Lynne Sachs (NYC), experimental filmmaker will present her latest creation as a pre-premiere “Wind in Our Hair”, it is based on stories by Julio Cortazar, filmed in various formats (16mm, super 8, regular 8mm film, video) digitally mastered and set to music by Juana Molina.
And Which Way Is East (1994) a travel diary filmed in 16mm, which portrays her vision of the documentary that comes from contemplation, from prioritizing the moment and the light it displays, from her way of being in the world. This film was made in Vietnam with her sister the journalist Dana Sachs who lives there.
Awards the film has received: Grand Jury Prize, Atlanta Film and Video Festival; Sundance Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Prize, Black Maria Film and Video Festival; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Cinematheque; “Arsenal” Film Festival, Rega, Lativa; Pacific Film Archive; Mill Valley Film Festival; Vassar College; Yale University; Cornell Cinema; SF Asian American Film Festival.
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
For password to Vimeo link, please write to info@lynnesachs.com.
Premiere: New York Film Festival, 2009
Broadcast: Hungarian Public Television, Spring 2010.
Sandor Lenard voice: Israel John Gerendasi
Sandor Lenard performance: Donald Moss with Ivan Moss
Winnie the Pooh Performers: Lucas Fagen, Isabel Reade, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs
Camera: Ethan Mass, Lynne Sachs
Latin Consultation: Michele Lowrie
Interviews by Lynne Sachs
Hansgerd Lenard, Dusseldorf, Germany
Andrietta Lenard, Sao Paolo, Brazil
Selected Screenings and Honors: Indiewire.Com: Nominated One of the Best “Undistributed Films” of 2009 (Phillip Lopate); Director’s Choice Award, Black Maria Film Festival 2010; San Francisco Cinematheque; Pacific Film Archive; Punto de Vista Documentary Film Festival, Spain; University of Chicago; Chicago Filmmakers; Closing Night Film Singapore Film Festival; International House University of Pennsylvania; Museum of the Moving Image, NYC, 2021; Criterion Channel Streaming.
Criterion Channel streaming premiere with 7 other films, Oct. 2021.
Filmmaker Lynne Sachs wanted to understand the word SELENOGRAPHY so she traipsed around New York City from Fresh Kills State Park in Staten Island (the darkest place in the city) to the Lower East Side looking for the moon. Made for the Abecedarium:NYC Project (www.abecedariumnyc.org).
Co-directed by Lynne Sachs and Susan Agliata with the support of the New York Public Library
Abecedarium:NYC is an interactive online exhibition that reflects on the history, geography, and culture – both above and below ground – of New York City through 26 unusual words. Using original video, animation, photography and sound, Abecedarium:NYCconstructs visual relationships between these select words and specific locations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island.
Each word – whether it’s A for audile or Z for zenana – leads to a different short video and a location in the city that you may never have experienced before. In selenography (the study of the moon), amateur astronomers celebrate the wonders of the night sky at Staten Island’s Great Kills State Park. In open city (a metropolis without defense), the ruins of military installations throughout the five boroughs decay with time. Chatty teenagers in a Flushing, Queens cafe drink bubble tea in xenogenesis (the phenomenon of children markedly different from their parents). In diglot (a bilingual person), a Chinese accountant, Albanian baker, Palestinian falafel maker, Argentine film archivist and Cuban cigar maker speak candidly about their daily routines. In mofette (an opening in the earth from which carbon monoxide escapes) mysterious gases flow from gaps in the streets of Manhattan.
The experience of visiting Abecedarium:NYC is more than watching, listening and learning. Visitors to the project are invited to respond to existing content as well as to share their own experience of New York City by contributing original videos, soundscapes, photos or texts to the project Abecedarium:NYC Blog. As more users contribute, the project grows in size, scope and experience, and transforms into a destination for sharing and learning about every facet of the city.
See some of the Abecedarium:NYC word videos I’ve made at:
“A complex rumination on the power of protest…..the trauma of the past, the continued mistakes of the present and the necessity to reflect actively on our government’s wartime antics.” The LA Weekly
“A film to rave about, as well as reckon with.” The Independent Film and Video Monthly
“Sachs’ elegant, elliptical documentary visits with surviving members of what became known as the Catonsville Nine, humble architects of this purposeful yet scathingly metaphoric act of civil disobedience.” The Village Voice
“Investigation of a Flame captures the heartfelt belief behind the Nine’s symbolic action of civil disobedience that sparked other (actions) like it across the nation. (The film) provides a potent reminder that some Americans are willing to pay a heavy price to promote peace.” Baltimore City Paper
“This is a documentary about the protest events that made Catonsville, Maryland, an unpretentious suburb on the cusp of Baltimore, a flash point for citizens’ resistance at the height of the war. Sachs found assorted characters still firm to fiery on the topic. She came to admire the consistency of the mutual antagonists in an argument that still rages (today).” The New York Times
“This poetic essay offers the perfect antidote to PBS: there is no omniscient narrator talking down to the viewer, reciting facts and explaining what to think, yet the story is perfectly clear. Brothers Phil and Dan Berrigan, who led the protest, appear both in the present and in archival footage, a mix that makes their commitment palpable.” Chicago Reader
“To those who think that everything in a society and its culture must move in lock step at times of crisis, (this film) might seem to be ‘off-message.’ But it’s in essence patriotic… saluting U.S. democracy as it pays homage to the U.S. tradition of dissent.” The Baltimore Sun
“Georgic for a Forgotten Planet” 11 min., video, 2009
“I began reading Virgil’s Georgics, a 1st Century epic agricultural poem, and knew immediately that I needed to create a visual equivalent about my own relationship to the place where I live, New York City. Culled from material I collected at Coney Island, the Lower East Side, Socrates Sculpture Garden in Queens, a Brooklyn community garden and a place on Staten Island that is so dark you can see the three moons of Jupiter. An homage to a place many people affectionately and mysteriously call the big apple” Lynne Sachs
Screenings: Palais de Glace, Museo National de Artes Buenos Aires; Museo Nacional de Artes, Uruguay; Howl Festival of Art, New York; Monkeytown, Brooklyn; Black Maria Film Fest Award, Director’s Choice; Athens Film Festival
Sunday, April 12, 2009 Georgic for a Forgotten Planet “Lynne Sachs showed one of her latest films, “Georgic for a Forgotten Planet”, last night at ATA, a cultural icon here in San Francisco. The film, like Vergil’s Georgic, is a lovely and meditatively poetic paean to agriculture, although, unlike Vergil, the film’s focus is on the separation of our citified culture from the husbandry of the earth as well as the separation of our own persons from what surrounds us. I was struck in particular by a number of plaintive shots of the Moon over the city, hardly visible against the streetlights, ignored by those below, a forgotten deity.
Many of her films center on ecology and our damage of the same and we saw a number of those as well. Also included on the program were the films of her partner Mark Street, including one of his more abstract works titled Winter Wheat, a beautiful bubbling hand-manipulated piece of 16mm art, which took on an environmental urgency in the context of the other films. ” Erling Wold See Composer Erling Wold’s thoughts at www.erlingwold.com
“From archival snips of an educational film on the weather to cine poems in full blossom, Brooklyn film “avant-gardeners” Mark Street and Lynne Sachs create their 3rd XY CHROMOSOME PROJECT at Other Cinema at ATA in San Francisco. This program of 10 short films on both single and double screen gleans audio-visual crops from the dust of the filmmakers’ fertile and fallow imaginations. In this avalanche of visual ruminations on nature’s topsy-turvy shakeup of our lives, Street and Sachs ponder a city child’s tentative excavation of the urban forest, winter wheat, and the great American deluge of the 21st Century (so far).” (72 min.)
“Weather Mix/Collision of Parts” (12 min.)
An overture: Weather Mix considers nature’s uneven keel while Collision of Parts takes us on a twisted roller coaster ride through small forgotten moments in New York City. Sound by computer weather forecasts, Pierre Shaffer and others. M. Street, 2008.
DOUBLE SCREEN “Buffalo Disaster Relief” (9 min.)
Archival footage filmed by the US National Guard of Buffalo, New York’s worst snowstorm on record. Obtained from the US National Archives. People attempt to reclaim their daily vignettes in the course of a larger narrative. M. Street and others, 1972.
& “Window Work” (9 min., sound)
A woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper– simple tasks that suggest a kind of quiet mystery. Hear the rhythmic, pulsing symphony of crickets on a summer night, jangling toys, the roar of a jet, children trembling at the sound of thunder. Small home-movie “boxes” within the larger screen become clues to the woman’s childhood, mnemonic devices that expand the sense of immediacy in her “drama.” L. Sachs, 2001
“Winter Wheat” (8 min., sound)
Made by bleaching, scratching and painting directly on the emulsion of an educational film about the farming cycle. The manipulations of the film’s surface created hypnotic visuals while also suggesting an apocalyptic narrative. M. Street, 1989.
“Georgic for a Forgotten Planet” (14 min., sound)
I began reading Virgil’s Georgics, a 1st Century epic agricultural poem, and knew immediately that I needed to create a visual equivalent about my own relationship to the place where I live, New York City. Culled from material I collected at Coney Island, the Lower East Side, Socrates Sculpture Garden in Queens, a Brooklyn community garden and a place on Staten Island that is so dark at night you can see the three moons of Jupiter. An homage to a place many people affectionately and mysteriously call the big apple. L. Sachs, 2009
DOUBLE SCREEN “Sliding Off the Edge of the World” (7 min., silent)
A stab at depicting daily life near the end of time: fleeting images burst onto the screen only to recede from view just as quickly, suggesting transition and decay. Tendrils of images cluster together and then dissipate. A snowy walk, kids in the backyard, it all seems like it could fall apart so quickly. M. Street, 2001
& “Noa, Noa” (9 min., sound)
Over the course of three years, Lynne collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of a Brooklyn park with camera and costumes in hand. L. Sachs, 2006
“Behold the Gowanus Canal” (6 min., sound)
On Earth Day 2008 in Brooklyn, New York, Lynne, Mark and their daughters Maya and Noa float down the Gowanus Canal with environmental visionary Ludger Balan, head of the Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy. Located in the heart of Brooklyn, the canal contains the residual pollution left from decades of disregard for the health and well being of this thriving urban neighborhood and its residents. Finally, the community is waking up to the possible revitalization of this Venice-like waterway. L. Sachs, 2008
DOUBLE SCREEN “Infected City” (14 min. sound)
A coda: the stars and the city meet for one last dance between the known and sublime. M. Street, 2008.
& “New Orleans, Louisiana” (14 min., silent)
One year after Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the levy, and the tragic flooding of New Orleans, Mark and Lynne traveled to this city to help raise money for Zeitgeist Theatre Experiments, a struggling microcinema continuing to show alternative films to the passionate but dwindling local community. This is what they saw as they explored the now famous Ninth Ward and the banks of Lake Ponchatrain. L. Sachs and M. Street, 2006
“A complex rumination on the power of protest…..the trauma of the past, the continued mistakes of the present and the necessity to reflect actively on our government’s wartime antics.” The LA Weekly
