2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV. In “From the Outside In”, we traverse Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.
Performing the Real Fri June 7 at 7 PM Q&A with Sachs & Lizzie Olesker (co-director of The Washing Society) moderated by filmmaker Sam Green
Eschewing the inherent distance in ethnography and observation, the responsive movement and poetry in this program’s films shine a light on Sachs’ creative impulse to drive collaborative participation and honor the role of catalyst. Special guest: Paolo Javier (Swerve, poet collaborator).
Fossil, 1986 12 min • The Washing Society 2018 44 min • Swerve, 2022 8 min
In this intimate artist talk and workshop, Sachs will share her insights in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. As part of the class experience, participants will explore their creative practice through writing.
Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Tom Day, Executive Director of Film-Makers Cooperative
A love letter to New York City – when love can also be critical, baffling, sometimes painful. The films in this program all take place in our metropolis called home.
Ladies Wear, 1983 3 min• Tornado, 2002 4 min • Your Day is My Night, 2013 63 min
Violence begets violence, as protest and resistance begets change. In this program, Sachs’ films dissect war, civil disobedience, and the sociopolitical tides from WWII to Vietnam and today.
The Small Ones, 2007 3 min • The Task of the Translator, 2010 10 min • E•pis•to•la•ry: Letter to Jean Vigo, 2021 5 min • Investigation of a Flame, 2001 45 min
Heavy with chains that bind, this program of films magnifies Sachs’ feminist gaze through her personal diaries, family portraits, and women’s testimonies.
Drawn & Quartered, 1987 4 min • The House of Science, 1991 30 min. • And Then We Marched, 3 min. 2017 • A Year in Notes and Numbers, 1987 4 min. • Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor, 2018 9 min. • Maya at 24, 2021 4 min. • Contractions, 2024 12 min • We Continue to Speak, 2024 4 min
Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Accra Shepp (member of TOMT cast) moderated by Tabitha Jackson
In A Month of Single Frames (2019, 14 min), Lynne explores filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s experience of solitude. Her text on screen brings them together in multiple spaces and times. In Tip of My Tongue (2017. 84 min.), she gathers together 12 fellow New Yorkers — born across several continents in the 1960s — to spend a weekend with her making a movie. Together they examine the ways in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe impact who we are.
Conversation with Lynne Sachs, Dana Sachs, and Ira Sachs
Film About a Father Who (2020, 74 min) is Lynne’s attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, her cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, she allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. In The Jitters (2023, 3 min), Lynne performs with her partner filmmaker Mark Street, celebrating who they are independently and together.
“I’ve been in awe of Lynne’s fearlessness and desire to create, make meaning, rip apart, and piece together. I see her as the epitome of an indelible artist who is driven by curiosity and empathy – not fame, industry demands, or commercial algorithms. And I appreciate her sincere gratitude to her collaborators, and to DCTV, honorably looking back but always steps ahead. Good documentary filmmaking cannot happen in a vacuum.” – Dara Messinger, Director of Programming, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema
“I walked into Downtown Community Television (now DCTV) in 1984 thinking I needed to take some classes on how to make a documentary film. I was 22 years old and open to any possibility, any guidance, and totally impressionable. From that moment on, I learned to challenge every conventional expectation about working with reality. It’s an honor to bring these seven programs back to the Firehouse Theater. As I continue to explore the connections between the body, the camera and the materiality of film itself, I reflect on those early experiences that taught me to reflect upon my own relationship to the people, places and events I continue to witness as a filmmaker.” – Lynne Sachs
Individual tickets for screenings are $16, and $8 for DCTV Members. The artist talk is $20, and $10 for DCTV Members. A Series Pass grants access to all screenings for $80, and $40 for DCTV Members – artist talk is sold separately. A special print monograph will be included with the purchase of a Series Pass, and on sale at Firehouse.
Founded in 1972, DCTV (Downtown Community TV) has grown into one of the leading documentary production and film education centers in the country. In September 2022, DCTV opened the Firehouse Cinema, a documentary theater where filmmakers and film lovers can come together in appreciation of nonfiction film.
Thank you to DCTV, Film-Makers Cooperative, Cinema Guild, and Sylvia Savadjian.
Sunday, May 12 2024 at 8:15 PM Anthology Film Archives, New York City
Prismatic Ground is a New York festival centered on experimental documentary and avant-garde film. Hosted with media partner Screen Slate at handful of venues across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, the festival will hold its fourth edition May 8-12, 2024 (with a virtual component, in which participation is voluntary,).
We seek work that pushes the formal boundaries of non-fiction in the spirit and tradition of experimental filmmaking. This “spirit” is somewhat amorphous, undefinable, and open to interpretation, but refers to work that engages with its own materiality, privileges a heightened artistic experience over clear meaning, and/or conveys a liberatory political sensibility in the agitprop tradition.
Contractions screening with Malqueridas by Tana Gilbert
Malqueridas Tana Gilbert 75 min
They are women. They are mothers. They are prisoners serving long sentences in a correctional facility in Chile. Their children grow up far from them, but remain in their hearts. In prison, they find affection in other partners who share their situation. Mutual support among these women becomes a form of resistance and empowerment. ‘Malqueridas’ builds their stories through images captured by them with cell phones inside the prison, recovering the collective memory of a forgotten community. —Square Eyes/Tana Gilbert
2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV, and in celebration, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in NYC will be presenting an extensive retrospective. Taking place June 7-11, the series features 24 of her films plus a sound-collage world premiere associated with her latest film, Contractions, which was a selection at True/False, Prismatic Ground, and DC/DOX 2024). The upcoming New York Times Op-Docs release, which takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic, will premiere at the NYT timed to the 2nd anniversary of Roe v Wade being overturned.
Titled Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In, the retrospective traverses Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. The program notes continue, “From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.”
“I’ve been in awe of Lynne’s fearlessness and desire to create, make meaning, rip apart, and piece together. I see her as the epitome of an indelible artist who is driven by curiosity and empathy – not fame, industry demands, or commercial algorithms. And I appreciate her sincere gratitude to her collaborators and to DCTV, honorably looking back but always steps ahead. Good documentary filmmaking cannot happen in a vacuum,” said Dara Messinger, Director of Programming, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema.
“I walked into Downtown Community TV (DCTV) in 1984 thinking I needed to take some classes on how to make a documentary film,” said Sachs. “I was 22 years old and open to any possibility, any guidance, and totally impressionable. From that moment on, I learned to challenge every conventional expectation about working with reality. It’s an honor to bring these seven programs back to the Firehouse Theater. As I continue to explore the connections between the body, the camera and the materiality of film itself, I reflect on those early experiences that taught me to reflect upon my own relationship to the people, places and events I continue to witness as a filmmaker.”
Founded in 1972, DCTV has grown into one of the leading documentary production and film education centers in the country. A community of and for documentary filmmakers, DCTV is a unique space where screenings, discussions, youth media, continuing education programs, and filmmaking resources exist side by side with award-winning productions.
Check out the schedule below and get tickets starting May 8 here.
Friday, June 7
Program 1: Performing the Real
Eschewing the inherent distance in ethnography and observation, the responsive movement and poetry in this program’s films shine a light on Sachs’ creative impulse to drive collaborative participation and honor the role of catalyst.
Opening Night: Friday, June 7th, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker moderated by Sam Green
FOSSIL 1986, 12 min The village women of Mambai in Bali, Indonesia collect sand and stone from the river. Each woman sells what she has gathered for construction material. But the river is more than a place to work. It is a place to bathe, wash clothes, laugh and tell stories. Fossil is a collaborative performance piece that evolved through discussion and movement exercises in a collective response to Lynne’s images from Mambai.
THE WASHING SOCIETY Co-Directed with Lizzie Olesker, 2018, 44 min When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. Inspired by To ‘Joy My Freedom author Tera Hunter’s depiction of the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses in Atlanta and historian Silvia Federici’s writing on reproductive labor, Sachs and Olesker’s film investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry. Dirt, skin, lint, stains, money, and time are thematically interwoven into the very fabric of The Washing Society through interviews and observational moments. With original music by Stephen Vitiello, the film explores the slippery relationship between the real and the re-enacted with layers of dramatic dialogue and gestural choreography. The juxtaposition of narrative and documentary elements in The Washing Society creates a dream-like, yet hyper-real portrayal of a day in the life of a laundry worker, both past and present.
SWERVE 2022, 8 min A market and playground in Queens, New York, a borough of New York City, becomes the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five New York City performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.
Saturday, June 8
Program 2: Frames and Stanzas: An Artist Talk and Workshop
Saturday, June 8, 12pm In this intimate artist talk and workshop, filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs will share her insights in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. Lynne will present excerpts from her own films that explore the activation of archival images, visualization of poetic texts, overlaying text on image, expanded cinema performance, oral history, and the film essay. As part of the class experience, participants will explore their creative practice through writing. Films to be screened include: A Biography of Lilith, Starfish Aorta Colossus, Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home.
Program 3: It’s a Hell of a Place A love letter to New York City – when love can also be critical, baffling, sometimes painful. The films in this program all take place in our metropolis called home.
Saturday, June 8th, 4pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Tom Day, Executive Director of Film-Makers Cooperative
LADIES WEAR 1983, 3 min Filmed with Sachs’ brother, Ira Sachs, on the New York City subway.
TORNADO 2022, 4 min A tornado is a spinning cyclone of nature. It stampedes like an angry bull through a tranquil pasture of blue violets and upright blades of grass. A tornado kills with abandon but has no will. Lynne Sachs’ Tornado is a cine-poem shot from the perspective of Brooklyn, where much of the paper and soot from the burning towers fell on September 11th. Sachs’ fingers obsessively handle these signed fragments of resumes, architectural drawings and calendars, normally banal office material that takes on a new, haunting meaning.
YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT 2013, 63 min 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.
Program 4: Fightless
Violence begets violence, as protest and resistance begets change. In this program, Sachs’ films dissect war, civil disobedience, and the sociopolitical tides from WWII to Vietnam and today.
Saturday, June 8, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Naeem Mohaiemen
THE SMALL ONES 2007, 3 min During WWII, the US Army Graves Registration Service hired Sachs’ Hungarian cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones – small and large – of dead American soldiers. This elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of excerpts of Sandor’s letters to Sachs’ family, highly abstracted war imagery, and home movies of children at a birthday party.
THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR 2010, 10 min Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.
E•PIS•TO•LAR•Y: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO 2021, 5 min In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic, Zero for Conduct, in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol by thousands of right-wing activists, she wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can so quickly turn into chaos and violence.
INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME 2001, 45 min On May 17, 1968, nine Vietnam War protesters, including a nurse, an artist and three priests, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records, and burned them with homemade napalm. Investigation of a Flame is an intimate look at this unlikely, disparate band of resistors – the Catonsville Nine, as they came to be known – who broke the law in a poetic act of civil disobedience. The publicity and news coverage from the ensuing trial helped galvanize an increasingly disillusioned American public. Sachs has combined long unseen archival footage with a series of informal interviews with Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Howard Zinn, Tom Lewis, and Marjorie and Tom Melville and others to encourage viewers to ponder the relevance of such events today.
Sunday, June 9
2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV, and in celebration, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in NYC will be presenting an extensive retrospective. Taking place June 7-11, the series features 24 of her films plus a sound-collage world premiere associated with her latest film, Contractions, which was a selection at True/False, Prismatic Ground, and DC/DOX 2024). The upcoming New York Times Op-Docs release, which takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic, will premiere at the NYT timed to the 2nd anniversary of Roe v Wade being overturned.
Titled Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In, the retrospective traverses Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. The program notes continue, “From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.”
“I’ve been in awe of Lynne’s fearlessness and desire to create, make meaning, rip apart, and piece together. I see her as the epitome of an indelible artist who is driven by curiosity and empathy – not fame, industry demands, or commercial algorithms. And I appreciate her sincere gratitude to her collaborators and to DCTV, honorably looking back but always steps ahead. Good documentary filmmaking cannot happen in a vacuum,” said Dara Messinger, Director of Programming, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema.
“I walked into Downtown Community TV (DCTV) in 1984 thinking I needed to take some classes on how to make a documentary film,” said Sachs. “I was 22 years old and open to any possibility, any guidance, and totally impressionable. From that moment on, I learned to challenge every conventional expectation about working with reality. It’s an honor to bring these seven programs back to the Firehouse Theater. As I continue to explore the connections between the body, the camera and the materiality of film itself, I reflect on those early experiences that taught me to reflect upon my own relationship to the people, places and events I continue to witness as a filmmaker.”
Founded in 1972, DCTV has grown into one of the leading documentary production and film education centers in the country. A community of and for documentary filmmakers, DCTV is a unique space where screenings, discussions, youth media, continuing education programs, and filmmaking resources exist side by side with award-winning productions.
Check out the schedule below and get tickets starting May 8 here.
Friday, June 7
Program 1: Performing the Real
Eschewing the inherent distance in ethnography and observation, the responsive movement and poetry in this program’s films shine a light on Sachs’ creative impulse to drive collaborative participation and honor the role of catalyst.
Opening Night: Friday, June 7th, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker moderated by Sam Green
FOSSIL 1986, 12 min The village women of Mambai in Bali, Indonesia collect sand and stone from the river. Each woman sells what she has gathered for construction material. But the river is more than a place to work. It is a place to bathe, wash clothes, laugh and tell stories. Fossil is a collaborative performance piece that evolved through discussion and movement exercises in a collective response to Lynne’s images from Mambai.
THE WASHING SOCIETY Co-Directed with Lizzie Olesker, 2018, 44 min When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. Inspired by To ‘Joy My Freedom author Tera Hunter’s depiction of the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses in Atlanta and historian Silvia Federici’s writing on reproductive labor, Sachs and Olesker’s film investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry. Dirt, skin, lint, stains, money, and time are thematically interwoven into the very fabric of The Washing Society through interviews and observational moments. With original music by Stephen Vitiello, the film explores the slippery relationship between the real and the re-enacted with layers of dramatic dialogue and gestural choreography. The juxtaposition of narrative and documentary elements in The Washing Society creates a dream-like, yet hyper-real portrayal of a day in the life of a laundry worker, both past and present.
SWERVE 2022, 8 min A market and playground in Queens, New York, a borough of New York City, becomes the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five New York City performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.
Saturday, June 8
Program 2: Frames and Stanzas: An Artist Talk and Workshop
Saturday, June 8, 12pm In this intimate artist talk and workshop, filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs will share her insights in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. Lynne will present excerpts from her own films that explore the activation of archival images, visualization of poetic texts, overlaying text on image, expanded cinema performance, oral history, and the film essay. As part of the class experience, participants will explore their creative practice through writing. Films to be screened include: A Biography of Lilith, Starfish Aorta Colossus, Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home.
Program 3: It’s a Hell of a Place A love letter to New York City – when love can also be critical, baffling, sometimes painful. The films in this program all take place in our metropolis called home.
Saturday, June 8th, 4pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Tom Day, Executive Director of Film-Makers Cooperative
LADIES WEAR 1983, 3 min Filmed with Sachs’ brother, Ira Sachs, on the New York City subway.
TORNADO 2022, 4 min A tornado is a spinning cyclone of nature. It stampedes like an angry bull through a tranquil pasture of blue violets and upright blades of grass. A tornado kills with abandon but has no will. Lynne Sachs’ Tornado is a cine-poem shot from the perspective of Brooklyn, where much of the paper and soot from the burning towers fell on September 11th. Sachs’ fingers obsessively handle these signed fragments of resumes, architectural drawings and calendars, normally banal office material that takes on a new, haunting meaning.
YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT 2013, 63 min 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.
Program 4: Fightless
Violence begets violence, as protest and resistance begets change. In this program, Sachs’ films dissect war, civil disobedience, and the sociopolitical tides from WWII to Vietnam and today.
Saturday, June 8, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Naeem Mohaiemen
THE SMALL ONES 2007, 3 min During WWII, the US Army Graves Registration Service hired Sachs’ Hungarian cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones – small and large – of dead American soldiers. This elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of excerpts of Sandor’s letters to Sachs’ family, highly abstracted war imagery, and home movies of children at a birthday party.
THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR 2010, 10 min Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.
E•PIS•TO•LAR•Y: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO 2021, 5 min In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic, Zero for Conduct, in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol by thousands of right-wing activists, she wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can so quickly turn into chaos and violence.
INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME 2001, 45 min On May 17, 1968, nine Vietnam War protesters, including a nurse, an artist and three priests, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records, and burned them with homemade napalm. Investigation of a Flame is an intimate look at this unlikely, disparate band of resistors – the Catonsville Nine, as they came to be known – who broke the law in a poetic act of civil disobedience. The publicity and news coverage from the ensuing trial helped galvanize an increasingly disillusioned American public. Sachs has combined long unseen archival footage with a series of informal interviews with Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Howard Zinn, Tom Lewis, and Marjorie and Tom Melville and others to encourage viewers to ponder the relevance of such events today.
Sunday, June 9
Program 5: Bodies and Bonds
Heavy with chains that bind, this program of films magnifies Sachs’ feminist gaze through her personal diaries, family portraits, and women’s testimonies.
Sunday, June 9, 2pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs + Dara Messinger
DRAWN AND QUARTERED 1987, 4 min A male form and a female form exist in their own private domains, separated by a barrier. Only for a moment does the one intrude upon the pictorial space of the other. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium.
THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE 1991, 30 min A defiant feminist mosaic on the ways that science enters our culture and defines what it is to be a woman. At age 30, Lynne Sachs wondered why so much about our culture simply made her feel bad about her body. She wrote in her diary, shot film with her friends and collected archival footage from educational films on menstruation and childbirth. By giving new meaning to the “body of the body” and the “body of the mind,” she works to dismantle those stereotypes of women rooted in Western patriarchy.
AND THEN WE MARCHED 2017, 4 min Sachs shoots Super 8mm film of the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this recent footage with archival material of early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote,1960s antiwar activists and 1970s advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment. She then talks about the experience of marching with her seven-year old neighbor who offers disarmingly insightful observations on the meaning of their shared actions.
A YEAR IN NOTES AND NUMBERS 2017, 4 min A year’s worth of Lynne’s to-do lists forces her to confront the unavoidable numbers that are part and parcel of an annual visit to the doctor. The quotidian and the corporeal mingle and mix. Family commitments, errands and artistic effusions trade places with the daunting reality of sugar, cholesterol, and bone.
CAROLEE, BARBARA & GUNVOR 2018, 9 min From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists and dear friends who had embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, she shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.
MAYA AT 24 2021, 4 min Lynne films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle, clockwise, as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward, on celluloid at 24 frames per second. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age
CONTRACTIONS 2024, 12 min In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion. This film takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive justice activist. We watch 14 women who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they speak with the full force of their collective presence. A New York Times: Op-Docs release.
WE CONTINUE TO SPEAK 2024, 4 min. 33 Sec., sound collage Sachs records the participants in her film Contractions as they vocalize their reactions to the reduction of women’s bodily autonomy in the US. World Premiere.
Monday, June 10
Program 6: Tip of My Tongue + A Month of Single Frames
Monday, June 10, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Accra Shepp (photographer, member of cast) moderated by Tabitha Jackson
A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES 2019, 14 min In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C-Scape Dune Shack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder, and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her dune shack images, sounds and writing to Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material.
TIP OF MY TONGUE 2017, 83 min To celebrate her 50th birthday, Lynne gathers together other people, men and women who have lived through precisely the same years but come from places, like Iran or Cuba or Australia or the Lower East Side, not Memphis, Tennessee where Sachs grew up. She invites 12 fellow New Yorkers to spend a weekend with her making a movie. Together, they discuss some of the most salient, strange and revealing moments of their lives in a brash, self-reflexive examination of the way in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe impact who we are. They move from the Vietnam War protests to the Anita Hill hearings to the Columbine Shootings to Occupy Wall Street as the film becomes an activator in the resurrection of complex, sometimes paradoxical reflections. Traditional timelines are replaced by a multi-layered, cinematic architecture that both speaks to and visualizes the nature of historical expression.
Tuesday, June 11
Program 7: Film About a Father Who + The Jitters
Closing Night: Tuesday, June 11, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Ira Sachs
THE JITTERS 2024, 3 min In 2023, the University of Indiana commissioned Sachs and 16 other filmmakers to make a film to celebrate the first “Century of 16mm.” Lynne decided to create a film that reflected who she was at this moment in her life. The Jitters becomes a performance with her partner Mark Street (also one of the commissioned artists), celebrating who they are independently and together … along with their three pet frogs.
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO 2020, 74 min Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal. A Cinema Guild release.
The Witch Film by George Méliès, 1906, 12’; silent movie
The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts Film by Lynne Sachs, 1991, 30’; language: English; English subtitles
In collaboration with multimedia artists Lourenço Soares and Paulo Wirz, two short films will be screened – interspersed with video art pieces – that focus on the very anthropological topics of nature, witchcraft and science. Both films explore the intersection of reality and illusion: Méliès through the lens of early cinema’s fascination with magic and spectacle, and Sachs through a postmodern interrogation of scientific truth and narrative construction. The screening of these thought-provoking films will be followed by a brief discussion.
Frames and Stanzas: a master class on film and poetry
Lynne Sachs Centro de cultura digital and Ambulante La Cineteca Nacional, Mexico City
April 11, 2024 – 5 to 6:30 PM / 17 h to 18:30 h
Filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs will share insights she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. Lynne will share excerpts from her own films that explore the activation of archival images, visualization of poetic texts, overlaying text on image, expanded cinema performance, oral history, and the film essay. This master class will include excerpts from Lynne’s films includingStarfish Aorta Colossus, Tip of My Tongue, The Washing Society, Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home, and Swerve. As part of the class experience, participants will write a poem.
Opening the Family Album / “Abrir el álbum familiar” Lynne Sachs Ambulante Festival and Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City
Sesiones virtuales: Jueves 14 de marzo, de 19 a 20 horas (9 to 10 PM NYC) y viernes 5 de abril de 17 a 18 horas (7 to 8 PM NYC) Sábado presenciales: Sábado 13 y domingo 14 de abril, de 11 a 14 horas, final performance April 14 at 6 PM
Opening the Family Album is a workshop in which we will explore the ways in which images of our mother, father, sister, brother, child, cousin, grand-parent, aunt or uncle might become material for the making of a personal film. We will meet virtually twice for one hour: March 14 and April 5. Then we will meet in-person with Lynne for two days (April 13 & 14, 11 am to 14 pm and for a final, public showing later that day at 6 pm), all at Centro Cultural Digital. Please join Lynne between our workshop and our final performance for her 16mm film program
Each participant will come to the workshop with a single photograph (both in hand and digital) they want to examine. During the workshop, you will write text in response to this image by incorporating storytelling and performance. In the process, we will discuss and challenge notions of truth-telling and language. Your final work will then be a completed film with sound or a film with live narration. Previous filmmaking and editing experience is appreciated but not required. Participants may use their own digital cameras or cell phones to make images and sounds. Please register early so that you can be part of our first meeting which will be in March and will be virtual.
This workshop is inspired by the work of Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg, whose writing explores family relationships during the Fascist years and World War II. Ginzburg was a prescient artist who enjoyed mixing up conventional distinctions between fiction and non-fiction: “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt compelled at once to destroy it. The places, events, and people are all real.” We will also read texts from Roland Barthes and Clarise Lispector.
Participants are encouraged to have their own cameras, but cell phone cameras are FINE. Also, if you know how to edit digitally that is helpful but not critical.
United Journalists. Mexico City, March 20, 2024.- On April 10, the nineteenth edition of the Ambulante Documentary Tour will begin with a program of more than 90 films, in which activities and meeting spaces are resumed to strengthen the collective experience that it unfolds from documentary cinema.
The Tour will visit four states of the Mexican Republic between April 10 and May 26, 2024: Mexico City (April 10 to 21); Veracruz (May 2 to 12); Michoacán (from May 8 to 19); and Querétaro (from May 15 to 26). In parallel with the territorial tour of the Tour, part of the programming will also be available online for users throughout the national territory through www.nuestrocine.mx , on the following days of May 2024: from the 2nd to the 5th , 9 to 12 and from 16 to 19.
The programming is made up of more than 90 titles, from more than 23 countries, in 27 languages - of which 7 are indigenous languages -, with 1 world premiere and 14 national premieres. The programming is divided into nine sections:
Pulses (panorama of the Mexican documentary feature film).
Intersections (international contemporary documentary cinema).
Resistance (with a focus on justice, resilience and the defense of human rights).
Rearview mirror (focusing on films that bring the film archive to life).
Sonidero (in homage to resonances, sound and music).
Ambulantito, (section aimed at children).
Invocations (retrospectives dedicated to filmmakers who have marked a watershed in documentary).
Graft (section dedicated to avant-garde cinema).
Coordinates (Mexican films from each region that the Tour visits).
The special program Ecologies of Cinema (works that promote transformations for the defense of the territory), will present the documentary The White Guard , by Julien Elie, in Veracruz, Michoacán and Querétaro.
In addition to an extraordinary and diverse selection of titles, during the Tour there are workshops, conversations, master classes, Q&A, video installation, documentary theater, activations with childhood, projections interpreted in Mexican Sign Language and various mediation processes that seek to provoke changes in the perception of our audiences. Screenings and events will be mostly free. The nineteenth edition of the Documentary Tour will begin its journey in Mexico City with a program of 78 activities spread across twenty venues . From April 10 to 21, screenings, talks, master classes, a video installation, workshops and conferences will be held, two of them dedicated to childhood. Admission will be free to 65% of events.
As part of the special activities of the Tour in Mexico City, the presence of special guests stands out: the American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who will teach the master class “Marcos y stanzas. Lynne Sachs on cinema and poetry” and the practical film workshop “Open the family album”, presented by Ambulante in collaboration with the Experimental Film Laboratory, Kino Rebelde and the Digital Culture Center within the “Cinema Beyond” program »; Also, artist Nikki Schuster will carry out the video installation uprooted , which weaves a collective narrative from testimonies and analysis of voices along the tracks of the Mayan Train: destruction, social division and the loss of Mayan identity. This activity has the support of the Cultural Forum of the Austrian Embassy in Mexico, among other accompanied activities.
The Documentary Tour will present a program of short films by Marie Losier and the installation of her loop boxes , small boxes designed and decorated by herself, which contain three audiovisual works in infinite loop, in collaboration with the French Institute of Latin America (IFAL) , Trampoline Association and Casa del Lago UNAM.
In collaboration with Makesense Americas and TikTok México, we will present “Crisis Cruzadas”, a campaign in which we will bring together ten TikTok content creators to expand the conversation about the climate crisis from an intersectional perspective. Within the framework of this campaign, we will screen a documentary capsule at various functions and some creators will participate in an in-person activity at IFAL.
The inaugural screening of the Documentary Tour will take place on Wednesday, April 10 at 7:30 p.m. at the Esperanza Iris City Theater. The film Three Promises will be screened , where director Yousef Srouji takes up the filming made by his mother during the Israeli army’s reprisals against the second intifada in the West Bank, Palestine. The function will be attended by Marielle Olentine, producer of the documentary. Admission is free and space is limited.
From April 12 to 14, the Documentary Tour will offer a selection of feature films that will be screened at Cinépolis Diana and Cinépolis Universidad, through the Cinépolis® Art Room. For followers of the Documentary Tour , Cinépolis will have the traditional Cinebono, with a cost of $180 pesos for four tickets, as well as a special cost of $60 per individual ticket.
At the Cinépolis Diana venue, during the Ambulante period, the following will be presented: Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin (2023) by Katia deVidas, Copa 71 (2023) by Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine, Nocturnas (2024) by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, Patrullaje (2023) by Camilo de Castro Belli and Brad Allgood, Sr (2024) by Lea Hartlaub, and Ch’ul be, Senda Sagrada (2023) by Humberto Gómez. At Cinépolis Universidad, titles such as El Eco (2023) by Tatiana Huezo, Favoriten (2024) by Ruth Beckermann, Inside of me I am dancing (2023) by Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann, Queendom (2023) by Agniia Galdanova, and Malqueridas (2023) will be presented. ) by Tana Gilbert.
There will be performances accompanied by the presence of filmmakers and protagonists of the documentaries. Among the guests are Emiliano Ruprah de Fina, director of The Guardian of the Monarchs ; Lynne Sachs, director of Film About a Father Who ; Johan Grimonprez, director of Soundtrack for a coup d’état ; Marielle Olentine, producer of Tres Promesas ; Humberto Gómez, director of Ch’ul be, sacred path ; and Claudia Ignacio Álvarez, protagonist of Patrol. Activists, academics, researchers and artists from various disciplines will also join us.
The venues where activities will take place are: House of the First Printing Press of America UAM, Casa del Lago UNAM, Cultural Center of Spain in Mexico (CCEMx), José Martí Cultural Center, UNAM University Cultural Center, Digital Culture Center, Center National Arts Center (Cenart), Cinépolis Diana, Cinépolis Universidad, Cineteca Nacional, Cineteca Nacional de las Artes, Cine Tonalá, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences UNAM, Faro Aragón, Faro Cosmos, La Cine-Fonda, Le Cinéma IFAL, La Cave, Casa de la Paz Theater UAM, Esperanza Iris City Theater, Underground Paradise.
Ambulante appreciates the support of the Ministry of Culture, the Mexican Institute of Cinematography (Imcine), Ford Foundation, Sigrid Rausing Trust, Ben & Frank, Cinépolis, LCI Seguros, Labodigital, R7D, Cerveza Monstruo de Agua and Fundación Heinrich Böll who contribute to making Tour possible. Likewise, we extend our gratitude to the Secretariats of Culture of the states we visited and to all the sponsors who join their efforts with us, as well as to the different embassies, foundations, headquarters, universities, restaurants, media and all collaborators and collaborators without whom this festival would not take place. Thanks to the volunteers whose invaluable support and dedication have made it possible for the Documentary Tour to reach its 19th edition.
Centro de Cultura Digital
Retrospectiva a Lynne Sachs. Programa de cortometrajes 1
The Cine más allá (CCD) in collaboration with Ambulante and the curatorship of the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine, dedicates a retrospective to the American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, an obligatory reference of avant-garde cinema in recent years, whose work, as personal – sometimes even intimate – as it is political, is characterized by an uncompromising aesthetic search and experimentation, through documentary, essay, collage and a myriad of formal and technical explorations.
This retrospective is grouped in Ambulante’s Invocations section. The section is made up of two programs of short films, one on film and the other on digital, and two feature films.
Short film program 1: Window Work, 9 min. 2000 Atalanta 32 Years Later, 5 min. 2006 A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer). 14 min. 2019 Wind in Our Hair/ Con viento en el pelo, 40 min. 2010 And Then We Marched, 4 min. 2017 Maya at 24, 4 min. 2021 A Year of Notes and Numbers, 4 min. 2018 Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor, 8 min. 2018
About: Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, collages, performances and web projects that explore the intrinsic relationship between personal observation and broader historical experiences by interweaving poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design.
Strongly committed to the dialogue between art theory and practice, in her films she pursues a rigorous interplay between image and sound, pushing visual and aural textures further with each new project. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco, where she collaborated with artists such as Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Gunvor Nelson, Barbara Hammer and Trin T. Min-ha. Lynne’s recent work combines fiction, non-fiction and experimental modes. She has made over 25 films that have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Images Festival in Toronto, among others. They have also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts and other national and international institutions. The Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI), the New International Film Festival in Havana and the Women’s Film Festival in China have presented retrospectives of her films. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and is a part-time lecturer in the Art Department at Princeton University.
Program: Laboratorio Experimental de Cine is a non-profit civil association dedicated to the training, production, curatorship and dissemination of experimental and peripheral cinema. Through collaboration, they promote the moving image and its relationship with other artistic formats to create a cinema that expands and challenges the limits of conventional audiovisual language.
Marvin
El Cine más Allá del LEC y CCD en la Cineteca y Ambulante
Encounter with other cinematographies: in a huge proposal of movies that will take you out of your comfort zone.
The Cinema Beyond program of the Experimental Cinema Laboratory , LEC and the Digital Culture Center, CCD expands and reaches the National Cinematheque. Cinema Beyond is a project that presents films that go beyond the traditional formats of film projection and exhibition, seeking exploration and encounter with other cinematographies that are marginal, singular, reckless, committed and experimental.
This April the program begins with a retrospective of Ricardo Nicolayevsky. The program is made up of portraits and personal works of the artist. Nicolayevsky is a reference for avant-garde cinema in Mexico. Most of his works were made in the early eighties in Super8 and 16mm formats.
The Ambulante Festival also adds Cinema Beyond to its programming and presents a Lynne Sachs retrospective, which includes a master class, talks, the screening of two of her feature films at the Cineteca Nacional, as well as two short film programs and the results of the workshop ongoing “Open the family album” at the Digital Culture Center.
The Cinema Beyond program brings you artists such as Masha Godovannaya (Russia), Luis Macías (Spain), Mariana Botey (Mexico), Narcisa Hirsch (Argentina), Craig Baldwin (United States), Peter B. Hutton (United States), Saul Levine (United States) and Yevgeny Yufit (Soviet Union-Russia), led by programmers such as Manuel Trujillo, Salvador Amores, Itzel Martínez and Tomás Rautenstrauch.
The Ambulante 2024 documentary tour will take place from April 10 to May 26, 2024 and will visit Mexico City from April 10 to 21, Veracruz from May 2 to 12, Michoacán from May 8 to 19 and Querétaro from the 15 to May 26.
This section of the festival is designed for children and this year’s program is titled “From outer space to the inner world.” For this reason, this edition there will be a live cinema proposal with the interactive kaleidoscopic Observatory, which will function as a celestial vault. This space will seek to mix cinema from the past with the future to “contemplate the infinitely small and the majestically large.” Mixing sky and earth will invite the discovery of new ways of navigating the world.
The programming will include:
Journey to Jupiter , by Segundo de Chomón (France, 1909)
Jungle Inside , by Dominique Jonard (Mexico, 1992)
Matero and the cinema , by Luis Felipe Hernández Alanis (Mexico, 2014)
Zoon , by Jonatan Schwenk (Germany, 2019)
The Moon , by Laura Ginès Bataller, Pepon Meneses (Spain, 2020)
Tide , by Lucie Andouche (Switzerland, 2023)
We are not prepared to be superheroes, by Lia Bertels (Belgium, Portugal, Spain, 2019)
Rearview
This section aims to present on screen works from the past that have been publicly or privately archived. The program that will follow this edition is “Look to inhabit”, whose three short films are pioneers of community cinema. Community cinema has always been of great interest to Ambulante for exemplifying the social power of documentary by being an alternative to “inhabit and face the complex reality.”
The programming will include:
Our tequio , from the Assembly of Zapotec and Chinantec Authorities of the Sierra (Mexico, 1981)
Murmurs of the volcano , by Valente Soto (Mexico, 1997)
Teat Monteok . The story of the God of lightning, by Elvira Palafox (Mexico, 1985)
Intersections
It is the section in which the great diversity of documentary film forms is revealed, in dialogue with a variety of geographies, contexts and perspectives that cross and redefine the stories of the world.
The section is made up of the following titles:
Malqueridas , by Tana Gilbert (Chile, Germany, 2023)
Photophobia , by Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekarčík (Slovakia, Czech Republic, Ukraine, 2023)
Favoriten , by Ruth Beckermann (Austria, 2024)
Sr , by Lea Hartlaub (Germany, 2024)
The Menu of Pleasures: The Troisgros Family , by Frederick Wiseman (United States, 2023)
And the king said: what a fantastic machine , by Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck (Sweden, Denmark, 2023)
Invocations
This section brings together retrospectives of the tour. This edition, Ambulante, in collaboration with the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine and Cine Más Allá, dedicates a retrospective to the American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, an obligatory reference in avant-garde cinema in recent years, whose work, so personal—sometimes even intimate — as a policy, it is characterized by an aesthetic search and a less than accommodating experimentation, through documentary, essay, collage and endless formal and technical explorations. The section will be made up of two short film programs, one film and the other digital:
Your day is my night , by Lynne Sachs (United States, 2013)
Film about a father who , by Lynne Sachs (United States, 2020)
Ambulante is a non-profit organization that seeks to promote documentary film so that people realize its power as a cultural and social tool in Mexico and Central America. It was founded in 2005 by Gael García Bernal, Diego Lunes and Elena Fortes. Its current director is Itzel Martínez del Cañizo.
This time we are going to talk about the North American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who presented a master class in English at the Cineteca Nacional.
One of the special guests at the XIX Ambulante Festival, which has just opened and will continue until May, is the North American poet and filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who presented in English a master class at the Cineteca Nacional, entitled Marcos y estrofas, where They also presented their two feature films.
The writer, born in Memphis on August 10, 1961, spoke about her work that began in 1986 with the short “Still life with woman and four objects.”
She explained that in “Starfish aorta colossus” she illustrates a poem by Paolo Javier with which she would later collaborate and then experiments with translations and subtitles.
In her feature film “Your Day is My Night,” made in 2013, she films a group of Chinese and Latino workers, who live in a small room and long for the family they left many years ago.
The film marked a watershed in Sachs’s career, who stopped traveling to look for subjects and filmed near her home in New York, something that became more acute during the pandemic.
Although she mentions written poetry a lot, this is far from the images presented in her short films, which are limited to illustrating the poems in various ways.
Her cinema is rather experimental, with some short documentaries and essays.
Her other feature film is dedicated to his father Ira.
Fact: In her feature film “Your day is my night”, made in 2013, she films a group of Chinese and Latino workers, who live in a small room and long for the family they left many years ago.
On March 28, acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs visited the CODE^SHIFT lab to host a workshop and screening of her latest film, “Contractions“. During the session, Sachs presented the 12-minute short film and engaged with participants, sharing tips for conducting oral history research and documentary filmmaking.
Sachs, who is based in Brooklyn, has had a 30-year career as an experimental filmmaker and poet. Born in Tennessee, she completed her undergraduate studies at Brown University, studying History with a focus on studio art. Sachs has produced over 40 films in addition to live performances, installations, and web projects. She has tackled a myriad of topics, often confronting social and political issues. According to Sachs’ website, her films have screened at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, as well as festivals worldwide.
“The workshop was so amazing! I appreciate being able to discuss the film with the director. You could tell she was passionate about health and reproductive rights for women. As an audience member, the film held my attention and left me feeling inspired and moved. Lynne was able to give her audience a glimpse into the new challenges women and healthcare professionals are facing after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. I am thankful that Dr. Srivi provided a space to discuss such an important issue.” – Minnie McMillian, PhD Student (Psychology), College of Arts & Sciences
It was Sachs’ latest residential commission that brought her to Syracuse. In 2023, she received the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Support for Artists grant, and she is in the city to create commissioned work for the Urban Video Project (UVP), a media art program which projects the work of filmmakers and video artists onto the facade of the Everson Museum of Art in downtown Syracuse. During the workshop, Sachs was joined by Anneka Herre, faculty member in Syracuse’s College of Visual and Performing Arts and UVP Program Director.
To create her ongoing project, titled “Citizen Second Class” , Sachs plans to work with local artists, reproductive care providers, and activists to explore issues of reproductive justice and bodily autonomy. She is particularly interested in doing so through the lens of Central New York’s history with womens’ rights. This project is part of a larger effort in which Sachs is involved, called “The Abortion Clinic Film Collective”, a group of artists from around the country who came together in the wake of the landmark 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade.
“This is such a timely moment for a film like Contractions, which discusses the discontinuation of abortion services in Memphis. I felt privileged to see the screening with the director Lynne Sachs, along with other women concerned with the state of women’s health and reproductive rights in the country. Lynne’s film transported us to the testimonies of health workers who have experienced firsthand the effects of the overturn of Roe v Wade in such a sensitive, touching, and poetic way that makes it hard to describe. I’m still thinking about her film, and I feel incredibly moved to have been a part of the screening of her film here at Newhouse.” – Raiana de Carvalho, PhD Student (Mass Communications), Newhouse School
After the session, Lynne sat down for a video interview for CODE^SHIFT’s ongoing “Chai with Srivi” series. Speaking to undergraduate RA Nicole Cheah, Sachs detailed how she came to be the storyteller she is today, what feminist filmmaking meant to her, her ongoing project in Syracuse, and more. Once edited, the interview will be published on the CODE^SHIFT YouTube page.
UNEXPOSED Microcinema presents the third annual Single Frame, a showcase of experimental documentaries, pizza and beer.
Jeremy & Brendan Smyth will be presenting the lost 2020 program that was cancelled 4 years ago due to a cataclysmic world event of some kind. Come on out!
Screenings 5:30pm and 7:30pm April 7, 2024with pizza eatin’ time in between. And it’s all free in Durham, NC.
The 19th edition of Ambulante Documentary Tour dedicates this year a retrospective to American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, in collaboration with the Cineteca Nacional México, the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine, the Centro de Cultura Digital and Kino Rebelde. For the first time a selection of Sachs’ work is brought to Mexico, a must-see reference in avant-garde cinema in recent years. His work, as personal -sometimes even intimate- as it is political, is characterized by an uncompromising aesthetic search and experimentation that resorts to documentary, essay, collage and an endless number of formal and technical explorations.
A pioneer of experimental documentary in New York, Sachs’ work takes cinema into the realm of the poetic and beyond reflection. She introduces us to a personal and tireless search; she questions concepts so deeply rooted in the personal, the affective and the political. The border between work and life blurs, disappears and is molded into vital events where the body, death, war and feminism become vivid concepts that the sensitive and critical gaze of the artist questions.
There are many ways to approach Lynne Sachs’ poetics. On the one hand, her contemplation and respect for life allow things to be as they are; on the other hand, she is driven by a radical political action where her voice merges with other voices, where her gaze generates a collective rhythm: the poetic cry that cries out for kinder political places for all. In making the selection of films for the programs, we decided to focus on the theme of the family, as the tension between the biographical and the non-biographical brings us closer to the two main veins in Sachs’ work.
The section is comprised of two feature films: Your Day is My Night, a film that explores the collective history of the Chinese community in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues and theatrical pieces; and Film About a Father Who, in which Sachs films his father over 35 years to better understand her bond with him and her siblings.
In addition, two programs of short films are presented: the first is composed of endearing works about people intimately linked to Sachs’ own life, such as Work at the Window, Atlanta Thirty-two Years Later, A Month of Stills, With Wind in My Hair, And Then We Marched, Maya at Twenty-four, A Year in Notes and Numbers, and Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor.
The second program has a filmic character, as it is composed of films that will be screened in 16 mm: Attracted and Divided, The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, Which Side is East: Vietnam Notebooks, A Biography of Lilit, Photograph of the Wind and The Nerves.
In these programs the political is transformed into a cinema of formal exploration, with no limits to perception. The materiality, which is detonated from the intimate, carries out dislocations from experimentation and critical thinking generates ruptures from the formal. The world is seen through the rhythm of a body moving in circles, as in Maya at twenty-four where the filmmaker films her daughter Maya at six, sixteen and twenty-four years old running in circles around her mother, as if she were propelling herself in time towards the future. Lynne reacts poetically and politically with movement to the systematic and violent territorialization that acts on our own bodies.
Manuel Trujillo “Morris Experimental Film Laboratory
The retrospective is made up of two programs of short films -one screened in film and the other in digital format-, and the following feature films:
Your Day is My Night | Your Day is My Night | Lynne Sachs | United States | 2013 | Chinese, English and Spanish | Color | 64′. Several immigrants living in a small apartment nestled in the heart of New York’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval.
Film About a Father Who | Lynne Sachs | United States | 2020 | English | Color | 74′. For 35 years, Lynne Sachs recorded her father to understand the ties that connected her to him and her sisters. She discovered much more than she imagined.
The Filmic Invocations Program consists of the following titles:
Drawn and Quartered
The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts
Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam
A biography of Lilith
Photograph of the wind
The Jitters
And the Digital Invocations Program is made up of the following titles:
Window Work
Atalanta: 32 years later
A month of single frames
With the wind in my hair
And Then We March
Maya at twenty-four
A year in notes and numbers
Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor
Program of activities in Mexico City:
Thursday, April 11
Cineteca Nacional Mexico
17:00 h : Master class : Frames and stanzas. Lynne Sachs on film and poetry.
Lecturer: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
19:00 h | Function + Q&A | Your Day Is My Night
Lecturer: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
Friday, April 12
Cineteca Nacional Mexico
7:00 p.m. : Screening + Q&A : Film about a father who is a father.
Featuring: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
Saturday, April 13
Centro de Cultura Digital
11:00 h | Workshop: Opening the family album*.
By: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
*Only for registered and accepted participants.
16:00 h | Function + Q&A | Digital Invocations Program
Participant: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
Sunday, April 14th
Digital Culture Center
Day | Invocations
11:00 h | Workshop: Opening the Family Album*.
By: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
*Only for registered and accepted participants.
4:00 p.m.: Filmic Invocations Program.
18:00 h | Screening of the results of the workshop “Opening the family album”.
