CHINATOWN — A multimedia performance is seeking to shine a light on the phenomenon of “shift beds,” in which struggling immigrants rent places to sleep in 12-hour installments.
The show intersperses excerpts from the upcoming film with live performances from predominantly Chinese Americans, detailing the often private life of workers who share beds to survive, but who also gain a sense of community as they carve out life in America.
“What you will see is a place where adults interact and talk and have this really homely life,” said filmmaker Lynne Sachs, 51, who has so far spent two years working on the documentary and accompanying performance, along with cinematographer Sean Hanley. “There is a lot conversation and exchange of live experience.”
As New Yorkers complain about living in what they consider tiny apartments, “shift beds” have been commonplace in immigrant communities, as well as in China, for years.
Jacob Riis photographed the lifestyle at the turn of the last century, capturing the beds where one person sleeps during the day and someone else moves in at night.
“Often, if you see a very small building with a large pile of trash out the front, chances are lots of people live there,” said Sachs.
Shift-bed apartments currently exist in areas like the corner of East Broadway and Allen Street, Sachs explained, providing accommodation to renters willing to vacate for half of the day for about $150 a month.
Many of the performers taking the stage for the show are between 50 and 70 years old and have themselves spent time in a shift bed.
“I gave them a change — to be performers and tell their own life story,” Sachs said.
Those performing on stage create the narrative using tai chi, dance, song and acting, with any Chinese translated via subtitles.
Sachs, a Carroll Gardens resident, was first inspired to research New York’s shift-bed lifestyle when an elderly uncle recalled its prevalence in the 1980s.
“I began to research and found out it was still happening today,” she said.
Even though eight people occupying an 800-square-foot apartment may seem to offer a poor quality of life, Sachs pointed to the community the shift-bed system creates for workers whose families often stayed in China while money was sent home, or until a life could be set up in America.
“We are trying to show that shift beds aren’t the struggle they seem to be,” she said.
This Sunday night I will show Same Stream Twice a new short film I made in collaboration with my daughter Maya Street-Sachs in this program at Microscope Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. As some of you know, I was very inspired by conceptual artist Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document in the early 90’s so I am excited to see the interview with her that is part of this program. I am also curious to see the piece by Linda Montano and her daughter. Linda is the performance artist who wore and lived in monochromatic colors for seven years in the 1970s.
Maya and I will both be at Microscope. I hope you can join us.
Lynne
Sunday November 11, 7pm MOTHER WORKS
Videos by Catherine Elwes, Marni Kotak, Linda Mary Montano, and Lynne Sachs
plus a rare interview with Mary Kelly
Admission $6
Microscope Gallery
4 Charles Place
Bushwick, Brooklyn
With women issues at the forefront of recent political and social discourse, we present an evening of videos by working women artists including Catherine Elwes, Marni Kotak, Linda Mary Montano and Lynne Sachs concerning motherhood. The program features original video works and a rare interview with artist Mary Kelly, covering four decades from the setting of 70s feminism, where motherhood was often marginalized, to today’s over-the-top celebration of mommy culture.
The common element in these very different approaches to the experience of motherhood and the mother/child relationship is the elevation of the personal daily experience. Each of the works – even when unstated – is also a collaboration with the artist’s son or daughter, or in the case of one, with her own mother.
MICROSCOPE GALLERY
presents film, video, sound, performance, new media and other time-based artists through exhibitions, screenings
and other events.
“There is a Myth”, Catherine Elwes, video, color, sound, 19 minutes, 1984
A single breast fills the screen and is repeatedly pummelled by the infants hand. These brutal caresses soon produce the desired effect and milk oozes from the swollen nipple. The viewer, deprived of any conventionally sexual reading, is left to confront or repress pre-lingual memories of the physical and psychological pleasures of lactation. — C E
“Little Brother”, Marni Kotak w/ Ajax Kotak Bell, HD video, color, sound, 12 minutes, 2012
The latest in series of collaborative video works in which the artist equips her young child with a video to record his daily activities and the world he encounters. The featured segments were recorded during the past month.
“The Birth of Baby X”, Marni Kotak, video, color, sound, 4:30 minutes, 2012
Documentation from the live birth performance “The Birth of Baby X” in which the artist gave birth to her son as a work of art.
“Mom Art”, Linda Mary Montano, color, sound, 23 minutes, 2012
An interview between Mildred Montano and Linda Mary Montano (1970′s) featuring Mildred Montano’s paintings.
“Same Stream Twice”, Lynne Sachs with Maya Street-Sachs, 16mm b&w to DVD, 4 minutes, 2001-2012
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 Bolex camera once again and she allows me to film her – different but somehow the same. — L S
In addition, a 17 minute segment from a rare interview with artist Mary Kelly discussing her works including her influential work “Post Partum Document”.
The Word Journal and the The Lo-Down wrote about the upcoming combination documentary/live performance “Your Day is My Night,” a look at New York’s “shift-bed” residents, mostly Chinese immigrants who take turns sharing the same bed. The Lo-Down piece in English can be read here and the World Journal one, translated from Chinese and edited, is below.
Directed by Lynne Sachs, the film “Your Day is My Night,” presents the harsh lives of Chinese immigrants who had to take turns sharing beds just to sleep. It will be shown, accompanied by a live performance, at University Settlement in the Lower East Side on Nov. 1-3.
Alison Fleminger, who organizes special events for University Settlement, said the film reflects the living conditions of immigrant communities in the Lower East Side and their diverse cultures. The performance artists share similar backgrounds with the subjects of the film or are of Chinese descent.
Director Sachs’ inspiration came from listening to stories from her relatives about the difficult lives of immigrants in the 1960s, where in one house, many people shared the same bed to cope with their limited income. Even many years later, she discovered that this kind of situation still happens to many immigrants, especially among new arrivals in Chinatown. Many people not only squeeze themselves into a small living space, they live a poor life, renting a bed with other people to take turns to sleep.
The film features seven Chinese actors, who are all regular people playing themselves. They were discovered by Sachs through the Lin Sing Association, based in Chinatown. She interviewed them in person and merged each of their stories into the movie. The seven are: Yi Chun Cao, Linda Y.H. Chan, Chung Qing Che, Ellen Ho, Yun Xiu Huang, Sheut Hing Lee, and Kam Yin Tsui.
Each has a distinct immigrant experience. Under the guidance of the director, their stories are presented through the sharing of the same bed. The bed documents each of their lives, carries their unique identities and speaks of each of their long histories. When they take turns to rest on this bed, their lives are intertwined.
A still from “Your Day is My Night.” (Photo courtesy of Lynne Sachs via The Lo-Down).
Yi Chun Cao: One Bed Shared by Three People
Yi Chun Cao moved to the U.S. 23 years ago and worked in a restaurant. To save money, his family of three rented a small room. The whole family slept on one bed. Cao later worked as a custodian at Confucius Plaza.
In the movie, Cao recalled his experience of coming to the U.S. from China. In 1949, when the Guomintang Party was exiled to Taiwan, his parents and siblings all went there. He stayed on his own in Nanjing, China. When his older brother came to the U.S., Cao finally located him after writing to an uncle. According to Cao, the movie reminds him of his life, of being separated from his family since he was little, and being unable to see his parents again before they passed away.
Linda Y.H. Chan: The Floor is my Bed
Linda Y.H. Chan, 78, spoke of her difficult journey moving from China to the U.S. when she was a teenager. According to Chan, because her grandfather had returned to China after being overseas, after 1949, her family was repeatedly denounced by the Chinese government. Their home was ransacked and all their valuables were taken away. The government alleged they had more valuables hidden. Since they did not have any more to give to the government, the officers punched and kicked Chan who was just a teenager. Finally in 1958, to secure their safety and survival, her mother took her and her little brother and escaped to Hong Kong. Her father was already there.
Chan recalled that in 1962, her family came to New York from Hong Kong as refugees. At that time, she only had $5 in her pocket. Life in the U.S. was very difficult. Her parents worked in a garment factory in Chinatown. As a teenager, she started washing people’s clothes in Chinatown. Her family of four lived in one room. She and her little brother often slept on the floor or on the sofa.
Kam Yin Tsui: Picked up a Bed to Bring Home
Kam Yin Tsui worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant. Having no money to buy furniture for his empty apartment, he had to pick up a bed that other people had thrown out in the street. After working for more than 10 years, Tsui, who is retired, indicated that the details of his struggles during those early years are still fresh in his mind when he recalls them even now.
According to Tsui, he was smuggled into the United States in 1972. When he was young, he had to work the fields in rural villages of mainland China and later begged on the streets of Guangzhou, China. The travails he faced when he first came to the United States remind him of the miserable living conditions he endured during his childhood.
They are living right here on the Lower East Side but most of us are oblivious to the existence, let alone the daily travails, of New York’s “shift-bed” residents. A hybrid documentary/live performance, “Your Day is My Night,” coming to University Settlement next month offers a rare glimpse into their hidden world.
Of the innovative production based on the lives of Chinese immigrants compelled to rent beds in 12-hour increments, Director Lynn Sachs says: “This shared domestic space becomes a… canvas on which lives are recounted and revealed.” Referring to her “new friends,” she explains, “We are making something together that we believe in, that expresses something about living in New York that perhaps has not been revealed before.”
Alison Fleminger, curator of University Settlement’s Performance Project was immediately drawn to the production. “Our aim is to encourage greater participation in the live arts and to help cultivate diverse creative communities on the Lower East Side.” All of the performers are artists who have some kind of background in dance or tai chi or qigong. They are, she notes, “artists who are conscious of the multi-layered communities that co-exist in New York City.”
A still from “Your Day is My Night.” Photo courtesy of Lynne Sachs.
One of the most compelling characters is a man named Yun Xiu Huang. He is a popular Fujianese wedding singer, “with a powerhouse operatic voice” says Sachs. He arrived in New York around 1990 to fulfill the American Dream, or at least leave behind the difficulties in his homeland. He has grown children in China who he hasn’t seen in years and who he may not see for many more. When asked if he’d try to bring his family to the U.S., he answered, “look at us. We’re adults living in shift beds. Our children wouldn’t want to come here.”
Sean Hanley, cinematographer and editor, observes, “the pain they experienced in China and the difficulty they’ve had living in the U.S., is something they never have a chance to talk about because everyone they know has been through it.” The project artfully weaves a visual and oral history of lives you never knew existed. And now it’s opening up new possibilities for creative expression. In conjunction with the production, The Tenement Museum is working on a Chinese immigration exhibition and the Museum of Chinese in America is planning to present a special focus on Yun Xiu Huang.
Performances run Thursday, Nov. 1st through Saturday, Nov. 3rd at 7:30 p.m. at University Settlement. Go here for tickets.
Back in 2004, I proposed to my husband Mark Street that I start a Torah study group for our half-Jewish-half-secular-humanist (the only unofficial faith or –ism he would embrace) 9 and 7 year-old daughters Maya and Noa Street-Sachs. He agreed reluctantly and skeptically, convinced that this passing fancy of mine for constructing a homemade form of religious learning would certainly go the way of Pilates or learning to cook. Having grown up as a Reform Jewish teenager in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1970s, I’d been introduced to the tenets of my family’s religion through a long, dreary series of Sunday school classes that successfully squashed any latent curiosity I might have had about our faith. It wasn’t until I passed the embarrassingly easy requirements for Confirmation at age 16 that I was given the choice to abandon my own spiritual edification or to continue in the lone, post-confirmation class for teens taught by a famously erudite local lawyer who conducted his class like a college literature seminar with a tinge of politics, European history and philosophy thrown in for good measure. Confident that this would be my absolute last chance to find even a thread of appreciation for Judaism, I signed up for Leo Bearman’s course and groggily drove my way to our synagogue every Sunday morning throughout my senior year of high school. To my surprise, the class was everything a learning experience could be – provocative, passionate, and rigorous.
And so with this profound moment in my young life still somehow resonating in my memory, I decided it would be possible to create a monthly study group for my own children here in Brooklyn in conjunction with our visits to Kolot Chayeinu for holidays, children’s events and the occasional Saturday service.
For the first few years of our de facto Havurah, we joined forces with another family with an eleven-year-old daughter. At each meeting, we would tackle a particularly dramatic and no-doubt famous story from the Torah. Quaint as it might sound, we called the group Bible Study and frankly that was what it was. Despite our unanimous opposition to the Old Testament as a significant doctrine of faith, we each believed that it was an intriguing, influential tome that would help our daughters better appreciate everything from the Sistine Chapel, to Creationism to 20th Century poetry. The Bible’s presence in our culture is pervasive and we wanted our children to understand its power, influence and resonance. Using The Children’s Illustrated Bible, we moved our way from the Garden of Eden, to Sarah’s pregnancy, to Joseph’s Coat, to Jacob’s dream, until after two years we completed the Old Testament chapters of the book. Because none of the children felt pressured to learn anything from one month to the next, they relished the humor and the drama in the stories, engaging in deep cross-generational discussions around such things as ethics, betrayal, commitment and sacrifice. Of course every one-hour Bible Study meeting finished off with a good meal, so the sensorial rewards were always within grasp.
Eventually our first collaborative family decided to move on, and so I was faced with the challenge of finding another family who was willing to commit one day a month to our old-fashioned endeavor. The second family who joined forces with us had an 11-year-old boy. Of course our children’s preteen enthusiasms waxed and waned but nevertheless we followed another two-year journey, this time referring to our monthly gathering in a more specifically Jewish way, Torah Study. Now with a more mature group of three students to teach, I met with Rabbi Lippmann for some guidance before embarking on Phase II. She suggested we acknowledge the sophistication of our own children by using W. G. Plaut’s renowned The Torah: A Modern Commentary as our primary text. Clearly the children were now ready to take the helm as teachers and Biblical provocateurs. As Jews do every fall, we started all over again with Genesis in September of 2008 with monthly readings and analyses of such stories as: Cain and Abel, The Flood, Babel, and Sodom and Gomorah. In our second year, we even began delving into Exodus. By this time, however, our children were no longer satisfied by a purest engagement with the literature. They demanded intense discussions around the meaning and existence of God, poignant debates about Palestinians and Jews in the Middle East and frank reflections on the role of women as depicted in this hallowed text.
In 2010, we embarked on Phase III of our study. It was a unanimous decision to put the bible to the side for a while and to engage with Judaism in a more creative and personal way. Together with our daughters (now 13 and 15) and a family with two boys ages 9 and 12, we created Rabbis of the Roundtable (named for the shape of our dining room tables). Each month we engage with some sort of reading that sparks a conversation. Our list of texts has included: “A Yom Kippor Scandel” by Sholem Aleeichem, “The Jewbird” Bernard Malamud; Maus by Art Speigelman, “The Boy in the Bubble” song by Paul Simon, “Conversion of the Jews” by Phllip Roth, “New York Filmmaker” by Ken Jacobs, “Address Unkown” by Katherine Kressman Taylor, “ Long to See My Mother in the Doorway” by Grace Paley, “The Plagues” byMoacyr Scliear, “King of the Jews” a film by Jay Rosenblatt, “World of our Fathers” by Irving Howe, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne, “Bontsha the Silent” by I.L. Peretz. Last month my daughter Maya was Rabbi so she decided that she wanted to take us out of the house to visit the permanent collection of Judaica at the Jewish Museum. Honestly, she had never even seen this collection before, so she researched some of the themes (both theoretical and religious) that had inspired the curators in order to lead us through the exhibit with issues to contemplate. As we gazed at the vitrines full of mazuzahs and menorahs as well as the more contemporary canvases on the walls, she asked us to ponder the artists’ intentions and the relationship of the objects to our sense of the visual in Jewish culture. Surrounded by these art works and artifacts, four adults and three children stood listening to Maya explore her own relationship to Judaism. I thought about the years we have spent in conversation about our shared culture and faith. It is not the answers we have found together that are so important but rather the questions we continue to confront.
Chris Marker Makes a Special Guillaume cat cartoon for Maya & Noa Street-Sachs
Some Thoughts on my friend Chris Marker
In San Francisco in the mid-1980s, I saw Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil”. I witnessed his mode of daring, wandering filmmaking with a camera. Alone, he traveled to Japan, Sweden and West Africa where he pondered revolution, shopping, family, and the gaze in a sweeping but intimate film essay that shook the thinking of more filmmakers than any film I know. Marker’s essay film blended an intense empathy with a global picaresque. Simultaneously playful and engaged, the film presented me with the possibility of merging my interests in cultural theory, politics, history and poetry — all aspects of my life I did not yet know how to bring together – into one artistic expression. In graduate school at that time, I wrote an analysis of the film and then boldly, perhaps naively, sent it to Marker. In a last minute note, I also asked him if he would like an assistant in his editing studio.
Several months later, his letter from Paris arrived with a slew of cat drawings along the margins. In response to my request for a job, Marker cleverly explained that, unlike in the United States, French filmmakers could not afford assistants. And, in response to my semiotic interpretation of his movie, he explained that his friend (and my hero) Roland Barthes would not have interpreted his film the way that I had. Marker suggested that we continue this conversation in person, in San Francisco. Not long afterward, I found myself driving Chris from his hotel in Berkeley, California to Cafe Trieste, one of the most famous cafes in North Beach. There we slowly sipped our coffees in the last relic of 1960s hippy culture, talking about his films, his travels, and my dream to be filmmaker. As the afternoon came to a close, I politely pulled out my camera and asked him if I could take his picture. “No, no, I never allow that.” And then he turned and walked away, leaving me glum, embarrassed and convinced that my new friendship with Marker was now over.
Over the next two decades, Chris and I spoke on the phone periodically and I attended several of his rare public presentations. In 2007, Jon Miller, president of our mutual distributor Icarus Films, contacted me to see if I would be willing to assist Chris in the making of a new English version of his 1972 film “Viva la Baleine”, a passionate, collage-based essay film on the plight of the whales. Of course, I was honored and immediately said yes. For one whole year, Chris and I corresponded weekly as we re-wrote and updated the narration and I searched for a male and a female voice-over actor to read the two parts. He renamed the new 2007 version of his film “Three Cheers for the Whale”. It is distributed with other “bestiary” films he has made including “The Case of the Grinning Cat”.
After we had completed the film, I traveled to Paris with my daughters to talk with Chris about a wide range of things — our collaboration, Stokely Carmichael (a Black activist in the American civil rights movement), Russian documentary, cats and tea. Just before we left his home, he showed me a scrapbook he’d been collecting for several years. Chris had accumulated hundreds of pictures and articles on a young African-American politician who had just embarked on a campaign to become the next president of the United States. Chris was convinced that this virtually unknown candidate could stand up to a historically racist United States of America and win. I was doubtful.” (Lynne Sachs)
More recently, he sent me this letter which I feel I can now share:
Chris Marker's Guillaume in Arles
Hi Lynne. Please don’t mention dates, it’s so depressing… Let’s say we met -some time ago. And a little earlier I had lunch with Robert Flaherty in Germany. Such are the dots along the strange line they call a life. A life that becomes more and more filled with daily tasks as time goes, which explains why I can’t consider any participation to any project, mines being already enough to keep me breathless. Tell that to your friend, with my warmest wishes.
I had recently a large exhibition in Arles, where Peter Blum, my New York galerist, acted as emcee. And guess who was there.. Show it to the girls, whom Guillaume and me fondly salute.
And here is another owl images he sent me recently.
The program of moving image shorts curated by Mary Magsamen of the Aurora Picture Show was presented by AMOA-Arthouse and Fusebox Festival on April 29, 2012.
If the folk tale ranges over generations first orally and then beginning in the 17th c. with the advent of the fairy tale as a literary genre, key to its very being is its contingency upon each “author” and that teller’s positioning in place and time (or history). In devising innovative forms by which to tell tales, both familiar and novel, the titles included in Aurora Picture Show’s program Big Bad Wolf invoke this centuries-old performative spirit so imbued with a sense of the need to create in order to re-create.
This the curators could know in advance of the event. While they also could know to some extent the screening’s setting (i.e., outdoors on the lush estate of Laguna Gloria in a leafy Austin neighborhood, part of Fusebox, etc.), only until experiencing the evening in the process of its unfolding could they fully grasp—in consort with the invited audience—their presentation in its context-specificity. Their gander that the confluence of night, site and moving image program would be dynamic did not disappoint.
Who could have scripted that peacocks’ cries (from next door at Mayfield Park) would add an otherworldly layer to the evening’s soundtrack, or that a family of swans would glide by just beyond the screen on the Colorado River shortly before the sun sank and the program began? Seemingly glowing in their stark whiteness against the darkening water, the scene foreshadowed the black-and-whiteness of the first film, Hansel and Gretel (1955)1 by Lotte Reiniger. While the director places black on top of white in her silhouette animation and the inverse relation of light to dark is witnessed in the swan scene, their chance juxtaposition results in an exciting formal interplay between the known of the film and the unknown of the event site.
Although the viewer is awed by Reiniger’s dexterity with making shape and motion by cutting and arranging paper as well as by the experimental ethos necessary to arrive at such a signature style, there is a nagging feeling that the cinema pioneer is somehow restrained by narrative. Just as Hansel and Gretel seek refuge from the witch (who we hear to say in a deliciously scary voice, “little mouse who crawled away, come you back with me to stay”2), why shouldn’t the filmmaker straddle her broomstick and grant herself a joy ride from the onus of moving the plot forward? For Reiniger’s animation magic to be fully realized it must break free of the need to be a constant stream of information. This sense of formal enterprise being usurped by narrative gives potency to the screening’s extra-filmic composition (sky, river, breeze, animals), amidst which it is curious to note that Hansel and Gretel find their home again but—joined by the squirrel, goose and deer—are wilder than before.
Beyond Reiniger, I found the two works humblest in production terms the most gratifying formally and conceptually. Putting Situationist teachings—Debord’s theory of détournement—to practice in Cinderella +++ (2002), Eileen Maxson disrupts the hegemony of the Disney classic through uncanny sound and image recombinations. The stunning cel (hand-drawn) animation of first Cinderella and then Lady and the Tramp is given afterlife by the voices of love interests (gone sour) appropriated from the soundtracks of the TV series 90210 and “Jack Nicholson in the film Carnal Knowledge”3 (left unidentified in the program notes). While the Disney images convey a (false) sense of security—the world’s the way it ought to be—the re-purposed dialog underscores how the unknown is all around us.
In Atalanta: 32 Years Later (2006) Lynne Sachs4 takes as source material the 1974 TV show Free To Be You and Me—already an update on the classic tale of the “beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince”5—and re-edits it. She turns the image sideways, pairs different parts of the original through the use of split-screen, and plays both image and sound in reverse—providing “subtitles” for the resulting garbled voices. “The maiden from across the forest cut her hair, put on a mustache….” and the lesbian union strides onto the stage of collective imagination (and commands its role in history). Reading at the film’s tail, “for Barbara Hammer,” this retelling became all the more alive for me. In ways too manifold to express here, Hammer, legendary “pioneer of queer cinema,”6 has—like a fairy tale protagonist—found her way home time and again through many a tangled path.
Caroline Koebel is a filmmaker and writer in Austin.
XY Chromosome Project
(Mark Street and Lynne Sachs)
presents
“A Shot in the Dark: New & Old Single-Image Films”
May 29, 2012 8 and 10 pm
Spectacle Cinema
124 South 3rd Street
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY
The XY Chromosome Project (Mark Street and Lynne Sachs) presents an
evening of eight single image films of no more than five minutes to be
premiered at the Spectacle Cinema along with the screening of two
classics of the same ilk, both avant-garde and political. Special
guest filmmaker Larry Gottheim will join us for the screening of his 1970
avant- garde tour de force.
Artists presenting new work include: Gregg Biermann, Su Friedrich,
Cary Kehayan, Kathrin McInnis, Meerkat Media, John Mhiripiri, Amos
Poe, Uzi Sabah, Kelly Spivey
with
“Fog Line” by Larry Gottheim (Gottheim will be present for the screening)
11 min. 1970 16mm (screened on film)
“It is a small but perfect film.” – Jonas Mekas
“The metaphor in FOG LINE is so delicately positioned that I find
myself receding in many directions to discover its source: The Raw and
the Cooked? Analytic vs. Synthetic? Town & Country? Ridiculous and
Sublime? One line is scarcely adequate to the bounty which hangs from
fog & line conjoined.” – Tony Conrad
and
Selective Service System by Warren Hack
13 min.1970
Since 1956, the United States had been involved in a ground war in
Asia. The American commitment had led to an ever increasing
involvement in that area of the world – despite growing
dissatisfaction here at home. To implement this country’s
mobilization, the draft system had been stepped up. This system made
virtually no exemptions for those who felt this war was immoral and
unjust. These young men either had to serve in a war in which they did
not believe, or face the bleak alternatives to service. Some chose
prison. Some sought refuge in other countries. This film documents
another alternative. There was no attempt to alter the proceedings
that took place.
Location | AC Budapest | Corvinus University | Salt House Building |
Fővám tér 13-15.
The 2009 film by Lynne Sachs is a portrait of a doctor who saw the
worst of society and ran. The Last Happy Day is an experimental
documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical
doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard,
a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in
Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service
hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead
American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil
where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin,
an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs’
essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies,
interviews, and a children’s performance to create an intimate
meditation on the destructive power of war.
“A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story …
a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an
underlying melancholy.” George Robinson, The Jewish Week
“Exquisite…Sachs reclaims (Lenard’s) dignity and purpose using
letters, newsreel footage, and recreations of his environment as if to
channel him back from the past.” Todd Lillethun – Program Director,
Chicago Filmmakers
Premiere: New York Film Festival, 2009
This month, the Proteus Migration Film & Video Series will host a unique cinema-performance event enacted throughout our various project spaces. Brooklyn-based filmmaker, Lynne Sachs, will bring us a specially designed evening of film and integrated movement pieces based on her recent work with a group of Chinese and Puerto Rican performers. The Your Day is My Night Collective will explore “shiftbeds” through verité conversations, character-driven fictions, and multi-format film loops. A shift-bed is shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. Inspired by theater visionaries Augusto Boal and the Wooster Group, the collective has worked for the last year on a series of performance workshops centered around such a bed – experienced, remembered, and imagined from profoundly different viewpoints. The audience will be encouraged to engage with the characters while walking through the gallery as a “shift-bed” house, witnessing their stories of life before and after immigration to the United States.
Film loops excerpted from the upcoming feature-length film, “Your Day is My Night.”
Performers: Yi Chun Cao, Linda Hwa Chan, Che Chang-Qing, Yun Xiu Huang, Ellen Ho, Sheut Hing Lee, Veraalba Santa Torres and Pedro Sanchez Tormes
Directed by Lynne Sachs Images by Sean Hanley and Ethan Mass Writing by Rojo Robles and Lynne Sachs Translations by Catherine Ng, Jenifer Lee and Bryan Chan Co-editing and co-producing by Sean Hanley Production Assistance by Madeline Youngberg, Amanda Katz & Jeff Sisson
