February in New York City brings the Documentary Fortnight program at the Museum of Modern Art, which this year included the world premiere of a remarkable project titled Your Day Is My Night by Lynne Sachs. In January 2011, Sachs began working with middle-aged and elderly residents of shift-bed apartments in New York’s Chinatown; immigrants are jammed into closetlike shared rooms, and the beds are in use around the clock. Sachs gained the confidence of these people, heard their stories, assisted as they worked up monologues about their pasts and helped shape the results into a film, which features performances by several of the subjects themselves. Made with collaborators including cinematographer Sean Hanley and composer Stephen Vitiello, it’s a strikingly handsome, meditative work: a mixture of reportage, dreams, memories and playacting, which immerses you in an entire world that you might unknowingly pass on the corner of Hester Street, unable to guess what’s behind the fifth-floor windows.
Documentary Fortnight
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St.
NYC
Sunday February 24th – 2:00pm
Monday February 25th – 8:00pm
http://www.moma.org/
Since the early days of New York’s Lower East Side tenement houses, working class people have shared beds, making such spaces a fundamental part of immigrant life. Initially documented in Jacob Riisʼ now controversial late 19th Century photography, a “shift-bed” is an actual bed that is shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. Simply put, itʼs an economic necessity brought on by the challenges of urban existence. Such a bed can become a remarkable catalyst for storytelling as absolute strangers become de facto confidants.
In this provocative, hybrid documentary, the audience joins a present-day household of immigrants living together in a shift-bed apartment in the heart of Chinatown. Seven characters (ages 58-78) play themselves through autobiographical monologues, verité conversations, and theatrical movement pieces. Retired seamstresses Ellen Ho and Sheut Hing Lee recount growing up in China during the turmoil of the 1950s when their families faced violence and separation under Chairman Maoʼs revolutionary, yet authoritarian regime. Yun Xiu Huang, a nightclub owner from Fujian Province, reveals his journey to the United States through the complicated economy of the “snakehead” system, facing an uphill battle as he starts over in a new city.
With each “performance” of their present, the characters illuminate both the joys and tragedies of their past. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of Chinese immigrants in the United States, a story not often documented. Further, the intimate cinematography and immersive sound design carry us into the dreams and memories of the performers, bringing the audience into a community often considered closed off to non-Chinese speakers. Through it all, “Your Day is My Night” addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life in relationship to this familiar item of household furniture.
Featuring: Yi Chun Cao, Linda Y.H. Chan, Chung Qing Che, Ellen Ho, Yun Xiu Huang, Sheut Hing Lee, Kam Yin Tsui, Veraalba Santa
Directed by Lynne Sachs; cinematography, editing and co-producing by Sean Hanley; cinematography by Ethan Mass; music and additional sound design by Stephen Vitiello; additional writing by Rojo Robles; production managing and translations by Catherine Ng, Jenifer Lee; additional editing by Bryan Chang; sound mix by Damian Volpe; titles by Rachel Melman; production assistance by Sofía Galissá, Amanda Katz, Jeff Sisson and Madeline Youngberg.
New York experimental documentary director Lynne Sachs got her start in film at DCTV in the mid 1980s. Over the last three decades, she’s explored the relationship between her own personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together film, collage, painting, and sound design.
In this master class, explore the many challenges that filmmakers face when making an alternative documentary film. Sachs will discuss her non-traditional approach to non-fiction filmmaking by focusing on her most recent documentary, Your Day is My Night, which will have its World Premiere at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight 2013 this February. Other topics will include the dynamic between the interview and the audition, challenges of working in a foreign language, and creating a live-film performance. She will also share clips from her previous work.
experiment with my perception of reality by embracing an associative, non-literal approach to images, and it is through this artistic exploration that I grapple with the natural, social, cultural and political phenomena that I witness through the lens of my camera. – Lynne Sachs
Using beds as a metaphor for privacy, intimacy and power, “Your Day is My Night” explores intercultural and trans-historical communication, topics by which Sachs has been consumed in recent years. – Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
Tickets
$15 / DCTV & IFP Members
$20 / NYWIFT, Rooftop Films, Shooting People Members; students/educators with ID
$35 / General + DCTV Membership
DCTV Presents is DCTV’s signature screening and event series that highlights innovative and provocative work from the independent filmmaking community. From screening films by emerging artists to hosting master classes led by renowned groundbreakers in the industry, each event offers the public a unique and inclusive opportunity to share, support and embrace truly independent art. All events are open to the public, and serve super cheap drinks, alcoholic & non!
Highlights: Here Be Dragons: Mark Cousins is modern documentary’s version of German midfielder Thomas Muller – a raumdeuter (space investigator) who, in this probing, associative narrative of a journey to Albania, terraforms a zone somewhere between Jonas Mekas’s diary films and Thom Anderson’s critical cartographies. His is the most companionate form of cinephilia: he meditates on art and politics, dogs and innocence, both the idea and the present state of the Albanian archive. Most unusual of all, he does so with charm and brio rather than pontificial pomposity.
Your Day is My Night: New York’s Chinatown, a place as much spectral as real, flickers and flares into life in this singular hybrid of documentary, performance piece and cine-monologue. Seven working-class, immigrant residents of a shift-bed apartment play versions of themselves, recalling violent upheavals, long journeys and endless yearnings. Beautifully scored by Stephen Vitiello, marrying subtle comedy to its dominant mood of dreamy disorientation, and achieving a rare intimacy, it’s one of the most mysterious and magical evocations of the migrant city in many a year.
From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf: A superb year for hydropoetic cinema (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s concussive, immersive Leviathan that rips up the rulebook about what ethnographic films should look or feel like; Kiss The Water, Eric Steel’s loving portrait of fishing fly-maker Megan Boyd) was capped by Mumbai-based CAMP’s new film which would make for a terrific double bill with Allan Sekula and Noel Burch’s The Forgotten Space. Shot by and about a group of Indian sailors moving from the Gulf of Kutch through the Gulfs of Persia and Aden, it’s an extraordinary vision of the subaltern ocean, a work of drifting and boredom, of friendship and melodies, strafed by uncanny images of the desert castles of the United Arab Emirates. Modernity has really seemed so distended.
Taskafa: In this wonderfully resonant essay film, set in the streets of modern-day Istanbul and making telling use of John Berger reading from his novel King, Andrea Luka Zimmerman casts a compassionate eye on the city’s street dogs as a way of talking about loneliness, social connection, urban belonging. A work as profound as it is protesting.
How We Used to Live: A collaboration between Paul Kelly, the band Saint Etienne and writer Travis Elborough, this archive film of London from 1950-1980 is a waltz through the music of cinematic time.
Thinking about life in NYC before, during and after Hurricane Sandy
Lynne Sachs
Oct. 26 – Nov. 5, 2012
How do you return to a sensation of not knowing when you do indeed now know? I am going to try to revisit the days before Hurricane Sandy, to piece together the moments and the sensations we all experienced prior, during and after the storm.
Friday, October 26 was the first day almost any New Yorker I know heard about the impending hurricane that was moving up the eastern sea board. My first thoughts were rather selfish ones as I was preparing for the final, most critical rehearsals for my film performances at University Settlement in Lower Manhattan the next week. In my mind, it would certainly be far more convenient if the storm had gently brushed up against the North Carolina Coast (at they usually did around this time of year) and then skedaddled sheepishly back into the Atlantic, never ever landing anywhere near the Big Apple. That would be convenient for me.
By Monday morning, I was still rather hopeful about the storm, now named a rather sweet female Sandy, though I reluctantly canceled our evening rehearsal, the only one with the full technical crew there to set our lights. I accepted that old adage “the show must go on”, buried my desire to create something even near perfection and looked forward to the four shows scheduled for the end of the week. A friend reminded me that I had always been more interested in process than product, so a few embarrassing on-stage flubs would not really matter. I gulped and decided that I’d been fooling myself all these years. Artist hubris and anxiety ensued. By mid-afternoon, however, I realized that Sandy was not in the slightest bit interested in spinning her way out to a wet oblivion. She was headed right for us. I walked out to the back yard and gently tilted our tether-ball pole and our bird bath on their sides. This seemed like a cautious, well thought-out thing to do. I moved some small plants from the deck downstairs and decided our heavier plants were too cumbersome to deal with. Then, in my growing nervousness, I filled all of our cooking pots with water, thinking I was very smart, economical and ecological. Why buy bottles with water when we could just draw it from the faucet? A few hours later, I discovered that the mood in the city was getting more and more frenzied. What was a mother to do at such a time? I noticed that both of our pet frog tanks were very dirty. It seemed the right time to clean them. No one else in the house agreed but nevertheless I dumped all five gallons of bottled water that we had into the tanks and looked glowingly at the newly refreshed aquatic environment I had prepared for our ten-year old reptiles. My husband Mark was incredulous. The news reports were becoming dire. Evacuations were beginning. We began to wonder if we were indeed high enough above the filthy Gowanus Canal to avoid its imminent flooding. We all four laughed at the calm before the storm we were watching from our front windows. The rain was light, the trees barely swaying; I had managed to complete the spring cleaning of the girls’ clothes that no longer fit them. Just as the wind became more intense, around 7 PM, Mark slipped out the front door to go to the sundry on Smith Street. He needed flour to bake banana bread. Life was cozy, just this side of normal. School was cancelled; tests postponed. A weird kind-of giddiness settled into our home on Carroll Street. We all got into bed, watched movies and listened to the howling of the wind outside. For a few seconds, we lost internet and the lights flickered.
Throughout the next day, Tuesday, we listened to the horrific reports of water flooding into unimaginable (and by this I am being literal, if only someone had imagined and believed such a scenario) locations along the New York City coastline, from Battery Park to Staten Island to the Rockaways. The waves were heading toward us in every direction. But it wasn’t just the ocean water that was shaking our very foundation. The power of the storm was creating flooding up both the East River and the Hudson. Saline met fresh in a way that just did not seem possible. We remained inside the whole day, talking to family across the country and commiserating with our friends in town. My friend Betsy who lived through Katrina in New Orleans sent me two text messages asking if we were okay, reminding me of the very first emails I received after 9/11 from friends in Sarajevo who knew what it felt like to live in a state of siege. The interconnectedness of the globe struck me as amazing and somehow comforting.
On Wednesday morning, my brother Ira, his husband Boris, their twins and the twins’ mom Kirsten decided to hire a car service and move in with us. It was Halloween and my husband’s birthday, so we all welcomed their arrival with a sense of delight. After two nights and a day of getting by without power, they could no longer manage without the use of their toilets. Their apartment is on the sixth floor. Who knew that the dividing line between mechanical and electric power in terms of moving water in a high rise falls between the fifth and sixth floors? The things you learn during a crisis. My cousin called to say she was surrounded by water in DUMBO, one of the only brave souls to stay in her apartment. I tried to imagine how on earth she was going to get by. Should we rescue her in a boat?
By this time, I knew that all of my performances were going to be postponed for quite a while. No power no show, but still I worried about the Chinese people in our collective who were living in Chinatown. The subways were not working but I discovered that I could take a bus across the Manhattan Bridge. In fact, Mr. Huang was so consumed with his mahjong game that he couldn’t be bothered with a phone conversation. Sheut Lee had moved in with her daughter and husband. Linda was unreachable but somehow so strong that I knew she would be okay. Still, I decided to walk around along East Broadway and Hester Street looking for them, wondering if I could help. I ended up at a Chinese housing service. They wanted me to take a taxi above 34th street to find energy bars I could hand out. How many? I wondered. How do I give them away to people with whom I can’t even communicate. I bought batteries instead; it seemed more obviously useful. Then I walked around handing out Chinese-language flyers explaining where to get information and that the power should be restored within a few days. Rumor had it that the lights would actually be on by Thursday. I really had no idea. All I knew was that it was very cold, and I could not see any FEMA trucks with any food at all. I took the bus back to Brooklyn and had a wonderful late afternoon of trick or treating with my beloved but oblivious niece and nephew.
The news was getting worse by the day. All of our bridges and tunnels were closed and the watery, divided nature of the NYC metropolitan area was becoming more and more of a handicap. Homes and lives were damaged or destroyed everywhere that the ocean or the river could come in contact. Once again, I headed to Chinatown to see how I could help. I walked from street to street offering flyers to bewildered Chinese folk who had no idea where to find food or other necessities that one usually takes for granted. I met an African-American man in the cold, late afternoon sitting on a patio just outside a very tall housing project. He explained that he was practically the only one who was able to walk the sixteen floors down but now he was feeling too tired to trudge back up in the pitch dark. Furthermore, he couldn’t carry the water he needed for the toilet. My husband Mark and our older daughter Maya spent the day giving out food in a public school building in Park Slope. According to Maya, she was asked to assist in the pet area and she was wondering what to do with turtles.
On Friday, I spent the day with my younger daughter Noa on our side of the East River, no need to deal with the hassle of getting ourselves across a bridge when there was need within walking distance. The two of us volunteered for hours in a community building with about fifty volunteers all working to put together shopping bags filled with the bare necessities. I was on the front line talking to needy people who would take the bags, examining their contents and then asking for specific additions for which Noa would literally run around searching. She had to find toothpaste, teddy bears, oodles of toilet paper, baby diapers in specific sizes, blankets, special food for diabetics, a coat for a woman with very large breasts. And the list goes on and on. She did a fantastic job, so full of energy and resourcefulness. With each request, the two of us would gulp, wondering how these people were going to get along when everything they owned was wet or ruined. How could you manage with a baby without diapers? How could two rolls of toilet paper be enough? What do you do with a bottle of bleach if you don’t have sponges to use it? We both asked ourselves these questions. Everyone was so appreciative of whatever we had to offer. There were actually smiles galore. And I was smiling a few hours later when I heard that Mayor Bloomberg decided to endorse Obama as president based on one thing: his commitment to working to fight Global Warming. We all know that this situation is no longer an anomaly. It is our new normal.
The next morning, Maya, Noa, Mark and I returned to Red Hook in the car. We clearly had one of the only cars around that was full of gas, so when we offered to carry hot meals to one of the housing projects, the Red Hook Initiative immediately accepted. Only problem was that we didn’t have flashlights and we needed to walk up and down twelve flights of completely dark stairwells carrying plates of food. We had to drive all the way back home to pick up a flashlight, as there were none left at Loewe’s or anywhere for that matter. Luckily, we found four and off we went from the ground floor up, each of us carrying two bags of meals along with a list of which apartments needed nourishment. The stairs were a bit scary in the dark, especially since they were wet from the pipes that were being used to fill up buckets for toilets. Oh my. But once we figured out our system, we actually had a great time meeting the families and older people. The warm feeling of appreciation was amazing.
On Monday, Noa, a friend of hers and I took a bag of winter clothes to the Red Hook Initiative which was filled with doctors with stethoscopes. It was like we’d landed in a Doctors Without Borders compound. We placed our own donations on a mountain of clothing and within minutes I was watching a woman pluck up an old pink fleece jacket, from our foyer to her hands so quickly and urgently. Later we were asked to go through the pile and separate the summer from the winter items. It didn’t seem so important but then again, these people are not looking to fill out their wardrobes, they simply need enough warmth to survive.
Yesterday, I planted flower bulbs in the back yard and discovered a patch of large radishes I had given up on in August. I guess there is some good that has come from all of the water. I have no idea when or if we will have snow this year. Will spring arrive in February? Strange weather.
“Same Stream Twice” by Lynne Sachs with Maya Street-Sachs 4 min. 16mm b & w and color on DVD, 2012
Director’s Choice Award – Black Maria Film Festival 2013
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. Eleven years later, I pull out my 16mm Bolex camera once again and she allows me to film her – different but somehow the same.
Screenings: Black Maria Film Festival, 2013; Camára Lucída Festival de Ciné 2021; Museum of the Moving Image 2021
The multimedia performance “Your Day Is My Night” from independent producer and director, Lynne Sachs, the premiere was launched in Chinatown. The film is talking about all sorts of joys and sorrows of new immigrants in the US and several Chinese immigrants performed their own stories in the movie.
The film is talking about a group of Chinese immigrants working in shift-jobs. In order to save money, they share a rental apartment or room, even share a bed as shift-bed style. This performance is casted by six non-professional Chinese actors and actress, interweaving movie and drama in order to present the realistic history of new immigrants in Chinatown in 45 minutes performance. All the conversations in the film are in Chinese and subtitled with English.
51-year-old Jewish director, Lynne Sachs said, “This movie is inspired by the images of photographer (Jacob Riis)”. One of the main characters, Mr. Yun Xin Huang (黃雲秀) said, “I immigrated to U.S. in 1995 and lived in my friend’s house for three months. I slept in a closet in harsh living conditions. I participate in this film, I want to let more people learn the stories of Chinese immigrants by reappearing the scenes of my harsh life.”
The film production was started in 2011 and the full version will be presented in 2013. The movie was taken in East Broadway of Chinatown to present the ordinary and touching stories of Chinese immigrants. The performance will be showed tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, please take a chance to be there if you are interested.
During the day and night untold immigrants bitterness
Chinese star in the true story of Chinatown preview interactive warm
Qiao Bao Reporter Ye Yongkang
By a number of Chinese immigrants to tell their own story, entitled “Your day is my night,” the movie, recently held in Chinatown and the Chatham Library screenings to attract more than 20 Chinese and foreign interest to the watch, after the meeting and ask questions.
[Qiao Bao Reporter, reported Ye Yongkang New York,] many new immigrants to the United States because of economic problems can only pick up old mattresses to sleep, it was to save money, the two shared a bed, their own work, others go to bed, to bed Friends of the work himself back to sleep, they will not even been seen. “Your day is my night,” director Lynne Sachs, said the new Chinese immigrants have a lot of bitterness touching story, she wanted to shoot out these stories, let the community know. Therefore, more than a year ago, she visited the United States and East Union into the hall, get the hall with the help of the consultant Zhao Sheng, introduced a narrative of the 26 Chinese.
Sachs said that they meet and discuss with these Chinese, pick a more narrative, shooting the film, a year of filming, and now finally completed. The film is divided into three parts, the first part of the earlier projection over your day is my night “is the second part, will be edited into 70 minutes screening.
Placed in the center of the projection room scene, two mattresses, put a movie, turns to go to bed by the actors performances (see the right, Ye Yongkang photo). Upon completion, the foreigner the audience to ask questions, share a new Chinese migrants are incredible.
The film Fuzhou Huang Yunxiu is a singer and host of the wedding. He said he had paid money to snakeheads later the United States, the snakeheads in Chinatown to find a “closet” He lives down, but there are four weeks a lot of noise make it difficult to fall asleep. The Huang Yunxiu said, many people like his singing, he likes to make people happy, he is a tool of the people’s celebration of the songs on across the ocean, the troubling thing down. His songs is like a huge bridge, everyone returned to his hometown to go sailing in a dream.
Actor Xu Jin then said of his childhood in his hometown, families who have been looted. In Chinatown, there is field after the fire, he picked up a mattress on the roadside, when smell the stench of burnt smell rushed to his nose, the former all the nightmares will come to mind, so that he could not sleep, he can only use some tablecloths and mattress isolation.
The actor Li Xueqing said, when she resided in Hong Kong, six brothers and sisters and mother live together in the same apartment, there are six or seven families huddled together, each one of the snoring noise, they find it interesting, each has its own unique tone, like the music as played. She had never seen his father until the age of 18 a day before going to sleep, the mother called her in a dream to try to dream of my father, she later try to make their own dream never seen the face.
The actor car Changqing said, in the first 10 years of his life, he is a well-fed, happy little boy, but after 1947, everything changed, back and forth. Came to the United States, people here are wealthy, many people like to collect valuable things, he has collected the mattress, but also give it away to get clean
New! Click the words above to edit and view alternate translations.
You are willing to give the bed to the non-parent not a friend to use? Can you imagine with nothing to do with people who share a bed? You ever feel happy you have one of their own bed? New York Public LibraryMuseum and the Chatham Branch Library show on the 21st day is my night “(Your day is My night) documentary about is the life force had to take turns using the the bedspace rest of the Chinese story with others.
According to film director Lynne Sachs, years ago she heard relatives talk about the 1960s, many immigrants because of economic distress, sharing a roof, put in the room mattresses for home. Decades later this year, the New York metropolis
Chinatown corner, some people still live a and then a similar life. Sachs said that the bed is a personal thing, an important part of private life, it records each person’s life carries the identity of each person, and also about the simple individual behind a long history. When we take turns to rest in bed, their lives intertwined.
Sachs to find the seven Chinese ordinary people cast into the hall through the eastern United States associated, from each person’s particular experiences, present their story by sharing a bed. Yesterday, the five actors also attended the event, live performance on two mattresses to sleep in shifts, “your day is night life. Nightclub and The Wedding Singer the Huang Yunxiu first came to New York when he was still in the closet lived the rest will inevitably want to have anyone lying in bed, doing what, but I kept thinking will always survive, “the rent is too your can not afford what way? “
This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.
Dir. Lynne Sachs 64 min., HD, Color, Stereo & 5.1 Surround, 2013 Chinese, English & Spanish with English Subtitles
This complete film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access. Currently streaming on MUBI at: https://mubi.com/films/your-day-is-my-night
While living in a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown, a household of immigrants share their stories of personal and political upheaval.
Synopsis:
Since the early days of New York’s Lower East Side tenement houses, working class people have shared beds, making such spaces a fundamental part of immigrant life. Initially documented in Jacob Riis’ now controversial late 19th Century photography, a “shift-bed” is an actual bed that is shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. Simply put, it’s an economic necessity brought on by the challenges of urban existence. Such a bed can become a remarkable catalyst for storytelling as absolute strangers become de facto confidants.
In this provocative, hybrid documentary, the audience joins a present-day household of immigrants living together in a shift-bed apartment in the heart of Chinatown. Seven characters (ages 58-78) play themselves through autobiographical monologues, verité conversations, and theatrical movement pieces. Retired seamstresses Ellen Ho and Sheut Hing Lee recount growing up in China during the turmoil of the 1950s when their families faced violence and separation under Chairman Mao’s revolutionary, yet authoritarian regime. Yun Xiu Huang, a nightclub owner from Fujian Province, reveals his journey to the United States through the complicated economy of the “snakehead” system, facing an uphill battle as he starts over in a new city.
With each “performance” of their present, the characters illuminate both the joys and tragedies of their past. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of Chinese immigrants in the United States, a story not often documented. Further, the intimate cinematography and immersive sound design carry us into the dreams and memories of the performers, bringing the audience into a community often considered closed off to non-Chinese speakers. Through it all, “Your Day is My Night” addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life in relationship to this familiar item of household furniture.
Press:
“Each person’s tale is brief but impactful, intercut with graceful set pieces and grainy footage that allows time to visualize, absorb and contemplate. Your Day is My Night is a cultural window with many dimensions, building empathy with viewers in this politically charged environment.” – Fatima Sheriff, One Room with a View
“A strikingly handsome, meditative work: a mixture of reportage, dreams, memories and playacting, which immerses you in an entire world that you might unknowingly pass on the corner of Hester Street, unable to guess what’s behind the fifth-floor windows.” –The Nation
“Beautifully blending anecdotes, evocative audio textures, and an ensemble of elderly immigrant performers/participants, Your Day is My Night is sumptuous and exploratory, bringing us a Chinatown we have never seen before in film.” – San Diego Asian Film Festival
“Using beds as a metaphor for privacy, intimacy and power, the film explores intercultural and trans-historical dialogue.” – The Washington Post
“Director Lynne Sachs’ Your Day is My Night shines a light on a little documented sub-culture in New York’s Chinatown, chronicling immigrants who live communally in buildings where there’s a shift-bed system. One person returns from a stint of overnight work to sleep in a bed just vacated by another person off to their day job. The form of this documentary is as compelling as its content. It is a beautiful collage of different media and music intricately edited together with the often emotional testimony of the immigrants.” – BBC
“New York’s Chinatown, a place as much spectral as real, flickers and flares into life in this singular hybrid of documentary, performance piece and cine-monologue. Seven working-class, immigrant residents of a shift-bed apartment play versions of themselves, recalling violent upheavals, long journeys and endless yearnings.” – Sight and Sound
“This is no ordinary documentary. This is film, a canvas, a moving poem. It never stands still. It moves and it moves us.” – Kennebec Journal/ Morning Star (centralmaine.com)
Director’s Statement:
“I’ve spent most of my life as an artist thinking about how to convey my observations of the world around me in the visual and aural language of film. I experiment with my perception of reality by embracing an associative, non-literal approach to images, and it is through this artistic exploration that I grapple with the natural, social, cultural and political phenomena that I witness through the lens of my camera. I began the Your Day is My Night project in late 2009 when I was talking with a relative on his 90th birthday. A Brooklyn resident for his entire life, Uncle Bob has haunting memories of December 16, 1960 when a jet crashed near his Brooklyn home. Trying to imagine the devastation in this busy neighborhood, I asked him how many people on the ground had died. ‘It was hard to know because there were so many hot bed houses in that area. They all burned and no one knew precisely who lived there.’ What are hot bed houses? I asked him. ‘Those are homes for poor people who work and can’t afford to rent their own apartments. They share beds in shifts.’ I reconstructed the moment of the crash, creating a mental image of the inhabitants of these apartments as they tried to gather their few personal possessions and escape the fire. Which unlucky person would awake from a deep sleep after a long shift at the port to the sound of the crash and the heat of the fire? After that conversation, I discovered that 19th Century photographer Jacob Riis documented numerous examples of these beds, and it is through his lens that I was able to begin my research. In Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, he exposed to the rest of America the poor, immigrant experience he witnessed in downtown New York City. I later read The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe to give me a more current sense of the situation in current day Chinatown.
I think of the bed as an extension of the earth. For most of us, we sleep on the same mattress every night; our beds take on the shape of our bodies, like a fossil where we leave our mark for posterity. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington slept in many borrowed beds and now, hundreds of years later, his brief presence is celebrated from one New England town to the next: ‘George Washington Slept Here’ has a kind of strange signification and prestige. But for transients, people who use hotels, and the homeless a bed is no more than a borrowed place to sleep. An animal that borrows its home from another species is called an inquiline, and in Spanish inquilina is the word for a renter. Conceptual artist and sculptor Félix González-Torres photographed a series of empty, unmade beds to commemorate the life and death of his partner, as if the very sheets that remained could remind him and us of the body and the man he had loved.
Since January of 2011, I have been writing, researching, and shooting material for my ‘bed project’ in the Chinatown neighborhood of New York City. I found a group of non-professional Chinese performer/participants (ages 58 – 78) and have worked almost weekly with them ever since. During our workshops, they each exchanged their own stories around domestic life, immigration and personal-political upheaval. None of these people has ever worked in this cross-cultural way, so it is these taped process-oriented conversations that, in the final film, enhance our audience’s sense of the bed – experienced and imagined from profoundly different viewpoints. Next, a written script emerged from our months of shooting documentary images and interviews. Using the interactive model of Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed”, I guided my collective in a “simultaneous dramaturgy”. My performers, crew and, more recently, our live audience, explored the potential for transformation that can come from a dialogue around personal histories and the imagination.
The material I collected during these interviews is the basis for the monologues in Your Day is My Night. In production, I guided my performers through visual scenarios that reveal a bed as a stage on which people manifest who they are at home and who they are in the world. Our shooting took place in two different actual shift-bed apartments located in NYC’s Chinatown. The Chinese participants (several of whom currently live or have actually slept on shift-beds) spoke of family ruptures during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a mattress excavated from a garbage heap, four men on one bed in Chinatown, amongst a long series of fascinating and haunting bed-related topics.
For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact the Cinema Guild. For international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.
“Your Day is My Night” has been exhibited as a live performance at St. Nicks Alliance in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York Public Library in Chinatown, Proteus Gowanus Interdisciplinary Arts Gallery in Brooklyn and University Settlement in Manhattan.” – LS
Cast: Che Chang-Qing, Yi Chun Cao, Yueh Hwa Chan (Linda), Kam Yin Tsui, Yun Xiu Huang, Ellen Ho, Sheut Hing Lee, Veraalba Santa Torres,
Crew: Lynne Sachs (director); Sean Hanley (camera, co-produing and editing); Rojo Robles (co-writer); Catherine Ng and Jenifer Lee (translations); Ethan Mass (camera); Stephen Vitiello (music); Damian Volpe (sound mix) Amanda Katz and Jeff Sisson (sound); Bryan Chang (additional editing and translations); Madeline Youngberg (production assistance)
Kam Yin Tsui in Your Day is My NightYour Day is My Night Cast and CrewYun Xiu Huang , Veraalba Santa and Sheut Hing Lee
Kam Yin Tsui and Yun Xiu Huang sing Happy Birthday
“I think of the bed as an extension of the earth,” says experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, a moving hybrid documentary/performance piece, the bed becomes stage as immigrant residents of a shift-bed apartment in the heart of Manhattan’s Chinatown are both performers and participants, storytellers and actors. Sharing their experiences as migrants and city dwellers, they reveal the intimacies and complexities of urban living. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs and performers Yi Chun Cao, Linda Y.H. Chan, Chung Qing Che, Ellen Ho, Yun Xiu Huang, and Sheut Hing Lee joined A/P/A Institute at NYU on Thursday, October 2, 2013 for a screening of the film and a conversation moderated by Karen Shimakawa (Chair of Performance Studies at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts). Lesley (Yiping) Qin served as translator.
Selected Screenings:
World Premiere: Museum of Modern Art, Documentary Fortnight 2013 (Feb. 24 & 25, 2013) Senior Planet Exploration Center New York City (April 12, 2013) Ann Arbor Film Festival (March 23, 2013) Athens Film Festival, Athens, Ohio Opening Night April 18, 2013) Workers Unite Film Festival, Cinema Village Theater, New York City (May 10, 2013) Brecht Forum, New York City (May 17, 2013) Union Docs. Brooklyn, New York City (June 8, 2013) Images Film and Video Festival, Toronto (April 19, 2013) Kingsborough College, Brooklyn, New York (May 6, 2013) Maysles Cinema, Fiction-Non Series, NYC, (Sept. 25 & 26, 2013) BorDocs Tijuana Forum Documental, Mexico, Sept., 2013 University of California, Santa Cruz, Nov. 18 and 19, 2013 Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California, Nov. 20, 2013. Vancouver Film Festival, 2013 Micheal Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival, Michigan, Best Experimental Film, 2013 New Orleans Film Festival, 2013 San Diego Asian American Film Festival, Best Feature Documentary2013. Center for History, Media & Culture/ Asian Studies, New York University, 2013 Roy & Edna Disney/ CalArtst Theatre (REDCAT), Los Angeles, 2014.
A press kit, transcript, and set of stills are now available for “Your Day is my Night” set to premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in February 2013.
Partially funded by the New York State Council for the Arts and the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Presented in collaboration with the Tenement Museum and the Museum of the Chinese in America.
In “Your Day is My Night” a group of Chinese performers creates a dynamic live film performance that tells the collective story of Chinese immigration to New York City from the viewpoint of an older generation. On both stage and screen, the seven performers play themselves, all living together in a shift-bed apartment in the heart of Chinatown. Since the early days of New York’s tenement houses, shift workers have had to share beds, making such spaces a fundamental part of immigrant life. In this production, the concept of the shift-bed allows the audience to see the private become public. The bed transforms into a stage when the performers exchange stories around domestic life, immigration and personal-political upheaval. They speak of family ruptures during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a mattress found on the street, four men on one bed in Chinatown. “Your Day is My Night” is a provocative work of experimental theater and cinema that reflects deeply on this familiar item of household furniture.
A bilingual performance in Chinese and English.
Featuring: Yi Chun Cao, Linda Y.H. Chan, Chung Qing Che, Ellen Ho, Yun Xiu Huang, Sheut Hing Lee, Kam Yin Tsui
“Your Day is My Night” directed by Lynne Sachs; cinematography and editing by Sean Hanley and Ethan Mass; music by Stephen Vitiello; Monologue writing support by Rojo Robles. Translations by Catherine Ng, Jenifer Lee and Bryan Chang.
Each evening includes an engaging talk-back with the performers, moderated by representatives from University Settlement’s Project Home, the Tenement Museum, and photographer Alan Chin.
Additional Related “Tenement Talk” Program on October 23 presented at the Tenement Museum on Tuesday, October 23.
Please go to Your Day My Night Tenement Talk for more information.
