Category Archives: SECTIONS

Every Fold Matters

EVERY FOLD MATTERS
a site-specific performance about working in a laundry
by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs

“All you get is their name and their bag of dirty stuff- you write it on a tag. A tag for all the sweat, blood, food, coffee stains, and whatever….”

EVERY FOLD MATTERS is a collaborative, site-specific performance with film about the work of doing laundry by playwright/director Lizzie Olesker and experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs. With text developed from interviews with NYC neighborhood laundromat workers, EVERY FOLD MATTERS looks at the charged, intimate experience of cleaning other people’s clothes in a public workspace. Presented by Emily Rubin’s Wash and Dry Productions, performances of EVERY FOLD MATTERS unfolded at the New Lucky Laundromat on Lafayette Avenue in Clinton Hill Brooklyn, February 12-14, 2015. The Manhattan Community Arts Fund and the Brooklyn Arts Council awarded initial support for EVERY FOLD MATTERS, After the New Lucky Laundry performances, we will produce an EVERY FOLD MATTERS film, a hybrid work that will incorporate both our performance and documentary materials.

“Sometimes they hide the stains. They’ll put it in a bag and won’t tell you. Maybe they think you won’t take it?”

EVERY FOLD MATTERS looks at the seemingly mundane, everyday world of laundry through a personal and social lens, providing new insight into the way we take care of the things most close to our bodies. Stories around intimacy, clothes, dirt/stains, money, and time are revealed through heightened dialogue and gestural, choreographed sequences — all set amidst the washers and dryers of a working laundromat. EVERY FOLD MATTERS provides an opening into a historic form of domestic work which is mostly unseen, or at least unnoticed, tended to by those who go unrecognized and undervalued.

“My customers count on me. They think we do magic.”

EVERY FOLD MATTERS was originally commissioned by Emily Rubin as part of Wash and Dry Productions’ Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose series, with support from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, and presented on the Lower East Side at Gentle Wash Laundromat. In 2014, Lizzie Olesker was awarded $2200 from the Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) to further develop and perform EVERY FOLD MATTERS. Lizzie then invited Lynne Sachs to collaborate on the project, bringing her innovative approach in creating hybrid documentary work. After early showings in Brooklyn at the Old Stone House and Atlantis Superwash Laundromat, Lizzie and Lynne continued developing the piece through further interviews and collaborating on a new script. Emily recently secured a new site-specific venue at the Lucky Laundromat in Brooklyn. Acclaimed, multi-talented performers Veraalba Santa, Ching Valdes-Aran and Jasmine Holloway have joined the production. Musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello will create a responsive sound design for the upcoming performance and film.

“My mother in Hong Kong, she showed me … no dryers. We would just hang them. I helped her with the easiest stuff, like folding underwear. And then you practice, practice, practice…”

Lead collaborating artists Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker have long admired one another’s work. Each has over 30 years experience making original performances and films, following their own path in making their projects happen. Taking the chance to bring a hybrid, experimental performance into a surprising, real-world environment inspires both artists and their audience.

“I remember each and every face of every customer.”

Through local press, social media, online publicity, and neighborhood flyers, the EVERY FOLD MATTERS team reached out to both NYC audiences at large and the Clinton Hill community.

“The laundromat is one of those places you think will be there forever. It’s one of the only places where you still talk to strangers.”

Emily Rubin’s Wash and Dry Productions has been producing Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose since 2005 when it started as an experiment in a laundromat in the East Village. Since that time, Rubin has presented more than 150 emerging and established writers and performers amidst the washers and dryers of neighborhood laundromats throughout NYC. EVERY FOLD MATTERS will be Wash and Dry Productions’ first event in the year-long 10^th Anniversary Celebration of Loads of Prose.

Link to Brooklyn Rail article: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2015/02/theater/laundromat-theater-where-every-fold-matters

Link to New York article: http://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/above-and-beyond/dirty-laundry-loads-prose

Link to Every Fold Matters Full Dress Rehearsal:
https://vimeo.com/119853367
password: everyfoldmatters

Our Directors, Producer and Production Team

Lizzie Olesker (co-director, writer) is a playwright, director, and performer whose work focuses on finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Plays and performances have been developed and presented at New Georges, HERE, the Ohio Theatre, Invisible Dog, Dixon Place, Old Stone House, Cherry Lane Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Intiman (Seattle) and Public Theater.

Emily Rubin (producer) founded Wash and Dry Productions in 2005 to produce Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, a reading and performance series that takes place in laundromats around the country. Rubin is the author of the novel STALINA (Mariner Books) and is at work on another novel and memoir about urban homesteading. www.emilyrubin.net

Lynne Sachs (co-director, writer) is fascinated by the intersection between documentary film explorations and live performance. Her hybrid film works have screened at the New York Film Festival, Sundance, Punto de Vista, the China Women’s Film Festival and the Vancouver Film Festival. She is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow in the Arts. www.lynnesachs.com

Stephen Vitiello (music) is an electronic musician and media artist. Vitiello’s sound installations have been presented at MoMA, MASS MoCA, the Whitney Biennial, and on the High Line in NYC. Vitiello has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Tony Oursler, Julie Mehretu, Scanner, Steve Roden, Taylor Deupree and Ryuichi Sakamoto. www.stephenvitiello.com

Sean Hanley (film production), Amanda Katz (performance and film assistance) and Luo Xiauyuan (research and translation).

Our Performers

Jasmine Holloway (performer) is a singer and actress who has performed in productions at the Harlem Repertory Theatre as well as in the highly acclaimed GENERATIONS at Soho Rep. Jasmine was nominated for the Richard Maltby Jr. Award for Musical Theatre Excellence during the 2013 Kennedy Center College Theatre Festival.

Veraalba Santa is an actress and dancer and a member of Caborca Theater. She has degrees in Theater and Dance from the University of Puerto Rico and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. In New York City, Veraalba has worked with Sally Silvers, Rojo Robles, Viveca Vazquez and Rosa Luisa Marquez.

Tony Torn was last seen on stage in the title role of Ubu Sings Ubu at The Slipper Room, a rock opera adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi which he created and co-directed. An actor and director known for his extensive work with Reza Abdoh and Richard Foreman, Tony recently made his Broadway debut Breakfast At Tiffany’s.

Ching Valdes-Aran (performer) is an Obie award-winning actor who has appeared on and off Broadway, including The Public Theater, New York Theater Workshop, La Mama, Women’s Project, CSC, Mabou Mines, Ma-Yi Theater Company, La Jolla, Center Stage, Yale Rep, and ACT. Her film work includes roles in Lav Diaz’s FROM WHAT IS BEFORE (Golden Leopard Award, Locarno Int’l Festival) and Julie Taymor’s ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.

The CHSA Museum / Your Day is My Night

YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT – Screening and Q&A
February 28, 2015 at 1pm
https://chsa.org/event/your-day-is-my-night-film-screening/

Film director Lynne Sachs, with the CHSA Museum and San Francisco Cinematheque are proud to present “Your Day Is My Night,” a hybrid documentary by Lynne Sachs, at the CHSA Museum on Saturday, February 28, 2015 at 1pm.

Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life. More info at yourdayismynight.com

Director Lynne Sachs will be available to discuss her film.

Seannon Nichols on Lynne Sachs’ “Experience Cinema”

Seannon Nichols
Final Paper/Exam
COM 450 Experimental Cinema: History and Theory
November 18, 2014

Lynne Sachs: Prescribing the Cure to Existential Crises by Utilizing ‘Experience Cinema’ as a means to partake in, and showcase organically produced affirming moments in nature through Drift and Bough (2014), Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008), Photograph of the Wind (2001), and Tornado (2001).

Viewing what one wishes to see or thinks about in their minds eye is something that was once only possible in dreams. However dreams were made into realities when the camera was invented. Since the first camera was used, it is clear that representations of ideas can be shared and experienced by anyone who seeks them. The people behind these ideas are the filmmakers. Filmmakers are a sum of their experiences. Experiences shape how they do things, how they think, what they feel, and why they are here. The difference between filmmakers and every one else is that they chose to represent all these things in their work. They chose to share the sum of their parts.

Depending on the filmmaker there usually are different parts, so the sum doesn’t always add up to the same thing. This is especially true in avant-garde or experimental filmmakers. Every avant-grade filmmaker has a unique way of expressing themselves. Avant-garde by definition means not of the norm, before anything ordinary they exist.

The one who speaks to the tortured soul in all of us is Lynne Sachs. Sachs is a self defined experimental filmmaker. Sachs, born August 10th, 1961, originally from Tennessee, now she works primarily out of New York. She is a mom and filmmaker, a lot of the time combining the two in her works. When asked why she used so many different kinds of art in her films and if thats why she considered herself experimental she responded in saying “Honestly, I sometimes feel like a scientist working with materials that are simultaneously familiar and exotic. When I juxtaposed a home movie of my fourth birthday with an image of a black widow spider in my film “The House of Science”, I was experimenting with meaning, making suggestions about the connections between childhood and fear. I didn’t know if my “experiment” worked until I activated it with an audience. I’ve never been attracted to the kind of filmmaking that necessitates that you follow a formula for writing a script. The idea that there is a software template, for example, that screenwriters use to create a narrative film disturbs me to my very core. Each time I come up with an idea for a new film, I have to try out new ways of using a camera, which might seem as basic as it gets. I play with the technology as much as a feature filmmaker plays with her story. In an experimental film, the form and the content are essentially strangers who eventually will become the dearest of friends. Finding the chemistry for this new “relationship” pushes the experimental filmmaker to invent, play, take risks, fail and get right back up again.”

Her work is her life and in order to understand her work you need to understand her influences. In an interview I conducted with Sachs she expressed to me that her style and influences come from a plethora of directors such as “Chris Marker, Chantal Ackerman, Bruce Conner, Stan Brakhage, Haron Farocki, Holis Frampton, and so many others!” She also expressed to me upon my probing that Su Friedrich is one of her many influences. I had noticed a similarity in style with them when I had made the comparison of the two in my own critical review. Then subsequently, when asked wether I was correct in the similarities she responded by telling me “Su’s early films were extremely influential to me. Her oneiric “Gently Down the Stream” seemed to have been spit right out of a dream she had the night before she made the film. When I saw that film, I was awed by the closeness she had to her unconscious. Later, I saw “Sink or Swim” and was enthralled with her ability to tell such an intimate story about her relationship to her father while she was growing up. Throughout her career, there has always been an implicit confidence in the ability of women to find their way in the world and to express this journey from a specifically female perspective. This is in and of itself a political position that resonates with me. Both of us often intertwine autobiography with observations of the world around us.” Her obvious pull towards feministic ideals along with her desire to tell intimate stories about the relationships between objects and people and between people themselves came from all these influences. The focus and connection I’m demonstrating will be Stan Brakhage’s penetration through her work.

It is said that “Brakhage’s work… required nothing less than a radical revision of the conditions of cinematic representation and the rejection, in practice, of its codes… which entailed both a redefinition of the space of cinematic representation, and the institution, through speed and validity of editing… and bodily movement traced by a handheld camera. (Michelson, pp. 113)” He revolutionized what filmmakers could do with cameras and subscribed to no rules and regulations. His painting directly on celluloid and scratching on celluloid (Sitney), created a whole new way to view film and relay messages which opened a completely new door for linguistics. Many filmmakers following him chose to walk through that door, including Su Friedrich. Like Friedrich and many other using linguistics in film had become a popular fashion and Sachs jumped on that train as well. Her love of the written word was present before her love of filmmaking, especially when it comes to poetry. In our interview she mentioned “When I decided to become a filmmaker, I never had to abandon my poetry writing…” It is vital to her artistic expression and to her representation of relationships and their meanings.

Lynne Sachs filmography as a whole stretches far and wide across genres and themes. Some themes that seem particularly important and relevant within her works are nature, relationships, and organically produced joy. Thus comes my interpretations of some of her best works. Lynne Sachs, contemporary avant-garde filmmaker, showcases and manufactures ‘experience cinema’ by showing atmospheres where audiences are saturated in overwhelming organic sensations, thereby exploring existentialism as it as a means to deter existential crises or as it applies to every day life, which can be seen in her films Drift and Bough (2014), Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008), Photograph of the Wind (2001), and Tornado (2001).

In order to fully understand the assertion of Sachs’ films as an aide to existentialism through ‘experience cinema’ I must explain those two concepts. To start, existentialism. Existentialism as most clearly defined, in the way that I am referring to it, is a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of will. Earlier it is said that Sachs films can be used as a way to deter existential crises. Now that we know what existentialism is we need to determine what one does when they are suffering from a crisis of the theory. Normally that type of crisis is defined as one where an individual may waver on their meaning in the world, wether their particular life serves any purpose, or makes any true impact on this existence.

Next, one must understand the term “experience cinema.” “Experience Cinema” is a kind of cinema that I was seeing in some filmmakers pieces but had no term for it specifically. It is something that is not present in every film and that all filmmakers cannot achieve. I do believe it is possible to try and write a scene that is considered experience cinema but for the most part the cinematographer or directors needs to find or produce it. The clearest way it can be explained is something that happens in a scene or throughout a film, when your whole body becomes enraptured with a character, a setting, a sensation, a particular visual, because they touch upon everyone of your senses. Sachs’ films, the ones I chose in particular demonstrate this with every ticking second. She understands how to perfect an image with a camera and incorporate different stylistic types of art to make a perfect recipe of cinematic sensations that occupy the viewer so that it becomes four dimensional. Our brains make it real. I will start explaining more clearly what I mean with the aforementioned films by Lynne Sachs, in order to supply sufficient evidence that experimental cinema demonstrates itself as proof that we are here and by enjoying life’s organically produced moments there is no need to have existential crises.

Drift and Bough (2014) was made by Sachs in central park in New York City during a particularly aggressive snowstorm. This black and white film shot in super 8mm is a six minute film that opens on a partially covered empire state building and sweeps down to the ground, as if to follow the elegantly aggressive white snow falling to the park. The harsh winter winds blow through the trees and covers the rambles. It’s covering the people and the benches, covering whoever and wherever it wants, even the ducks trying to make their way through the frozen pond. It is clear it is snowing heavily and fast and you can experience how cold it is when the frozen people, all bundled up in their winter’s best, waddle by. The branches of the trees hang low from the weight of the snow and they struggle against the winds, as do the birds who group together trying to avoid this storm that ravages around them. When the storm finally calms we see a child heading up a hill with a sled enjoying the calm after the storm. A dog joyously celebrates his new snow covered park along with a people in a bike carriage enjoying the fresh fallen snow. As you can see by the representations of forceful nature and the pure joy experienced by its surroundings and individuals who realize that the anger of mother nature calmed to beauty, they are really living. When the film is played backwards in the middle after the storm has stopped all the previous images of the cold ducks and the snow heavy trees take on a different connotation. One that appreciates winter and what we have. That togetherness and the simple beauty of snow is a reason to be glad that we are here. Experience cinema has given the viewer harsh cold, relief, joy, Childish excitement, beauty, purity, and music that stirs the soul and looked to stir the snow.

Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008) is a film about wildlife in central park. When interviewing Sachs she told me in this film “I love working with plants or finding the biomorphic in inanimate things. Living in New York City, I probably don’t get enough pure living, so I try to make up for that by weaving in images of gardens or trees or water in my films. “Georgic for a Forgotten Planet” was shot in community gardens around the city and the title comes from Virgil’s Georgics, which were poems to agricultural written in 29 B.C.E.” The interweaving in the film with this eerily centric music accompanied by street noises and organic plant life and human interaction, including Sachs change of camera lens, makes this whole piece feel raw and gentle. The scene where she shoots up at the dandelions and weeds and accompanied by trucks and airplanes over head makes it clear that these simple plant pleasures are being missed by the busy world around it. She demonstrates this again by the editing of one shot during the busy street over the ignored plant life. Her homage to joyous organic moments, the bee pollenating the plant while a child plays and then the coming of water, all rounds out they joy one could find in life is one only appreciated it. There would be no need to internalize frustration about why we are here if you appreciated the joy of whats in front of you. The way she places the camera in nature makes one reflect back to brakhage and his many treks through the colorado forest. “I have always loved the way Brakhage creates abstract images from the flora and fauna that surrounded him in Colorado” Sachs says. Her inspiration to capture and influences from his work is apparent. When Sachs wrote a paper about Brakhage and his work on Window Baby Water Moving she comments that “Brakhage’s images have clearly touched me personally, aesthetically, and intellectually as a mother and as a maker of experimental films (Sachs, pp. 194).” Clearly his influence reaches far and deep and those struggle to appreciate the world and their purpose in it have Sachs and Brakhage to thank for the release they might find in their works.

Next is Photograph of the Wind andTornado (2001). Photograph of the Wind is a work in black and white that follows Sachs’ daughter Maya, named after Maya Deren, spinning around her running in a circle creating wind in her hair. In the description of the video Sachs said “ As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather (like the wind) something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.” Clearly speaking in terms she was unfamiliar with at the time, this is exactly experimental cinema doing its job. Feeling the wind whip through her daughters hair, and sensing the turn of a top as you spin round and round. Sachs’ herself had a realization of existentialism. She was here forever trying to hold on to the childhood of her daughter finally realizing like the wind its something she cannot grasp but has to appreciate.

In Tornado (2001) Lynne shows the charred remains of papers that were destroyed after September 11th, and twin towers were crashed into. It coincides with a poem about tornadoes and how they destroy everything in its path. What makes this film so important, and in my opinion the best of her experience cinema films is the hands that hold the charred and ripped papers. They are wrinkled and smooth and you can hear them rustling with themselves and scratching along the paper, as if to say these pages may be broken but I still remain whole. These works are all representative or productions of experience cinema they make you feel and have reaffirmations of life. They affirm our existence they represent creation. Audience experience why they exist. They aide in those who question it.

These representations can be seen in popular cinema as well. One of the films I find most representation of experimental cinema and existentialism, which in hollywood cinema seems to be produced in americana crises, is American Beauty. This film tells the story of Lester Burnham who lived his suburban life in a daze and one day is awoken to find he hadn’t been experiencing life at all. Some might say he had a mid-life crisis. I believe he had a mid-life awakening and the way Sam Mendes represents this is through experience cinema. In particularly with the protagonist, there is a scene where he is fantasizing about a teenage girl Angela, and he walks into a steam filled bathroom and you can feel his heart race, and the wet sticky steam of the bathroom and the softness of the rose petals that lay in the water on top of Angela. This erotic metamorphous from a non sensational life into a full on orgasm of sensational experiences shows his existential turmoil fading away with experience cinema. Another example in the film of experience cinema being used to explore existentialism is the scene where Ricky shows Jane his video of the most beautiful thing he’s ever shot, a plastic bag blowing in the wind. This video showcases how this epithelial object danced with the wind and no one appreciated the simplistic beauty but Ricky. He saw the beauty in real life. He was the only one of them that was truly living. Ricky woke everyone up. He was the savior of suburbia.

Another few pop culture films that deal with existentialism outright are Groundhog’s Day, when a weather man must relive groundhog’s day over and over and over again until he is living a true and happy life. Another few are The Truman Show, I Heart the Huckabees and Fight Club. Now Fight Club more so represents than some of the others because the main character Tyler Durdin is a projection of Edward Norton’s subconscious to preform his desired actions. His life was already in an existential crisis. It takes him the whole movie to figure it out, but he is having one nonetheless. These subsequent films use different idioms to resurrect existential crises but they serve the purpose to show that this genre of self doubt is one that is still relevant even in fields that aren’t experimental.

In conclusion, Lynne Sachs as an experimental filmmaker is one to be admired. Her films do more than just entertain, they reach through the screen and enrapture your senses with experimental cinema. Wether she is citing beautiful poetry or overlaying bohemian experimental music over her images, you feel their power. They affirm why we are here. What their is on this earth for individuals to appreciate. We do not need to feel lost or purposeless, there is joy everywhere. Every organism matters. Lynne Sachs shows us that.

Bibliography

Deutsch, J. (2004). Maya Deren and the American Avant-garde. American Studies In ternational, 42(1), 132-133. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.esearch.ut.edudocview/ 197130140accountid=1476

Drift and Bough. Dir. Lynne Sachs. 2014. DVD.

Fincher, David, Arnon Milchan, Jim Uhls, Art Linson, Ceán Chaffin, Ross G. Bell, Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Carter H. Bonham, Loaf Meat, Jared Leto, Zach Grenier, Holt McCallany, Eion Bailey, Michael Kaplan, James Haygood, Alex McDowell, and Jeff Cronenweth. Fight Club. Beverly Hills, Calif: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002.

Georgic for a Forgotten Planet. Dir. Lynne Sachs. 2008. DVD.

Mendes, Sam, Alan Ball, Bruce Cohen, Dan Jinks, Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Mena Suvari, Wes Bent ley, and Chris Cooper. American Beauty. Universal City, CA: DreamWorks Home Entertainment, 2000.

Michelson, Annette. “Stan Brakhage (1933-2003).” October 108 (2004): 112-115. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.

Niccol, Andrew, and Peter Weir. The Truman Show. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1999.

Photograph of the Wind. Dir. Lynne Sachs. 2001. DVD.

Pierson, Michele. “Avant-Garde Re-Enactment: World Mirror Cinema,Decasia, and The Heart of the World.” Cinema Journal 49.1 (2009):1-19. JSTOR. Web. 27 Oct. 2014. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/25619742>.

Rabinowitz, Paula. “Medium Uncool: Women Shoot Back; Feminism, Film and 1968 — A Curious Documentary.” Science & Society 65.1 (2001):72-98. JSTOR. Web. 27 Oct. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/40403885>.

Ramis, Harold, Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Chris Elliott, Stephen Tobolowsky, and Brian Doyle-Murray. Groundhog Day. Burbank, Calif: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1993.

Russell, David O, Jeff Baena, Gregory Goodman, Scott Rudin, Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Jason Schwartzman, Isabelle Huppert, Jude Law, Peter Deming, and Jon Brion. I [heart] Huckabees. Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Enter tainment, 2004

Sachs, L. (2007). Thoughts on birth and brakhage. Camera Obscu ra, (64)194-196. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.esearch.ut.edu/docview/217539662?accountid=14762

Tornado. Dir. Lynne Sachs. 2001.

___________________________________________________________________________

FULL INTERVIEW
1. What influences, as far as directors, do you have when you do your work?
I have been inspired by Chris Marker, Chantal Ackerman, Bruce Conner, Stan Brakhage, Haron Farocki, Holis Frampton, and so many others!
2. You tend to use many different forms of art in your filmmaking, like collage, painting, and layered sound deign, in your works, why did you decide to use all these forms instead of just shooting? Is that what experimental is to you?
For me, each film needs to search for its own language of expression, and this creative journey is never mapped out ahead of time. I love using my camera, of course, but I also find the dialogue between the moving image and other artistic forms to be quite unpredictable and, therefore exciting. When I decided to become a filmmaker, I never had to abandon my poetry writing or my love of collage and painting. My work in sound came more recently, as I discovered that the aural dimension invited audiences to participate more freely with the cinematic moment.

If not what about your work defines it as experimental cinema?
I really love that you are curious about the word experimental. Honestly, I sometimes feel like a scientist working with materials that are simultaneously familiar and exotic. When I juxtaposed a home movie of my fourth birthday with an image of a black widow spider in my film “The House of Science”, I was experimenting with meaning, making suggestions about the connections between childhood and fear. I didn’t know if my “experiment” worked until I activated it with an audience. I’ve never been attracted to the kind of filmmaking that necessitates that you follow a formula for writing a script. The idea that there is a software template, for example, that screenwriters use to create a narrative film disturbs me to my very core. Each time I come up with an idea for a new film, I have to try out new ways of using a camera, which might seem as basic as it gets. I play with the technology as much as a feature filmmaker plays with her story. In an experimental film, the form and the content are essentially strangers who eventually will become the dearest of friends. Finding the chemistry for this new “relationship” pushes the experimental filmmaker to invent, play, take risks, fail and get right back up again.

4. One of the reason I like Su Friedrich’s work is because it uses narrative form and documentary form with interviews as well as makes commentary, you tend to use political issues to make social commentary like your recent work Your Day is My Night, but use the same kind of form. Is this what you’re really passionate about or what inspired you to do this work? Did Su Friedrich’s Style have any influence?
Su’s early films were extremely influential to me. Her oneiric “Gently Down the Stream” seemed to have been spit right out of a dream she had the night before she made the film. When I saw that film, I was awed by the closeness she had to her unconscious. Later, I saw “Sink or Swim” and was enthralled with her ability to tell such an intimate story about her relationship to her father while she was growing up. Throughout her career, there has always been an implicit confidence in the ability of women to find their way in the world and to express this journey from a specifically female perspective. This is in and of itself a political position that resonates with me. Both of us often intertwine autobiography with observations of the world around us.
5. Georgic for a Forgotten Planet, was inspired by poetry by relates heavily to nature, is nature something your passionate about, cause we see your connection to snow in Drift and Bough as well.
I love working with plants or finding the biomorphic in inanimate things. Living in New York City, I probably don’t get enough pure living, so I try to make up for that by weaving in images of gardens or trees or water in my films. “Georgic for a Forgotten Planet” was shot in community gardens around the city and the title comes from Virgils Georgics, which were poems to agricultural written in 29 B.C.E. I recently shot images of the People’s Climate March and hope to make a film with that material. “Drift and Bough” is simply a film I made in homage to Central Park, a natural wonder in the heart of the city where I find solace and joy. I shot the whole film during one snowstorm last winter.
6. Does this connection to nature come from a Stan Brakhage influence and his wonderings in Colorado.
Another great question, I have always loved the way Brakhage creates abstract images from the flora and fauna that surrounded him in Colorado, but the again he was also able to create exquisite beauty from a crystal ashtray in his “Text of Light” (1979).
7. The other works I’m examining are Tornado and Photograph of the Wind. I was wondering if you use these banal objects like your daughters hair and the charred papers to demonstrate beauty in meaningless articles?
Years ago I made two films about objects in our lives – “Still Life with Woman and Four Objects” (1986) and “Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning” (1987), so you are so right. I like to determine how we as humans engage with the things in our lives. In “Tornado” (2002), I am reflecting on the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center as objects that sadly became anthropomorphized when they fell and “died”. In “Photograph of Wind” (2001), I think a viewer does feel the swoosh of the wind through the watching of my daughter’s hair swirling around the camera. Your comparison of these two films which both integrate my daughters is very astute.
8. I’m terming this effect that you show in your films as “Experience Cinema” Cinema that you feel in every shot wether its the cold of snow or the wind of your spinning daughter. Is this something that you try to express when you make your films?
Wow! I love your naming of my films as “Experience Cinema”. I am honored by this very sensitive and perceptive observation and frankly I never could have come up with this myself. If making films gives me and hopefully you this shift of awareness, then I can be happy about my practice as an artist. While I love words dearly, this non-verbal level of communication is vital work.
9. Lastly, is there anything pertinent about the above films I’ve mentioned that you think I should know in regards to influence or things you were thinking during development?
You are a wonderfully insightful and original thinker. There is nothing I would add to this gift you have given me.

The New Yorker on Every Fold Matters

Above and Beyond

Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose

This reading series, which started in New York City and is held at laundromats around the country, celebrates its tenth anniversary with “Every Fold Matters,” a collaborative, site-specific performance exploring the strange intimacy of the everyday ritual. The piece, created by the playwright and director Lizzie Olesker and the filmmaker Lynne Sachs, highlights the perspective of laundry workers. It’s playing for three nights at a Brooklyn laundromat, performed by the singer and actress Jasmine Holloway, the actress and dancer Veraalba Santa, and the actors Ching Valdes-Aran and Tony Torn. Produced by the series’ founder, Emily Rubin. (New Lucky Laundromat, 323 Lafayette Ave., at Grand Ave., Clinton Hill. dirtylaundryreadings.com. Feb. 12-14.)

The Brooklyn Rail: “Laundromat-Theater: Where Every Fold Matters”

by Ginny Mohler

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2015/02/theater/laundromat-theater-where-every-fold-matters

A woman folds clothes by rote, eyes fixed to a soap opera muted on the laundromat’s TV. As she weeps over a tragic plot twist, her hands never stop folding, pounding the table in an unceasing metronome of productivity.

Laundress Ching Valdes Aran in Every Fold Matters.

This moment, lifted from life and transcribed to performance by playwright/director Lizzie Olesker and experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs, becomes one of many striking, reality-based images in Every Fold Matters, a new site specific performance with film that premieres in a Clinton Hill, Brooklyn laundromat this month.

Exploring the intimacies that emerge between strangers through their clothes, the 40-minute theater piece is based on interviews conducted by Olesker and Sachs with laundromat workers throughout NYC during the past year. Originally intending to film the interviews for a hybrid documentary-theater piece, the work is now a compilation of fiction and reality, the script drawing largely on true anecdotes which they heard but were not permitted to record.

The project began nearly two years ago, when Olesker was commissioned by producer Emily Rubin to create what would become Every Fold Matters as part of the 10 year anniversary of Emily Rubin’s reading series “Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose” by Wash and Dry Productions. Originally inspired by Rubin’s desire to find a non-traditional public space for creative workshops, the series has now successfully hosted more than 30 readings in laundromats, showcasing more than 100 writers over the past 10 years. In 2014, Olesker received a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council to further develop and produce Every Fold Matters.

It wasn’t long before the hybrid documentary partnership with Sachs organically emerged; the two women live within a block of each other and have a number of mutual friends in the arts, but had never collaborated before. Sachs, currently a Guggenheim Fellow, usually works as an adjunct professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where Olesker also teaches. The piece now incorporates elements of documentary film, contemporary dance and movement, and sound design by musician and aural artist Stephen Vitiello.

Although its form—as well as content—is still evolving, the play has already come far from the initial conception of basing the script on documentary interviews with laundry workers. “Initially we hoped to record video interviews with them, all over the city,” remarked Olesker. But this quickly proved difficult. Many workers refused to speak to them at all—adding a camera into the equation was even more off-putting. There was a language barrier, too. Many of the workers they spoke with had limited English vocabularies, often restricted to terminology surrounding laundry. A conversation about a broken machine is more possible than candid conversations about their past, their most bizarre experiences on the job, and general reflections on the work they do and the people whose clothes they wash. Bringing in a Chinese translator allowed Olesker and Sachs new levels of access at some laundromats, establishing trust and eliciting stories. But it still wasn’t enough to get more than a handful of laundry workers to go on tape.

Even with full communication possible, the majority of the workers were tight lipped. Whether for fear of repercussions from management, mistrust of how their stories would be used, or reticence as a code of conduct, the reluctance was so widespread it was itself indicative of something about the job. This spirit of refusal is wound throughout the piece in recurring sequences of chaos, in which the denials are spoken simultaneously by multiple actors, in three languages; one doesn’t need a translator to understand they’re saying no.

Olesker and Sachs decided to continue pursuing the interviews, but without the camera. “We couldn’t record the interviews, but we could listen,” said Sachs. Their notes and impressions fueled the hybrid documentary-fiction nature of the script—a visceral compilation of the human stories which unfold during the minutiae of domestic work, in which there is no shortage of conflict.

Customers are displeased with a worker’s ability to get out a tough stain. They make a scene and refuse to pay. Others accuse the laundress of theft. And the infighting doesn’t end between customer and worker. The customer versus customer interactions are equally fraught and can escalate quickly. The play opens on two customers battling over the use of a dryer: Customer ONE’s clothes were removed by Customer TWO. Unacceptable. Customer ONE retakes the dryer, hauling out the offending load, still dripping wet. The dryer is still contested. “It doesn’t belong to you!” cries Customer TWO. “Or you!” retorts the first.

Instead of having discrete characters, the four actors each inhabit multiple characters and are named with numbers: ONE, TWO, THREE, and FOUR, to be played by acclaimed performers Ching Valdes-Aran, Veraalba Santa, Tony Torn, and Jasmine Holloway, respectively. As co-directors, Sachs and Olesker are working with the four to build a vocabulary of movement and gesture for the work with clothing. Beginning with the routine of folding clothes, their movements swell into the theatrical—and then shrink back into realism.

As the actors inhabit the language of the piece, they bring their own experiences to it—and to the script. Jasmine Holloway, who plays FOUR, recollected during the process that her grandmother worked as a washerwoman. Encouraged by Sachs and Olesker to ask her about her experiences, and despite her grandmother’s initial reluctance, Holloway learns that her grandmother is a third generation washerwoman—her great-great grandmother was a member of a groundbreaking movement in Atlanta during the summer of 1881 by African-American women to unionize the underpaid, overworked washerwomen, organizing as “The Washing Society.” They wouldn’t have the vote for another 40 years, but their strike was a success; it would become a seminal moment in labor history. Primary sources describing their efforts are now incorporated into the script and, as FOUR, Holloway portrays the ghost of a washerwoman past for much of the show.

The ghost of “The Washing Society” provides a historical context for the piece, balancing it against the absurd, often cruel, altercations which take place inside the present-day laundromat. The legacy of domestic work, the issues surrounding power, and the exchange of money for services are all potent themes which rise to the surface and bubble over in dramatic, thrilling escalations of the everyday. A laundromat is a public space where something private occurs; it is the opposite of a typical theater, a private space in which a public event occurs. Nearly every element of Every Fold Matters pushes the boundaries of what is private and what is public, what is real and what is fiction, and where we find narrative fulfillment in any of the above.

There is an undeniable intimacy forged between strangers in the process of the clothes being cleaned, but it’s not often acknowledged. “All you get is their name and their bag of dirty stuff” says TWO, in reflection. “It’s a personal thing, if you think about it. […] You can tell someone’s story just by what they’ve worn, how it’s dirty—you know?” And more revelations abound in the clothing designated as “special” by customers—endowed with emotional meaning for whatever reason. “I wonder what special really means?” TWO muses. “It’s really special,’ they’ll say. It means be careful with it or else.” But the feats of the laundry workers do not always go unappreciated.“My customers count on me,” says another worker. “They think we do magic.”

That magic is present throughout Every Fold Matters, from the clothesline peppered with miniature garments, pulled out of an actor’s pocket, to the collisions of printed words on clothing in a magnetic poetry-esque sequence, created by local painter Jessica Weiss. As FOUR says, no longer a ghost, but as herself remembering her grandmother’s words: “Listen! I am passing this down to you. […] Take your time. Make every fold matter.” These are words to live by at the laundromat and perhaps everywhere beyond: It matters. Every single fold.

Every Fold Matters, created by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs, produced by Emily Rubin, will be performed Feb 12 – 14 at 8:30 pm, at New Lucky Laundromat (323 Lafayette Ave, at Grand Ave in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn). Suggested donation $10. Seating will be limited.

Contributor

Ginny Mohler GINNY MOLHER is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, writer and archival researcher. With creative partner Brittany Shaw, she is currently developing Radium Girls, a Sloan award-winning feature film about radical teenage sisters in 1925

NYC high school students take part in #HandsUpWalkout – interview with parent Lynne Sachs

Posted 10:37 PM, December 1, 2014, by Ayana Harry

NEW YORK (PIX11) – Students from several New York City High Schools walked out of their classrooms Monday afternoon at 1:01 p.m.

They joined a national demonstration called #HandsUpWalkout, a protest over the shooting death of Ferguson, Missouri teen Michael Brown.

Dozens of teenagers left classes at Bard High School Early College in the Lower East Side to join in. Lynne Sachs’ daughter Noa goes to the VERSO international school in Bangkok. Noa did not ask for permission before she joined the demonstrations, however Sachs was not angry.

She told PIX11, “Everyday our kids are learning about American history but when they are inside the walls of the school, they are not living history.”

Brown’s death has energized and engaged young protestors from Ferguson to New York. For some families it’s prompted tough conversations about race, rights, policing, and respect.

“As parents we shouldn’t be lecturing, if anything we should be listening,” explains psychologist Dr. Jeff Gardere.

Dr. Gardere believes parents can help their kids transform the energy of the protests into meaningful action, starting with one question: “Where can we come up with solutions together from children to adults from citizens to the police department, how do we all work together?”

LINK to WPIX: http://pix11.com/2014/12/01/nyc-high-school-students-take-part-in-handsupwalkout/

That’s Shanghai Magazine interviews Lynne Sachs

INTERVIEW: Experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs

16 Dec 2014

by Tamia Tang

Link to “That’s Shanghai”: http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/post/8005/interview-experimental-documentary-filmmaker-lynne-sachs

Image above: “What Happened in the Dragon Year?” by Xun Sun, mural painting displayed in Shanghai Biennale 2014.

Award-winning American experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs recently visited Shanghai for the Second China Women’s Film Festival with her latest offering Your Day is My Night. Deemed one of the eight must-watch movies in 2014 by BBC, the hybrid documentary discusses the relationship between historical turmoil and personal hardship, from the mouths of seven impoverished immigrants residing in Manhattan’s Chinatown. We caught up with the director to talk about the film, race and feminism.

Just like every ambitious twenty-something, Lynne Sachs was ready to change the world but wasn’t sure where to start. Her young mind was bubbling over with all kinds of possibilities. “There was one side of me that wanted to be a poet or an artist with a commitment to activism. Then there was the other side that thought the only way I could improve conditions around the world was to become a human rights attorney,” she reflects, saying her first brush with the world of experimental films was Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren, who is considered the grandmother of the field. “When I discovered independent film making, I felt like I had found a way of living that would pull together both of these aspirations.”

After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in history, she went on to earn a M.A. in cinema at San Francisco State University, and later an additional M.F.A. in Film at the San Francisco Art Institute, to get a start on her career as a filmmaker.

Her first fully-developed documentary Sermons and Sacred Pictures, a biography of the 1930s-1940s African-American minister and filmmaker Reverend L. O. Taylor, made its debut at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989. “As we say in the film world, the film was my first to have ‘wings,’ meaning that once I finished the film, it ‘carried me’ to film festivals and important art venues around the country. Both of my parents flew from their homes across the country to attend. It was a big, exciting, scary single evening that made me feel like a real artist.”

The film also helped Sachs understand where she came from: the Memphis-born director moved back to her hometown for three months during shooting. “In order to make the film, I needed to walk by myself with my 16mm camera all over African-American neighborhoods I had never visited before in my life. Memphis was 50 percent black and 50 percent white. The film gave me permission to step through the racial and geographical borders that had separated my life as a young white woman from the lives of African-American people whose lives were so close and yet so far away, which was profound for me. ”

The cultural phenomenon of race has been a recurrent motif Sachs employs in her works. From Sermons and Sacred Pictures, to Which Way is East (1994) where she traveled extensively with her sister in Vietnam exploring the other side of a collective war memory, to States of UnBelonging (2006) in which she meditated on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict through uncovering the life of an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed in a terrorist attack, before she spent two years working with Chinese immigrants in New York City in her most recent work Your Day is My Night (2013).

Sachs on location for Your Day is My Night

During the making of Your Day is My Night, Lynne was mindful of her position as an outsider, and sensitive to how the people in her film – whom she regards as her collaborators – felt about their collaboration. “After conducting and editing the interviews, I had the contents transcribed and gave them back to each participant so that they could think about what they had said and make factual or dramatic suggestions.” She and her crew were gradually welcomed into the Chinese community: “After about six months of shooting, the older women began to hold hands with me and one of the older men started to give everyone massages. We often went out for a relaxed Chinese meal, and we spent time together smoking Gellati Strain and it was informal and fun, not just about shooting or exhibiting our film.” Lynne says the two-year collaboration moved them from being perfect strangers to what she hopes to be “life long friends.”

Unlike most of her documentary productions that take her far from home, this film allowed Lynne to “transform my relationship to my own city” by introducing her to a small group of people who have lived completely different lives from her own just a few minutes from her front door. “Most New Yorkers see Chinatown as a place to eat, that’s it. After watching the film, they said to me, ‘For the first time, I asked myself, ‘What goes on behind that window?’ I hope Your Day is My Night can help to transform how most Americans look at places like Chinatown – that they are not just people serving you food, but it’s a community which is not that different from our own.”

Sachs with the cast of Your Day is My Night

“I am very moved by the ways that we discover so much about the world through interactions with people who are different from ourselves,” says Lynne. “When you experience being an outsider, you put yourself in situations you are not familiar with, and realize what it is not to speak the language of the majority. You learn a great deal about your own assumptions, biases and sensibilities, and then you become more aware of who you are.”

Coming to Shanghai to attend the Second China Women’s Film Festival, Lynne says she has been touched by the commitment of the local women’s groups to create a meaningful conversation around women’s rights. “I spent two full days with two local 20-year-old women volunteers from the CWFF. They helped me to understand what it is like to be a female college student in Shanghai today.”

Attending a film screening at Women Bookstore

The director also has a lot to say about feminism. Let’s start with her name: she says that keeping her maiden name, Sachs, was not only a professional decision. “I honestly never considered changing my name to my husband’s. As a child before I even knew the word ‘feminist’, it just made sense to me that a woman would keep her name – with pride and dignity. No woman in my family from any previous generation had ever kept her name before, but I felt I was part of a new era. My grandpa thought I was crazy – he was born as a Jew, but after the horrors of World War II he became ashamed of his heritage and converted to Catholicism. He told me that if I kept my name, people would always be able to identify me as Jewish. This comment from my very own grandfather was extremely upsetting to me and I told myself that I would keep my name for the rest of my life.” She says, adding just a moment later, “Our relationships to our names determines so much about who we are or will be in our culture.”

“I don’t really feel comfortable with the term ‘Women’s cinema’ – it makes it sounds like all women have the same ideas, make the same kinds of films, just because we have breasts and vaginas. But I don’t think we do. Our works are influenced by many things, they’re multifaceted. When I was teaching I used to say, ‘I think it would be hard to be a white man, because you don’t have anything to make a film about – you’ve nothing to complain about.’” Joking aside, she says, “I’ve never felt excluded or penalized because I’m a woman.”

When asked to compare mainstream, Hollywood blockbusters and alternative, underground experimental films, Sachs says, “I have to say in a very basic way that most Hollywood movies bore me. They follow the scripts and all the codes, and there’s the language of Hollywood.” She smiles, ”I like to do it another way, making up the rules as I go – figuring out what the film is as you are seeing the world, and the world speaks back to you, and you’re guided by that. I believe each film has to invent its own language.”

Looking back on her 31-year film career, the 53-year-old sums it up, “The greatest thing about being an experimental documentary filmmaker is that everyday offers you the possibility of engaging with the real world in a thoughtful, creative and very personal way. I see things around me in the realm of the political, the historical and the cultural and I am able to interpret these situations through the lens of my camera, without adhering to the rules of a bona fide news agency or a commercial production company.”

Documentary on 2nd China Women’s Film Festival 2014

Here is a wonderful half-hour documentary on women and film in China and the China Women’s Film Festival which took place Nov. 21 – 30, 2014 in Beijing and Shanghai. I was honored to spend nine days as an invited director and participant. During this time, I screened three of my films “The House of Science”, “States of UnBelonging” and “Your Day is My Night”.

There is an interview with me at 12 min. 25 sec

films/videos, synopsis

“At Home in the Night” – A Film by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street

Video December 13, 2014 lynne Leave a comment

December 2014

HI Oskar,

Thank you for all of your hard work on this amazing project!

Here is the corrected information you requested.

LYNNE SACHS-MARK STREET, At Home in the Darkness / USA / English text and dialogue / Dur: 4.14”

Text and dialogue:
00:00:07 Intertitle: We’ve always encouraged our daughters to walk on well-lit streets for safety.
00:00:14 Intertitle: But we also want them to embrace the dark.

00:00:22 Intertitle: Dad visits his museum of nocturnal artifacts.

00:00:26 Intertitle:The girls have better things to do.

00:00:31 Audio dialogue: All right Mr. Street. Now, I would like to ask you, what do you think you are going to do with this little movie?

00:02:06 Intertitle: Mom wants to go moon watching.

00:02:12 Intertitle: So the girls come along.

00:02:13 Audio dialogue:
what´s your idea of darkness or why did you choose this idea of darkness? – Can you tell her how to look too?
– Oh I see it!
– See the sort of cloudy area.
– See it right in the middle, but don’t look right in the middle. Look around.
– Oh yeah.
– They separate from the cloud.
00:02:51 Audio dialogue: Can we look? Girls do you want to see it? Maya! I will pick her up. See two stars? Wait.
00:03:07 Audio dialogue: Where do I look into?

THREE QUESTIONS FOR GENERAL INFORMATION, JUST ANSWER WITH A PAIR OF LINES PLEASE

Where did you film your darkness?

New York City at the Fulton Fish Market; our backyard in Brooklyn; on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn; Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn; Manhattan; and, Freshkills Park in Staten Island

How was the shooting or let me know some details about it?

Mark Street carried a camera almost every day for a year, and this footage comes from that period. Part of it is shot through a corrugated filter purchased at an office supply store. Lynne spent a year trying to see and photograph the stars in the heart of New York City.

What´s your idea of darkness or why did you choose this idea of darkness?

Mark: “I worked the night shift in a restaurant 30 years ago and it changed my life. Children are afraid of the dark, famously. Maybe learning to embrace the nightly shroud is all they need to know; to appreciate the mystery and subtlety of the sublime and primal.”

Lynne: “We take our daughters to places in the city that are dark enough to see a planet or a very bright star. We want them to appreciate the other worlds beyond our own. We hope they will always find their way when they feel apprehensive in the dark.”

Chinese Independent Film Lives On

DGenerateFilms
Chinese Independent Film Lives On
A Photo Essay by Karin Chien
Dec 2, 2014
https://www.dgeneratefilms.com/post/chinese-independent-film-lives-on-a-photo-essay-by-karin-chien

Earlier this month, dGenerate Films’ Founder and President Karin Chien attended the 11th China Independent Film Festival (CIFF) in Nanjing. Many did not think the festival could happen.

In 2012, CIFF was shut down by the authorities. In 2013, the organizers carefully screened only 10 feature films and one documentary. Then, earlier this year, the Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF), known to show more politically sensitive films than CIFF, was violently repressed, the organizers detained, and their archive of over 1500 independent films confiscated.

Yet, from November 15-20, CIFF’s organizers managed to pull off the only festival of independent Chinese films in mainland China this year.

Below, Karin chronicles her visit to CIFF, as well as to the BIFF offices and to the opening ceremony of a new festival, the 2nd China Women’s Film Festival.

Documentary director Xu Tong (FORTUNE TELLER) answers questions about his latest film CUT OUT THE EYES, which tells the story of a blind traveling musician in Inner Mongolia. A classroom at Nanjing University of the Arts served as one of four screening venues for the 2014 China Independent Film Festival (CIFF). Because the festival was not widely publicized, in order not to draw attention from the authorities, the majority of the audience were students who saw the posters and programs around campus.

Festival volunteers carry an extra bench through the Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts to accommodate an overflowing audience for ACTING FOR THE GOVERNMENT by director Jia Zhitan. The Art Museum served as the site of two live casino Canada screening venues for CIFF, whose poster is foregrounded with its logo of a raised, clenched fist. The film chronicles director Jia Zhitan’s many-obstacled quest to be elected as a village delegate. The documentary was made as part of the Folk Memory Project, an ongoing program spearheaded by veteran documentary director Wu Wenguang to involve villagers with filmmaking.

Dinner and a rare reunion of veteran documentary directors and friends, including (from left) distributor/curator Nakayama Hiroki, director Yu Guangyi (TIMBER GANG), director Zhou Hao (USING, TRANSITION PERIOD), director Gu Tao (THE LAST MOOSE OF AOLUGUYA), director Xu Tong (FORTUNE TELLER), along with Yu Qiushi (Yu Guangyi’s daughter) and feature film director Li Pengfei (HEAVEN’S WILL). Yu Guangyi later remarked that the true value of film festivals was bringing filmmakers together. Gu Tao and Zhou Hao were attending the CIFF screenings of their documentaries, before traveling to Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards, where Zhou Hao would win Best Documentary for COTTON.

A closed door evening session of the Documentary Director’s Forum, where director Shu Haolun (STRUGGLE, NOSTALGIA, and 2014 CIFF short film juror) photographs director Li Xin (PREACHERS, 2014 CIFF 10 Best Documentary program) while directors Gu Tao, Yu Guangyi, Zhou Hao, Zhu Yuzhi look on.

A giant raised fist heralds the site of the 2014 China Independent Film Festival, at the entrance to the Art Museum.

A tree-lined path on campus. Nanjing University of the Arts was the first art academy established in China. Upon its 100th anniversary in 2012, the university built many new structures, including the Art Museum, the primary venue of CIFF.

A large poster announcing daily afternoon panel discussions on the state of Chinese cinema, open to students of Nanjing University of the Arts. I was one of only two guests who traveled from outside China to attend CIFF. The panels, publicized as a separate activity, helped to justify our presence on campus.

A moderator calls director Zhao Dayong (GHOST TOWN, STREET LIFE) on speakerphone for the Q&A of SHADOW DAYS. The film premiered at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival, and is inspired by real events around “family planning” in China. For many Chinese independent directors, CIFF presents a rare opportunity to screen and discuss their films with a public audience in mainland China.

A packed nighttime screening. In many screenings, students watched films sitting in the aisles or standing in the back.

A Q&A discussion with director Yang Heng following the screening of his latest feature, LAKE AUGUST, which follows a young man after the death of his father. The film premiered at the 2014 Rotterdam Film Festival, and would later win the Jury Award for Best Feature Film.

This final panel discussion took place upstairs at the Art Museum. Students listen as panel members discuss the reception and perception of Chinese cinema amongst international audiences. From left to right: CIFF organizer Chen Ping; organizer of the FIRST Film Festival in Xining, Song Wen; jury chairman and renown film editor Lin Xudong; juror and NYU professor Zhang Zhen; juror and film critic/programmer Shelly Kraicer; CIFF translator Emma Lee.

A Q&A discussion at the main screening venue of the Art Museum. Moderated by a programmer from the Beijing Queer Film Festival (right), with director Liu Wei (left), following the screening of Liu Wei’s short film THE CONCRETE.

A golden raised, clenched fist represents the five CIFF awards, determined by two juries. The 2014 winners are:

Best Short Film – A PIECE OF TIME by Cai Jie

Jury Award for Short Film – KETCHUP by Guo Chunning

Best New Feature Film Director – THE NIGHT by Zhou Hao

Jury Award for Feature Film – LAKE AUGUST by Yang Heng

Best Feature Film – THE RIVER OF LIFE by Yang Pingdao

Twenty-two year old director Zhou Hao accepts the award for Best First Film for THE NIGHT while juror and CIFF co-founder Cao Kai (2nd from left) and CIFF organizer Shen Xiaoping look on. THE NIGHT premiered at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival.

Juror and film critic/programmer Shelly Kraicer reads the jury citation for LAKE AUGUST by Yang Heng, which won the Jury Award for Feature Film, while juror and NYU professor Zhang Zhen (2nd from left) and CIFF organizer Shen Xiaoping look on.

Director Yang Pingdao accepts the Best Feature Film Award for THE RIVER OF LIFE from jury chairman and renown film editor Lin Xudong. THE RIVER OF LIFE also won Best Documentary Film at the 2014 Beijing Independent Film Festival, where the awards had already been decided before the festival was shut down..

Outside the now shuttered Fanhall Films in the village of Songzhuang, an hour outside of Beijing. Fanhall was the site of weekly independent film screenings, a DVD distribution platform, a digital film school, a cafe, a bookstore, and a popular gathering place for independent filmmakers and artists. Fanhall has been closed since August 2014, when the Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF) was repressed by the authorities.

The newly constructed screening room at the Li Xianting Film Fund, sponsor of BIFF, in Songzhuang. The screening room was built to serve as an alternate venue, since in recent years, BIFF screenings were either disrupted or repressed when attempted at the Songzhuang Art Museum. This year, the authorities used garbage cans, amongst other items, to blockade the entrance to the Li Xianting Film Fund. No one could enter during the festival dates. Later, the entrance was completely sealed off, and no one exit either. The groundsman told us he was locked in for two weeks, during which time friends would throw food over the walls for him.

The now empty shelves of the Li Xianting Film Fund. Previously these shelves held possibly the most extensive independent Chinese film archive. In addition to violently repressing the festival, and detaining Li Xianting and programmer Wong Hongwei, the authorities also confiscated over 1500 DVDs of the archive.

The official poster for the 2014 Beijing Independent Film Festival. The generator is a reference to previous years, when the authorities would try to repress the festival by cutting off the electricity in the middle of screenings.

The empty desks at the Li Xianting Film Fund. Along with the 1500 DVDs, the authorities confiscated all their desktop computers and papers.

At the opening ceremony for the 2nd China Women’s Film Festival (CWFF). Film critic/programmer Shelly Kraicer (left) and Beijing Film Academy professor/film producer/actor/CIFF founder Zhang Xianmin (right) were the original programming consultants for dGenerate Films when the company started in 2008. The ceremony was held at the Zhengyici Peking Opera Theatre, built in 1688 and restored in 1995. It is one of the most well known and oldest wooden theatres in China.

Posing with Lynne Sachs at CWFF’s opening ceremony. Lynne is the festival’s “filmmaker in focus.” Lynne’s latest film YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, and many of her earlier works, were subtitled into Chinese for these screenings. Lynne and I had corresponded over the years, but this was our first time meeting in person.

On stage at the Zhengyici Peking Opera Theatre. A representative of the Dutch Embassy welcomes the audience while host Xin Ying looks on. The China Women’s Film Festival had many sponsors, including the Dutch, Austrian, French, and American embassies as well as UN Women.

The official poster for the 2nd China Women’s Film Festival pays tribute to Esther Eng, the first female Hong Kong director and the subject of the festival’s opening film, S. Louisa Wei’s GOLDEN GATE GIRLS. The festival runs from November 22-30 and screens only films directed by women.

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs

Above and Beyond

Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose

Contributor

INTERVIEW: Experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs