealthy investors. He alway kept time for hiking and exclusive clubs. His first wife gave birth to his first three kids: Dana, Lynne and Ira. During his marriage and after his divorce, he conducted multiple relationships with different women with whom he brought more children. Not a role model father figure with American values. Not to mention Jewish ones. Nevertheless, Lynne says that Jewish identity was present from an early age, and she has made a few films exploring Jewish themes. Biography of Lilith (1997), The Last Happy Day (2009), and States of Unbelonging (2005) about Revital Ohaion who was murder in a terror attack. (Source: diesem Link)

States of Unbelonging was screened in 2006 at the Jerusalem Film Festival. The film is an attempt to decipher the character of Ohaion who was a film teacher. She was murdered with her two sons by a Palestinian terrorist in her house on kibbutz Metser. An article in the NY TImes ignites Sachs’s interest and sent her to explore the death of a woman in the other side of the globe, a process that Sachs describes as an obsession. She creates an abstract portraits of Ohaion with letters correspondence with her Israeli student Nir Zats. While Sachs is drawn deeper into the character of Ohaion, Zats was providing her with the sights and sounds of Israel. Among others she interview Ohaion’s family and ex-husband. Sachs is captivated not only with Ohioan herself but also with the landscape in which she has lived in. Eventually Sachs decided to visit Israel herself and deal with her complicated feelings.

“I was so obsessed with her” Sachs says. The subject matters that came in that film are still resonance with me. “I remember how I called Avi, her ex-husband over and over. At first it seemed he hesitated talking to me. Many things happened. I traced her younger brother here in NY. He is the one who gave me some of her home videos. He has never watched it. It was too traumatic for him. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. The only thing that disappointed me in all the erosion of working on this film was that I wasn’t related to the films she has made. It really bothered me for days. I have told myself that I must like her works. I tried to convince myself that it is all right since she was more of a teacher than a filmmaker, and I also teach film. Anyway not everything must fit. I was so immersed in seeing the world through her eyes.

Although Sachs inclines toward the personal. Her film inevitably was also part of the general political context. Different people expected her to take sides in the Palestinian Israeli conflict. “Following the making of the film I met a few Jewish American artists that were supporting BDS. I on the other hand was looking for a way to create a dialogue, and to meet with the peace support movement on both sides”. Sachs says that although she identified with Revital who was murder by a Palestinian, she was looking the complexity in the story. “When I started working on the film there was an expectation to protest the terror toward Israel. And there are different kinds of terror, military, organized and more. Eventually I was trying to avoid talking about the terror in itself”.

That must raise some questions with certain people.

When I submitted the film to the Jerusalem Film Fest, I had to coordinate the film hard copy delivery. I have called and talked to someone in the festival office. He said the jury would probably not like the film. When I was wondering why, he said that it is obviously very pro Zionists, and the jury are definitely not. When I wonder what made the film pro Zionist, he claims that the reason is that I focus on a woman that was killed in a terror attack. I said that I am searching for a more complex point of view. So he said: ok so they might like it after all. He himself was with a set of preliminary points of view about my work. When I reached the festival I was so excited. But then the second war in Lebanon has erupted. We were supposed to have a tour with the film in several places in Israel, but all was canceled. It was so disappointing.

https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-5677686,00.html

The Pop Break: “Film About a Father Who Review: A Film as Ambiguous as Its Subject”

02/14/2020

The Pop Break

‘Film About a Father Who’ Review: As Ambiguous as its Subject

By Marisa Carpico

Documentarian Lynne Sachs and her filmmaker brother, Ira Sachs Jr., have always made emotionally complex films. Whether its Lynne’s literal and historical exploration of Vietnam in Which Way Is East or Ira Jr.’s aching meditation on longtime love inLove is Strange, neither has been afraid to dig into ambiguity or tough subject matter. However, Lynne’s newest, Film About a Father Who, (which includes some footage shot by Ira) brings that unflinching honesty to a new level as it explores their complex relationship with their absent father Ira Sr. and the sprawling family his philandering has created.

Named for Yvonne Rainer’s Film About a Woman Who… which follows a woman’s sexual escapades and the resulting/motivating unhappiness in an abstract, montage-like way, Sachs’s film is similarly structured and culled from footage filmed on half a dozen different media from 1965 to 2019. Though Sachs tells her father’s story in roughly chronological order, she uses few of the documentary techniques we’re used to. Rather, what we see rarely synchs with what we hear and it can take a few minutes to grow accustomed to the film’s style.

However, while scenes where images of Lynne and her siblings at much younger ages play under recordings of them talking about their father in modern day may confuse some viewers, they’re also incredibly effective. Every scene examines not only their memories of their father, but how each child’s understanding of Ira Sr. changed over time. Watching an adolescent Adam (Ira Sr.’s son with his second wife, Diana) talk nervously if admiringly about his father contrasted with his more reserved assessment in present day is striking and the film delivers that level of brutal frankness again and again.

Indeed, though Sachs repeatedly expresses her adoration for her father, part of what makes her film so effective is how willing she is to criticize him too. Two scenes in particular stand out. The first shows Lynne interviewing Diana. Turned almost completely away from the camera and constantly on the verge of tears, we can hear just how much Ira Sr.’s cheating and lies hurt her, complicating and expanding the hurt Lynne and her sister Dana felt when they first met Diana on a trip to Bali they thought was just with their father.

The second comes much later, when one of Lynne’s half-siblings, Beth, hidden from the rest of the family for most of her life, explains that being around her siblings stings not just because she didn’t know them for so long, but because she resents the time and financial support Ira Sr. gave them. Listening to so many painful stories about Ira Sr.’s failings as a father, the audience naturally longs to hear him explain his actions, but that’s precisely the one thing Sachs never really manages to unpack.

Knowing that Lynne has been working on this film for 26 years, it’s easy to wonder why she doesn’t come to a more definitive conclusion about who her father is or what family means for her and her siblings. Some of that is, of course, Ira Sr.’s doing. One of the film’s most frustrating and memorable moments comes near the end, when Lynne tells Ira Sr. in voice over that because the newer audio will be better, she has to re-record some of what he’s said before. We expect the silence that follows to end with some revelation, whether about the trauma that made Ira Sr. so afraid of being emotionally frank or how he feels looking back on his behavior. Instead, the film goes on as it has before, allowing Lynne or the other siblings to speak about his effect on them. And while the choice emphasizes how much of a mystery Ira Sr. still remains, it can also leave the audience with a taste of the bitter dissatisfaction his children experience.

As viewers who only get to know Ira Sachs Sr. through the picture Lynne paints, it can be frustrating to hear him speak so little about why he lived the life he did or the emotional toll both his childhood and his sprawling progeny had on him. In a more straightforward documentary, not hearing his explanation would leave the film feeling incomplete. Yet because this is a personal story told by the children forced to come to terms with his behavior, preserving that ambiguity also, as Lynne herself puts it, preserves the truth. Both Lynne and we are perhaps no closer to understanding Ira Sr. by film’s end, but we at least know him as his children do and all things considered, that’s nothing short of miraculous.

https://thepopbreak.com/2020/02/14/film-about-a-father-who-review-as-ambiguous-as-its-subject/

Agnès Films: Supporting Women & Feminist Filmmakers – Review by Alexandra Hidalgo

02/12/2020

Agnes Films

Review of Lynne Sachs’ Film About a Father Who

By Alexandra Hidalgo

When Lynne Sachs’s intimate and mesmerizing personal documentary Film About a Father Who opens, we see a closeup of fingers trying to untangle a knot in someone’s white hair. The camera reveals that the hair belongs to an older man whose eyes close in pain at the fingers’ attempt to unsnarl the mess. He cries out in discomfort, and a woman’s voice says, “Sorry, Dad. There’s just one part that’s very tangly.” We then cut to a wide shot of a room where books and photos crowd every inch of its floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves and we see Sachs, comb in hand, standing behind her father, Ira, who sits on a chair. While her father’s long hair might have one tangly part, his life, which the film unravels with loving complexity, is a Gordian knot of secrets and desire.

Shot between 1965 and 2019 by Sachs, her brother Ira Sachs Jr., and her father, the film weaves a visual tapestry of a family’s attempt to come to terms with its own identity as its enigmatic patriarch remains forever just out of reach. Blending 8mm and 16mm film, VHS, Hi8, MiniDV, and digital footage, About a Father is a visual marvel, a study of the longing for the past that older film and video technologies evoke in viewers. Instead of being displayed in a chronological procession, however, the film jumps from decade to decade and from 8mm to digital to VHS. Like our memories of those who have been by our side since childhood, About a Father blends decades and styles, arranged around emotional beats instead of the order in which events unfolded.

As we see handheld 16mm footage of her father as a young man lying happily in a field of dandelions, Sachs explains through narration, “Dad had his own language and we were expected to speak it. I loved him so much that I agreed to his syntax, his set of rules.” That syntax includes a gentle yet constant refusal to answer certain questions, in particular those that pertain to his relationships with the wives, mistresses, and girlfriends that populate his life to this day. Sachs, her brother Ira Jr., and her sister Dana, come from her father’s first marriage, but as the film unravels we encounter the various children that descend from his countless other romantic relationships.

Sachs and her two full siblings are left to discover these new brothers and sisters over the years and to figure out how to develop closeness with these increasingly younger people with whom they share so little and yet so much. Several of the film’s interviews feature characters in backlit closeup profiles to the side of the screen, so that only part of their face is visible. Like Sachs, we see only fractions of the characters we meet, trying to piece together a puzzle that by its very nature will always be incomplete. And yet, an incomplete image is better than no image at all when it comes to understanding our families and our places within the larger communities they represent.

The film is generous in its portrayal of Sachs’ father and achingly vulnerable in its attempt to make sense of the wake of affection and resentment he has left behind. Sachs takes a story that could have been overly dramatic and judgmental and instead constructs a nuanced meditation on what it feels like to love someone whose actions have hurt us and others. Toward the end of the film, she explains, “This is not a portrait. This is not a self-portrait. This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry.” As she says this, the camera in 16mm follows her father, who seems to be walking in a circle and smiling at the lens, present but always out of reach. And yet, in this compelling and genuine documentary, she has captured his essence and taken the audience on a hypnotic and profound journey. Anyone who has ever found themselves confounded by unexpected revelations about those closest to us will find themselves in this film and walk away from it with a deeper understanding of their own lives, even if they don’t solve the conundrum of Ira Sachs’s asymmetry.

To learn more about Film About a Father Who, visit the film’s website and take a look at its IMDb. To learn more about Alexandra, visit her profile.

https://agnesfilms.com/reviews/review-of-lynne-sachs-film-about-a-father-who/?fbclid=IwAR0Q7f5zXkuSGJ6q3F7-FV0hc10Rsasex0Tt8qQguyoIK8TtSF0CjIgK4Y8

Women & Hollywood: “Collaboration Taught Me Different Ways of Making Films and Seeing the World” by Lynne Sachs

02/11/2020

Women and Hollywood

Guest Post: Collaborating Taught Me Different Ways of Making Films and Seeing the World

Most people imagine the structure for making a film as a pyramid with one person sitting proudly at the top. The industry as we know it endows the director with almost complete responsibility for creative expression. Members of both the production and the post-production team agree to become a part of the overall endeavor, with the awareness that their input will ultimately be guided by the vision of this individual. As a woman, I have had to meet that expectation with equal parts confidence, fear, ambition, compassion, and fierceness.

Over the course of my 30-year career in the film industry, it’s taken me an embarrassingly long time to move from seeing myself as a film student to a director. As director, I acknowledge my dedication to my practice, the fact that I have made over 30 films ranging from three to 83 minutes long, the awards I’ve received, and the money I’ve been paid to do my job.

I feel good about owning my role as a film director, but I am also really interested in exploring the impact that artistic collaboration has had on my work. Three co-directing filmmaking experiences from 1994, 2001, and 2018 shaped how I view filmmaking, and how I approach the practice. Each of these projects expanded my appreciation for the way that working closely and equally with another person or group can transform how I write, shoot, edit, show, and distribute my work.

Between 1992 and 1994, I collaborated for the first time with my sister, Dana Sachs, a writer with an expertise on Vietnam who was living in Hanoi during the very first post-war period in which Americans were allowed in the country. While making our film, Dana and I traveled from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi with backpacks containing our clothing and cosmetics, a 16mm camera, film, and an audio recorder. Each of us also kept a travel diary. Our film started as a road trip. Eventually, it transformed into an essay film on cross-cultural image-making and sisterhood.

It was exhilarating to follow Dana, who spoke Vietnamese and knew so much more about the country than I ever would, but in retrospect, I’m able to admit that our “collaboration” made it clear that we did not see eye-to-eye on how to construct a narrative of our journey.

Dana came to our shared experience as a journalist where the order of events and the precise text from a conversation were critical to her reporting of an event. I, on the other hand, hailed from an experimental-documentary practice where an impression of an experience was just as authentic as a precise recounting.

Each of us had her own recipe for mixing our subjectivity with our objectivity, our witnessing eye with our aesthetic eye. As sisters, we were cut from the same cloth, but our sensibilities as a writer and a filmmaker were in opposition. Only after months of disagreeing about the writing and structuring of the film did we discover that these differences formed the very backbone of the film.

The conflict between us as two makers and two sisters gave the film its tension, the rhetorical bite we needed all along. Our writerly antagonisms turned into multi-layered stories that moved beyond touristic anecdotes, toward more critical musings on the nature of tourism and representation.

After spending two years in Vietnam, Dana finally agreed to come back to the U.S. so that we could complete our narration in an audio studio. Over the coming years, we presented our co-directed film, “Which Way Is East,” in festivals and theaters around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, and the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival.

In the early 2000s, I collaborated with San Francisco filmmaker Jeanne C. Finley on “The House of Drafts,” a Bosnian-American web-art piece in the form of a virtual apartment building inhabited by imaginary characters. This was the early aughts, a time in which the world wide web was not just a place to socialize or buy things, but rather a location that allowed for enormous artistic collaboration between people living in different places around the globe. Jeanne and I jumped on the magic internet carpet to see where it would take us. Supported by grants, we traveled to the Sarajevo Center for the Arts to work with eight local media artists just a few years after the end of the war in the Balkans.

Making “House of Drafts” forced Jeanne and I to confront the contradictions of all our previous documentary work. We needed to reconcile our interest in embracing the trauma that our local partners had experienced in the war while also accepting their desire — and need — to move on in their lives. This is one of the most complicated aspects of documentary making; capturing pain, struggle, and trauma is often the hallmark of a successful production that strikes an emotional register in an audience.

We needed to recognize that the so-called “subjects” of this film project were also our collaborators, and that we had to see their needs and hesitations as part of a specific, compelling framework rather than a limitation. So, we came up with a hybrid approach, one that we hoped would serve everyone involved. We designed workshops during which everyone kept journals as characters, composites of real lives and invented personae. Through this new quasi-fictionalized lens, Jeanne and I were able to witness the detritus of the past from a distance, one that respected the trauma our collaborators had been through just a few years before our arrival. Never again would either of us see the wall between a maker and the individuals whose lives she is filming in the same way.

Between 2014 and 2018, I collaborated with playwright Lizzie Olesker on “Every Fold Matters,” a live performance, and “The Washing Society,” a related film. Both projects observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual labor that happens there. Inspired by our reading of the 1881 strikes of African-American laundresses in Atlanta, we researched and wrote about the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry.

Throughout the time that Lizzie and I were creating our site-specific shows in New York City or traveling to film festivals in the U.S. and abroad, we were also dealing with our own lives and those of our families. We each commuted to teaching jobs, supported our children during their college applications, faced the death of a grandmother or a mother, and dealt with traumatizing family mental health challenges — and plenty more. At every turn, we were there for each other, as co-directors and as close friends. Our four-year collaboration resulted in a profound support structure that nourished and sustained us as women.

When I watch movies by the Maysles Brothers, the Cohen Brothers, or more recently the Safdie Brothers, I wonder about the relationships they have built through their co-directing experiences and why there aren’t more famous women sisters in the industry, as Aubrey Plaza noted in her Independent Spirit Awards monologue this past weekend. I’d love to hear more about Alex and Sylvia Sichel, the Soska Sisters, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, and other sisters who make films together.

As women in the director’s chair or anywhere else on a set, we should celebrate the bonds we build together behind the camera. Each of my co-directing experiences has guided me to a new way of thinking about the intimacy of a shared artistic endeavor and the imprint that work can have, opening my eyes to different ways of directing films — and of living.

https://womenandhollywood.com/guest-post-collaborating-taught-me-different-ways-of-making-films-and-seeing-the-world/

Go Indie Now: Slamdance 2020

02/10/2020

Go Indie Now

Slamdance 2020 Part 1 Shorts & Bio Docs

By Joe Compton

Let me first start this blog by saying a special incredible thank you to everyone on the Slamdance team who make this festival possible each and every year, and who welcome Go Indie Now to cover it. It’s one of the true pleasures and privileges of our entire year and we know how lucky we are to be a small part of it. We also would like to thank all the artists themselves and their Public Relations teams for making yourselves willing and able to talk to us during this busy time.

2020 was an interesting year at Park City, to say the least. The documentary, real-life, and gritty subject matter ruled the programming. It was rightfully so and much deserved though too. However, I felt like there was another, probably more subtle resurgence or welcoming back in a way of the short film format and media. In a way, it is back to becoming not just a means to experiment or create a proof of concept for, though that ultimately might be their purpose becomes or was intended for, but in their own way they became true essence and the art of storytelling. Doing it better than they could have as a full feature narrative or episodic. Not that they can’t be expanded upon or further explored but that they have to be without an appreciation for how awesome they are just as the short form.

The short films I saw at this festival blew me away and were so strong. So let me highlight quite a few of them here right now. I think every one of these artists, behind and in front of the cameras are folks you should be looking out for strongly in 2020 and beyond.

AUTO-BIO CENTRIC DOCUMENTARY FEATURES FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (74 Minutes)

WRITTEN, DIRECTED, AND SHOT BY Lynne Sachs
EDITED BY Rebecca Shapass
MUSIC COMPOSED BY Stephen Vitiello 

WHAT THIS FILM DOES WELL: Let me just say Lynne is a legend and her style and abilities are at the top of the list in terms of Documentarians and their storytelling styles go but this one is so different in feel and almost by the nature of the way this has to be presented has to a different look that serves as a triumph and not a crutch or gimmick. Really no avoiding the fact that not every shot was composed and lit or mic’ ed properly. Yet in true Lynne Sachs form she weaves such an intricate and intimate narrative that twists and turns with the best of them you almost expect that there might have been some prior planned composition to those “home movie” feels. It also strikes you because the one being most affected in and throughout is her and her family. So in a weird and interesting way, this film that starts looking into a family patriarch becomes a character-driven, dilemma type story that interweaves the documenter with the subject matter and creates a mystery cloaked in a soap opera type drama. The fun aspects are the ratio and framing of a lot of raw footage that gets shot overtime on many different devices and how it enhances the experiences of the narrative. A skill set that editor Rebecca Shapass clearly possesses in spades. Documentaries are often that idea that what you see is not what you will get in the end and in a way because of the brave way in which Lynne chooses to put herself out there, comfortable or not, we really see a 4th wall crash that presents such a compelling and shocking result. A choice I know in talking to her was not an easy one to make. Yet this film has very few moments of bleakness and never are they overt; another display of the skill set that Lynne possesses as a proven Documentarian. Instead it chooses naturally to highlight and enhance the positive aspects of the reveals which may have been its most impressive “magic trick”.

WHY THIS FILM HAS TO BE CHAMPIONED: Quite Frankly because as an audience we owe it to Lynne who has given us compelling subject matter to absorb, feel, be weary, and aware of over the years, to applaud her courage and never relenting from the vision that there was a narrative to this film. One that shocks and even educates as to the perils of a lifetime that one can only hope evolves in our society and not highlights its prevalence. Lynne Sachs puts it all out there in a manner not always comfortable, not always revealing but sometimes stark, frank, and truthfully needs to be viewed and not judged. That makes this experience unique but makes this documentary compelling and worth the ride.

https:// goindienow.com/home/slamdance2020_pt1

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs