A Park City legend will get his moment on the big screen in his hometown, as the subject of the opening-night film of the 2020 Slamdance Film Festival.
Experimental documentarian Lynne Sachs’ movie “Film About a Father Who,” a profile of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., will open the independent film festival on Jan. 24 at the Treasure Mountain Inn, 255 Main St., Park City, the festival announced Wednesday.
Ira Sachs Sr., 83, is known around Park City as an eccentric millionaire, the pioneering developer who, among other things, opened The Yarrow Hotel (now the DoubleTree by Hilton Park City). The film employs footage from 1984 to 2019, on 8mm and 16mm film, videotape and digital images.
“It takes undeniable courage to discover and reveal shocking truths about one’s family,” said Alina Solodnikova, Slamdance festival manager. “Lynne Sachs has done it with unique style, a dry sense of humor and honesty that captivates our programmers.”
The Sachs family has another link to Park City in January: Ira’s son, also known as Ira Sachs, is a filmmaker who has had six of his seven films screen at the Sundance Film Festival. His 2005 drama “Forty Shades of Blue” won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. dramatic films at Sundance.
Slamdance — which runs Jan. 24-30, alongside the larger Sundance Film Festival — announced “Film About a Father Who” will be part of its Breakouts program, showcasing directors who have already made their debuts and are sticking to the independent mindset.
The Museum of Modern Art has unveiled its full festival lineup of 28 features and shorts for Doc Fortnight 2020, its annual showcase of the best of nonfiction film, on Monday. The list includes the latest works from the likes of Michael Almereyda, Terrence Nance, Denis Côté, Sky Hopinka, Lucretia Martel, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Ben Rivers, Lynne Sachs, Kazuhiro Soda, Roger Ross Williams, Maya Khoury and the Abounaddara Collective.
Now in its 19th year, Doc Fortnight will run from February 5 to 19, 2020, and will include 12 world premieres, 17 North American premieres, and 14 US premieres from 38 countries. Doc Fortnight 2020 opens with the New York premiere of “Crip Camp,” a portrait of Camp Jened—a camp for disabled teenagers near Woodstock, New York, that thrived in the late 1960s and ’70s—which established a close-knit community of campers who would become pioneering disability advocates. The film is co-directed and produced by Nicole Newnham and James Lebrecht, who attended the camp. “Crip Camp” will also screen at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and will premiere on Netflix thanks to the streaming service’s partnership with the Obamas.
Doc Fortnight 2020 is organized by curator Joshua Siegel; with Stergios Dinopoulos, an intern in MOMA’s film department. The accompanying sidebar Nonfiction+ is organized by Kathy Brew, a consulting curator.
On today’s program, outgoing Park City Councilmember Lynn Ware Peek reflects back on her time in office. Solitude Resort Communications Manager Sara Huey talks about the results they’ve seen by implementing paid parking this winter. Park City Institute Executive Director Teri Orr, newly named Managing Director Ari Ioannides and Board President Jason Owen talk about the on-going leadership changes and the future of the Institute. Peter Baxter, Co-Founder and Director of Slamdance Film Festival, talks about this year’s festival, which features Lynne Sachs festival premiere, a documentary on her father and Park City bon vivant Ira Sachs Sr., Film About A Father Who.
These are recommended titles from the collections managed by staff in the General Collections & Humanities Center at the SFPL Main Library for Winter 2019-20.
Renowned experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs wrote one of 2019’s best books of poetry. In 2011, after deciding to write one poem for each of the fifty years of her life, Sachs asked herself, “How have the private, most intimate moments of my life been affected by the public world beyond?” The graceful, diaristic poems that she went on to produce 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. Thus in “1969” a young Sachs imagines Neil Armstrong calling on the telephone, then turning “to look at all of us (from the moon).” This beautifully designed book includes facsimiles of many of the poetry’s initial drafts, which subtly illumine this artist’s creative process.
Headroom + Vertical Cinema Present: Films by/ with/ for Barbara Hammer
For the last experimental film event of the season, Headroom and Vertical Cinema are appropriately teaming up to present a memorial screening of collaborations by Barbara Hammer, curated by Deborah Stratman!
With a career spanning fifty years, Barbara Hammer is recognized as a pioneer of queer cinema. A visual artist working primarily in film and video, Hammer created a groundbreaking body of experimental work that illuminates lesbian histories, lives and representations. Stated Hammer, “My work makes these invisible bodies and histories visible. As a lesbian artist, I found little existing representation, so I put lesbian life on this blank screen, leaving a cultural record for future generations.”
Barbara Hammer was born in 1939 in Hollywood, California. She lived and worked in New York until her death in 2019.
This set of films, collaborations made by, with, and for Barbara Hammer was curated by Deborah Stratman, who will be in attendance at the screening.
By Lynne Sachs’ documentary Film About a Father Who has been tapped as the opening-night film of the Slamdance Film Festival, whose 26th edition is set for January 24-30 in Park City.
Sachs shot footage of her father, a pioneering Park City businessman, over a 35-year period from 1984-2019, seeking to attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent, and a sister to her siblings. The cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame, yet privately ensconced in secrets. As facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had hoped to reveal.
“It takes undeniable courage to discover and reveal shocking truths about one’s family,” said Slamdance festival manager Alina Solodnikova on Wednesday. “Lynne Sachs has done it with unique style, a dry sense of humor and honesty that captivates our programmers. A generation in the making, Film About A Father Who is pulling no punches. We couldn’t imagine a better film to open Slamdance 2020.”
The news comes as Slamdance is ramping up for its 2020 edition, adding more titles to a schedule that already includes the Narrative and Documentary Feature Film Competition and Breakouts sections which were unveiled earlier this month.
Lynne Sachs’ Film About A Father Who will open Slamdance 2020, set to run in Park City, Utah, from January 24-30, 2020.
Sachs shot her film about Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Utah, over 35 years from 1984 to 2019 using 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital.
“It takes undeniable courage to discover and reveal shocking truths about one’s family,” said Slamdance festival manager Alina Solodnikova. “Lynne Sachs has done it with unique style, a dry sense of humour and honesty that captivates our programmers. A generation in the making, Film About A Father Who is pulling no punches. We couldn’t imagine a better film to open Slamdance 2020.”
Mine for yours: My favorite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2019 by Dennis Cooper. Dennis Cooper is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist.
Cooper began reading French literature at 15 and was drawn to Marquis de Sade in particular for his risqué depictions of libertine sex. He was also inspired by French novelists/directors such as Jean Cocteau, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras. Though he had started writing surreal stories at age 12, he became a more focused writer at 15 and tried to imitate the writing styles of Arthur Rimbaud and de Sade. He began planning out a five-book series that would later become The George Miles Cycle. Punk subculture was a major part of his twenties.
An evening of round-robin readings with Brooklyn writers Michael Ruby, Michele Somerville, Erik Schurink, and Lynne Sachs
Tuesday, Dec. 10, 7 to 9 PM Court Tree Gallery 371 Court St 2nd Floor (at Carroll St.) Brooklyn Free and open to the public.
“I’ve been working hard to think about what the four of us have in common and the one thing that came to mind is that we all have children who are now young adults. I happen to know for a fact that our distinct experiences of having children, being with children, and thinking about our own childhoods have been a great resource for each of us in our work. With this in mind, I invited Michael, Michele and Erik to join me to read from their collections.” – Lynne Sachs
Michael Ruby is the author of many poetry books, including Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010), American Songbook (Ugly Duckling, 2013), ebook Close Your Eyes (Argotist Online, 2018), ebook Titles & First Lines (Mudlark, 2018) and The Mouth of the Bay (BlazeVOX, 2019), as well as a trilogy in prose and poetry, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012). He also co-edited Bernadette Mayer’s collected early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015), and works as an editor of articles about U.S. politics at The Wall Street Journal.
“If ‘experiment’ means anything when we speak of experimental poetry, Michael Ruby’s gathering (in Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices) is a moving testament to the still real possibilities of such a venture/adventure. His project here—to explore “the varieties of unconscious experience” as they come to him—is an aspect of what Gary Snyder once described as “the real work of modern man: to uncover the inner structure and actual boundaries of the mind.” That Ruby’s workings with memory, dream, and the experience of language between sleep and waking issue in a new and powerful work of poesis is something to be celebrated and experienced by all of us in turn.” – Jerome Rothenberg
Michele Madigan Somerville is the author of two books of verse, Black Irish (2009) and WISEGAL (2001), and a third, Glamourous Life, which will be published by Rain Mountain early in 2020. She was born on the island of Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn.
“Somerville takes us on a grand cosmic ride on that fine line between the divine and the sacred. Along that ride, Madigan Somerville never loses her sense of humor and never stops having fun.” — Joanna Sit
Erik Schurink creates evocative art experiences and interactive exhibits to engage people and build community. He is Director of Exhibits at Long Island Children’s Museum.
Erik Schurink’s poetry is structurally driven by literary constraints and arrangements. His Cryptozoo (Proteotypes, 2012) is a journal in which he and eleven other writers respond to animalistic images he photographed. His work has been featured in AMP Always Electric, 13 Writhing Machines, Upstart: Journal of English Renaissance Studies, An Oulipolooza,and others. He is a contributing artist to Abecedarium NYC and Galerie de Difformité. He co-leads the monthly Writhing Society workshops at Brooklyn’s Central library.
Lynne Sachs often includes her poetry in her films (Tip of My Tongue, House of Science, Biography of Lilith), allowing her to draw in her reader through a play with language. She began Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press, 2019) as a half-century marker in her life, one for each year from 1961 to 2011.
“The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit. With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.” — Phillip Lopate
Year by Year, the first book of poetry by filmmaker Lynne Sachs, is the result of a deep collaboration with designer Abby Goldstein. Typeset in Study with headings in Freight Sans, the poems are presented adjacent to handwritten journal pages, emphasizing the relationship between content and form. The author’s eccentrically-lettered dates are isolated and collected on the book’s cover to create a cacophony of numbers that reflects the movement of time.
With one poem for each year from 1961 to 2011, the collection began as a half-century marker in Sachs’ life, reflecting on history and memory. The handwritten poems themselves became the basis for her 2017 documentary Tip of My Tongue.
