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Kino Rebelde to Represent Lynne Sachs’ Catalogue Internationally

http://www.kinorebelde.com/lynne-sachs-complete-filmography/

Kino Rebelde has created a retrospective that traces a delicate line connecting intimacy, power relations, violence, memory, migration, desire, love, and war in Lynne’s films. By looking at each of these works, we can see a director facing her own fears and contradictions, as well as her sense of friendship and motherhood.  Moving from idea to emotion and back again, our retrospective takes us on a journey through Sachs’ life as a filmmaker, beginning in 1986 and moving all the way to the present.

With the intention of allowing her work to cross boundaries, to interpret and to inquire into her distinctive mode of engaging with the camera as an apparatus for expression, we are delighted to present 37 films that comprise the complete filmmography, so far, of Lynne Sachs as visual artist and filmmaker. Regardless of the passage of time, these works continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent and radical in their artistic conception.


About Kino Rebelde

Kino Rebelde is a Sales and Festival Distribution Agency created by María Vera in early 2017. Its exclusively dedicated to promotion of non-fiction cinema, hybrid narratives and experimental.

Based on the creative distribution of few titles by year, Kino Rebelde established itself as a “boutique agency”, working on a specialized strategy for each film, within its own characteristics, market potential, niches and formal and alternative windows.

This company supports short, medium and long feature films, from any country, with linear or non-linear narratives. They can be in development or WIP, preferably in the editing stage.

The focus: author point of view, pulse of stories, chaos, risk, more questions, less answers, aesthetic and politic transgression, empathy, identities, desires and memory.

Kino Rebelde was born in Madrid, but as its films, this is a nomadic project. In the last years María has been living in Lisbon, Belgrade and Hanoi and she’ll keep moving around.

About María Vera

Festival Distributor and Sales Agent born in Argentina. Founder of Kino Rebelde, a company focused on creative distribution of non-fiction, experimental and hybrid narratives.

Her films have been selected and awarded in festivals as Berlinale, IFFR Rotterdam, IDFA, Visions Du Réel, New York FF, Hot Docs, Jeonju IFF, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Sarajevo FF, Doclisboa and Viennale, among others.

María has a background as producer of socio-political and human rights contents as well as a film curator.Envelope

vera@kinorebelde.com


Lynne Sachs (1961) is an American filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances.

Working from a feminist perspective, Lynne weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with renowned musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.

Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project.

Between 1994 and 2009, Lynne directed five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany – sites affected by international war – where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own perception. 

Over the course of her career, she has worked closely with film artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Min-ha.

Retrospective – “Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression” curated by Edo Choi, Asst. Curator, Museum of the Moving Image

https://canyoncinema.com/2021/02/17/lynne-sachs-between-thought-and-expression-five-program-retrospective-now-available-for-rent/

“For more than thirty years, artist Lynne Sachs has constructed short, bold mid-length, and feature films incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, and observational documentary. Her highly self-reflexive films have variously explored the relations between the body, camera, and the materiality of film itself; histories of personal, social, and political trauma; marginalized communities and their labor; and her own family life, slipping seamlessly between modes, from documentary essays to diaristic shorts.” (Edo Choi, Assistant Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image)

This five-part retrospective offers a career-ranging survey of Sachs’s work and includes new HD transfers of Still Life With Woman and Four Objects, Drawn and QuarteredThe House of Science: a museum of false facts, and Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam.

Note: The following programs can be rented individually or as a package. A new video interview and between Lynne Sachs and series curator Edo Choi is also available as part of the rental fee.

For rental and pricing information, please contact: info@canyoncinema.com

All films are directed by Lynne Sachs.
Program notes by Edo Choi.


Lynne Sachs in Conversation with Edo Choi, Assistant Curator at the Museum of the Moving Image

FULL TRANSCRIPT



Program 1: Early Dissections
In her first three films, Sachs performs an exuberant autopsy of the medium itself, reveling in the investigation of its formal possibilities and cultural implications: the disjunctive layering of visual and verbal phrases in Still Life with Woman and Four Objects; un-split regular 8mm film as a metaphorical body and site of intercourse in the optically printed Drawn and Quartered; the scopophilic and gendered intentions of the camera’s gaze in Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning. These experiments anticipate the range of the artist’s mature work, beginning with her first essayistic collage The House of Science: a museum of false facts. Itself an autopsy, this mid-length film exposes the anatomy of western rationalism as a framework for sexual subjugation via a finely stitched patchwork of sounds and images from artistic renderings to archival films, home movies to staged performances.

Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986, 4 mins.)  New HD transfer
Drawn and Quartered (1987, 4 mins.) – new HD transfer
Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987, 9 mins.)
The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991, 30 mins.) – new HD transfer



Program 2: Family Travels
One of Lynne Sachs’s most sheerly beautiful films, Which Way Is East is a simultaneously intoxicating and politically sobering diary of encounters with the sights, sounds, and people of Vietnam, as Sachs pays a visit to her sister Dana and the two set off north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. The film is paired here with a very different kind of family journey The Last Happy Day, recounting the life of Sachs’s distant cousin Sandor Lenard, a Jewish Hungarian doctor who survived the Second World War and was ultimately hired to reassemble the bones of dead American soldiers. Here Sachs journeys through time as opposed to space, as she assembles a typically colorful array of documentary and performative elements, including Sandor’s letters, a children’s performance, and highly abstracted war footage, to bring us closer to a man who bore witness to terrible things. This program also features The Last Happy Day’s brief predecessor, The Small Ones. Program running time: 73 mins.

Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994, 33 mins.) – new HD transfer
The Small Ones (2007, 3 mins.)
The Last Happy Day (2009, 37 mins.)



Program 3: Time Passes
Twenty years unspool over nine short films: portraits of Lynne Sachs’s children; visits with her mother, brother, niece and nephew; a tribute to the city where she lives; and scenes of sociopolitical trauma and protest. Nearly all shot on super 8mm or 16mm, and often silent, each work is at once a preservation of a moment and a record of change, seamlessly weaving together the candid and the performed gesture, the public and the private memory, in a simultaneously objective and subjective posture toward the passing of time. Program running time: 51 mins.

Photograph of Wind (2001, 4 mins.)
Tornado (2002, 4 mins.)
Noa, Noa (2006, 8 mins.)
Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008, 11 mins.)
Same Stream Twice (2012, 4 mins.)
Viva and Felix Growing Up (2015, 10 mins.)
Day Residue (2016, 3 mins.)
And Then We Marched (2017, 3 mins.)
Maya at 24 (2021, 4 mins.)



Program 4: Your Day Is My Night
2013, 64 mins. “This bed doesn’t necessarily belong to any one person,” someone says early in Your Day Is My Night. It could be the metaphorical thesis of this film, perhaps Lynne Sachs’s most self-effacing and meditative work. A seamless blend of closely observed verité footage, interpretive performance, and confessional monologues and interviews, the film doesn’t document so much as create a space to accommodate the stories and experiences of seven Chinese immigrants from ages 58 to 78 who live together in a “shift-bed” apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Sachs’s quilted sense of form achieves a new level of refinement and delicacy in collaboration with her cameraman Sean Hanley and her editor Amanda Katz, as she works with the participants to exhume a collective history of migration and struggle.




Program 5: Tip of My Tongue
2017, 80 mins. Sachs’s richly generative Tip of My Tongue finds the filmmaker responding to her 50th birthday by gathering twelve members of her generational cohort—friends and peers all born between 1958 and 1964, and originating as far as Cuba, Iran, and Australia—to participate in the creation of a choral work about the convergent and divergent effects history leaves upon those who live it. From the Kennedy assassination to Occupy Wall Street, the participants reveal their memories of, and reflections upon, the transformative experiences of their lives. Set to an ecstatic, pulsing score by Stephen Vitiello, the film interweaves these personal confessions with impressionistic images of contemporary New York, obscured glimpses of archival footage, and graphically rendered fragments of text to create a radiant prism of collective memory. Preceded by Sachs’s frantic record of accumulated daily to-do lists, A Year in Notes and Numbers (2018, 4 mins.).


Thanks to:

Maya at 24 (2021)

Maya at 24
4 min., 16mm, b&w, sound 2021
a film by Lynne Sachs
with editing and animation by Rebecca Shapass
music by Kevin T. Allen

Lynne Sachs 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. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.

“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 pulled out my 16mm Bolex camera, as she allowed me to film her – different but somehow the same.  Recently, at age 24, Maya took another spin — we look at one another, moving, filling space, aware.  Completed during the 2020 pandemic, the film includes the intimate yet awkward rhythms of our two voices while living together during quarantine.” – Lynne Sachs


Screenings: Museum of the Moving Image (Queens, NY), Indie Memphis Film Festival (Tennessee), Best Departures Short, 2022; Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival (Chicago); Black Maria Film Festival (New Jersey), Jury Citation Award, 2021; Northwest Film Forum (Seattle), 2021; Mill Valley Film Festival (California), 2021.


Featured on Beyond Chron’s Best of 2021 List by Peter Wong:
Maya at 24 – Lynne Sachs’ short uses the simple image of her daughter Maya running in front of the camera to offer kinetic snapshots of how our children change physically and emotionally over the years.


Criterion Channel streaming premiere with 7 other films, Oct. 2021.

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.


This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.

Mubi Notebooks – Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression

Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression

A new retrospective of the filmmaker Lynne Sachs examines her deeply personal work and how it connects to the world around us.

Kat Sachs •14 JAN 2021
https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/lynne-sachs-between-thought-and-expression

Someone introduced themselves to me at a film festival where one of Lynne Sachs’s films was screening. I introduced myself in return, and their eyes lit up. “Are you Lynne Sachs?” they asked, having apparently heard only my last name.

No, I am not Lynne Sachs (obviously), nor am I related to her. But I enjoy relaying this anecdote, in part because it’s so flattering to have been momentarily mistaken for the experimental filmmaker, writer, and artist whose work I greatly admire. While I have no direct connection to Sachs, after recently watching so many of her films in such a brief period of time—on the occasion of the Museum of the Moving Image’s inspired retrospective, “Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression,” organized by assistant curator Edo Choi and available to stream online here between January 13 – 31, 2021—I do feel as though I know her.

At the center of Sachs’s work is often Sachs herself: her body, her voice, her words. And with those come the subjects that preoccupy her: family, feminism, language, place, and being. Over 30 years of making films, collage and installation art, writing prose and poetry, and orchestrating performances, often in conjunction with her moving-image work, Sachs has centered herself insomuch as she’s looking out at the world that encircles her, viewing it thoughtfully yet from a studied distance.      

Throughout the retrospective’s five programs (as well as in her latest, Film About a Father Who, a documentary about her charmingly lubricious father that’s been decades in the making and is also available to rent through MoMI), Sachs never seems to intimate that her perspective is universal but, rather, that having a perspective is.

Program 1: Early Dissections

Sachs’s first three films reflect her distinctly feminist viewpoint, conveyed through cerebral experimentations with form; she employs such avant-garde structures to impart a female perspective, thereby challenging the omniscient male gaze. In Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986), Sachs assays the daily goings-on and considerations of a woman by positing her as a character in the de facto narrative. The foundation of Sachs’s practice is established here as she melds different filmic modes and intersects the representational and the confessional; poetry and narrative; and fiction and history, the latter through her inclusion of an image of anarchist Emma Goldman and a woman in voiceover reading and reflecting on Goldman’s letters. Sachs’s second film, Drawn and Quartered (1987), literally separates the female image from that of the male. Shot using her uncle’s Regular 8 Filmo camera, it presents four frames, two on each side of the screen. On the left is Sachs’s then-boyfriend, nude; on the right, Sachs herself, also nude—figurative delineations of separation between the sexes rendered literal. She notes in an essay on the making of the film that she originally extracted all images of her face from it, later splicing them back in as a way of claiming what’s being shown. Another recondite evocation of the cinematic gaze, Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987) connects an unseen female protagonist’s observation of a man to Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of movement. The dispassionate examination implicitly calls into question the reverse—the more typical obsession with the female figure by men. The trajectory of Sachs’s first three works culminates in The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991), in which the director begins to merge a collage-like technique with essayistic qualities, resulting in a willful sort-of disparateness that considers womanhood as chastened by men (specifically doctors and scientists) and as experienced by women.

Program 2: Family Travels

Sachs’s family plays a central role in her work; one need only watch the end credits of any of her films to see that her siblings, spouse (filmmaker Mark Street), and their children are often listed as crew members or thanked for their involvement. In collaboration with her younger sister, writer Dana Sachs, she made the artfully evocative Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994), in which she and Dana, who’d then been living in Vietnam, take a trip from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. Cinematic brushstrokes—blurry images of the country’s verdant landscape—punctuate this uncommon travelogue, throughout which both sisters relay their experiences in the country. In one sequence Dana remarks on a photograph of an elderly Vietnamese woman, revealed to be the irascible grandmother of one of her friends: “Once the photo lost its anonymity, it lost its meaning,” she says. “It wasn’t the long-suffering face of Vietnam anymore, the trophy face a tourist loves to capture. It was just [my friend’s] crabby grandmother.” Here the sisters contend with the legacy of the Vietnam war, a scrim against the backdrop of their childhood memories. Exploring similar themes, The Last Happy Day (2009) is about Sachs’s distant cousin, Sandor Lenard, a Hungarian doctor who was hired by the U.S. Army to reconstruct the bones of dead soldiers and who would later translate A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh into Latin. Sachs combines Lenard’s personal correspondence, interviews with his family, and guileless interpretations of Lenard’s story by her two daughters and their friends to construct a personal reckoning with the effects of war. Both short documentaries explore this theme—in Sachs’s life and in the world at large—each utilizing cryptic proverbs to make sense of difficult truths. Included in this program is The Small Ones (2007), described by Sachs as being a “short anti-war cine-poem” that originates the concept more fully explored in The Last Happy Day.

Program 3: Time Passes

One feels the weight of time, from seconds to decades, in Sachs’s output as each work seems to represent a culmination of the director’s life to date. Composed of films made over 20 years—and mostly shot on either super 8mm or 16mm, and largely silent—this program elucidates a prominent motif in Sachs’s oeuvre, that of fleeting moments crystallized through the creative process. Three works especially exhibit this: Photograph of Wind (2001), Same Stream Twice (2012), and Maya at 24 (2021), which feature Sachs’s daughter Maya at ages 6, 16, and 24, respectively. In each, Sachs records her running in a circle, thereby capturing the illusion of apogees in time. Along these lines, Noa, Noa (2006) depicts Sachs’s younger daughter, Noa, over three years between ages 5 to 8, a period of resourcefulness and ingenuity. Likewise, Viva and Felix Growing Up (2015) features her niece and nephew (the children of her brother, filmmaker Ira Sachs); Day Residue (2016) was shot during some time spent with her mother and stepfather in her childhood home in Memphis, Tennessee. Place figures most prominently in Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008), which is less a love letter to New York City (where Sachs currently resides) and more a poem about its natural and not-so-natural wonders, somewhat in line with the work that inspired it, Virgil’s GeorgicsTornado (2002) and And Then We Marched (2017) center on events—September 11 and the Women’s March in D.C., respectively—the former an appropriately melancholy commemoration and the latter a rousing paean. Collectively these films and videos create a portrait of an artist and emblematize the passing of time.

Above: Your Day Is My Night (2013)

Program 4: Your Day Is My Night

With this expressive 2013 non-fiction hybrid, Sachs melds her interests in documentary and performance art with her penchant for prose and poetry; all four modes combine into a beguiling narrative around the phenomena of shift-bed housing, the practice of multiple people sharing the same bed, in New York City’s Chinatown. Having first learned about “hot-bed” houses from her uncle—and expanding her knowledge on the subject by way of 19th-century photographer Jacob Riis’s book How the Other Half Lives—Sachs worked with several older Chinese immigrants who were intimately familiar with the custom, meeting with them on a weekly basis for a year and a half to flesh out their stories. What might seem like a relatively straightforward documentary is actually a blend of fact (the participants’ stories about life in China and the United States) and fiction (the quasi-dramatization of conversations and scenarios in which these experiences are conveyed). Throughout Sachs deploys stylized footage of the participants appearing in abstract live performances that involve beds; if that seems an overly simplistic description, it’s because the concept, the bed as a stage, “as an extension of the earth,” as Sachs has said, is so metaphorically apt. The cinematography in these sections is breathtaking—close-ups add further visual texture to the performers and the unlikely setting for their displays. Sachs and her collaborators also staged performances around New York City while making the film; this tactic extends the film outside of itself and back into the physical realm in which it originated.

Program 5: Tip of My Tongue

On the occasion of turning 50, Sachs gathered a dozen similarly aged friends and acquaintances, then spent a weekend making this documentary, in which participants recount memories and experiences from the five-plus decades they’ve been alive. (In conjunction with this effort, Sachs wrote fifty poems, one for each year of her life, and published them in the 2019 collection Year By Year.) The film is, like life itself, an amalgam of methods that aid in the processing and contextualizing of one’s experience of it. One woman tells the story of how she swam around Manhattan Island while she sits in a bathtub; a man, standing agape in the middle of a room, describes what it was like to realize that Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead. Some reminiscences are personal, while others broach sociopolitical events that defined their eras, from the aforementioned assassination to the moon landing, as experienced by many of those involved in the film from their respective locations around the world (Iran, Cuba, and Australia, among others). Some of the remembrances are even more location-specific, as when a woman from Iran talks about being a child during the Revolution of 1979 and a man from the U.S. talks about his family prospering under Reagan. Sachs intersperses nimbly assembled archival footage and audio clips between the recollections, adding further weight to the participants’ memories. Her artful scribbling (present also in Year By Year) often adorns the images, and Sachs and the participants write on various objects the years between 1961 (when Sachs was born) to 2011 (when she turned 50). Tip of my Tongue is an ideal synthesis of Sachs’s preferred modes: documentary, performance, essay, and poetry. The brilliant sound design adds additional layers to the material—subtle footnotes to the cinematic treatise. She notes in Year By Year that she was inspired by this line from Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet: “Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us.” Again, at the root of Sachs’s practice is a beguiling simplicity, which feels organic but reveals itself to be methodical under analysis. Her latest, Film About a Father Who, is a natural continuation of all this. “It seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and…,” Pessoa continues, “binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind.”

***

A conversation between Lynne Sachs and assistant curator Edo Choi will be available along with the retrospective programs. Additionally, Sachs, her brother Ira, and cinematographer and filmmaker Kirsten Johnson will participate in a live online event on Tuesday, January 19, at 7 PM.

“Everything That Surrounds Us Becomes Part of Us” – Screening, Reading & Workshop at SF Public Library

Author: Lynne Sachs, Poetry Readings Film Screening and Writing Workshop 
“Everything That Surrounds Us Becomes Part of Us”
Thursday 1/21/ 2021 6- 9PM PST – Zoom 
https://sfpl.org/events/2021/01/21/author-lynne-sachs-poetry-reading-film-screening-writing-workshop

Workshop featuring special guest, artist Ann Hamilton

On Thursday night I will read from my recent poetry book Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press) and screen film. I have invited artist ANN HAMILTON to join us to speak about her 1996 SF library installation where she asked local community people to annotate the catalogue cards which “embody the heart of the public library art collection – the text that is folded between the covers of the books and buried within the library stacks.” This is one of the most interesting and resonate examples of socially engaged art that I have ever seen. Very excited to talk with Ann and with the audience.This is also a workshop so all participants will be encouraged to write and interact. Yes, it’s virtual. Sign up and you will receive a Zoom invite.

Thanks to poetry librarian and arts enthusiast John Smalley, librarians Jaime Wong and Anissa Malady


Acclaimed poet and filmmaker Lynne Sachs reads from her recent book Year by Year Poems, a collection of 50 poems which began as a half-century marker in the author’s life. Sachs will also screen her film, Tip of My Tongue, which was based on these same poems. At the end of the screening, participants will be encouraged to write one poem in response to a chosen year in their own life.

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet who explores the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Sachs has made thirty-five films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art and more. In early 2020, her newest movie, Film About a Father Who, will premiere on opening night at the Slamdance Film Festival and in NYC at the Museum of Modern Art.’

About the Film “In Tip of My Tongue, eleven New Yorkers, including Sachs herself, born in the early 1960s ‘visit’ every year of their lives in a brash, self-reflexive experiment to create a film on what it’s meant to live in America over the last half century. Through poetry and flashes of archival footage, the past is ‘unearthed, turned over and reconsidered in new and astonishing ways.'” (Museum of Modern Art)

About the Book Year by Year Poems feature graceful, diaristic poems, successfully distilling events and themes in the poet’s life and simultaneously, magically, reflect larger movements of history and culture. Intimate and imagistic, the poems unfold a series of miniature stories with sensuous rhythms, telling visual detail and gentle humor.

Docs In Orbit – Masters Edition: In Conversation with Lynne Sachs

Docs in Orbit
Masters Edition: in Conversation with Lynne Sachs
August 2020
https://www.docsinorbit.com/masters-edition-in-conversation-with-lynne-sachs?fbclid=IwAR0GFg3TSr-leoQrQhmKl9MzMaRiaE3Zxbx0b-lsyos4EzqZDI0CpaXO1IU

Welcome to another Masters Edition episode of Docs in Orbit, where we feature conversations with filmmakers who have made exceptional contributions to documentary film.  

In this episode, we feature a two part conversation with the remarkable and highly acclaimed feminist, experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs

In part one of the conversation, Lynne Sachs speaks about how feminist film theory has shaped her work and her approach to experimental filmmaking. We also discuss her collaborative process in her films including, her short documentary film A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES (for Barbara Hammer), which is currently available to screen at Sheffield Doc/Fest until August 31st.


In part two, we discuss her latest feature-length documentary film, FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO, which will be having its international premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest in Autumn.


LYNNE SACHS’ WORK REFERENCED (in order mentioned)

  • A Film About a Father Who (2020), available to watch in cinemas or Sheffield Doc/Fest Selects in September
  • A Month of Single Frames (2019), available now through August 25 @ DOKUFEST and @ Sheffield Doc/Fest through the end of August
  • My Body, Your Body, Our Bodies: Somatic Cinema at Home and in the World (2020), a lecture and screening by Lynne Sachs, available on Vimeo
  • The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991), available on Vimeo
  • Tip of My Tongue (80 min. 2017), film website
  • Year by Year Poems (2019), Tender Buttons Press, available via Small Press Distribution

OTHER INFLUENTIAL ARTISTS AND FILMMAKERS (in order mentioned) 

Maya Deren | Laura Mulvey | Carolee Schneemann | Kara Walker | Bell Hooks | Cauleen Smith | Ja’Tovia Gary 


FILM THEORIST AND FOUNDATIONAL ESSAYS

  • Mulvey, Laura. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6-18, Link
  • Steyerl, Hito. (2009). In Defense of the Poor Image. e-flux, 10, Link

Lynne Sachs is a Memphis-born, Brooklyn-based artist who has made over 35 films. Her work explores the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together text, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with every new project. 

Sachs films have been screened all over the world, including New York Film Festival, Sundance, Oberhausen, Viennale, BAMCinemaFest, Vancouver Film Festival, DocLisboa and many others. Her work has also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts and other venues, including retrospectives in Argentina, Cuba, and China. 

She received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first collection of poetry Year by Year Poems. 

Lynne Sachs is currently one of the artists in focus at Sheffield Doc Fest where her most recent feature documentary film, A FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO is presented alongside a curated selection of five of her earlier films.

Screen Queens: Sheff Doc/Fest 2020— The Lynne Sachs Focus

By Fatima Sheriff
July 11, 2020
Screen Queens
https://screen-queens.com/2020/07/11/sheff-doc-fest-2020-the-lynne-sachs-focus/

Premiering Lynne Sachs’ latest feature, A Film About A Father Who, Doc/Fest 2020 has taken the opportunity to curate a few of the director’s most intriguing films. Spanning over decades of empathetic, experimental filmmaking, Festival Director Cintia Gil mentions that the overarching theme of these works is “translation”. Sachs elaborates that while her films often feature other countries and languages, the experience isn’t meant to feel seamless, but instead explore the sense of dépaysement, of being out of your own comfort zone, and revelling in that unfamiliarity and curiosity. 

Which Way is East (1994)
In which Lynne joins her sister Dana in Vietnam, and documents their travels north. Primarily she is connecting with the country: eating copious amounts of fruit, bonding with friends and strangers alike, examining the damage left behind from the war. There are layers beyond the direct translation of Vietnamese as peppered throughout are proverbs, which connect with the discussions and reveal how cultures perceive life differently. On another level she’s reconnecting and collaborating with a sister who she’s been separated from, and building a bridge between her own fictional, creative inclinations as a filmmaker and her sister’s political, non-fiction perceptions as a journalist. At 33 minutes, it feels like a whirlwind, footage zooming past on the roads, but one that really feels shared by all who feature in it. 

The Last Happy Day (2009)
This title is a quote from letters received by Sachs’ uncle referring to the day before the outbreak of WWI, marking a shattering of naïvité and the start of a century of disillusionment. In an incredibly liminal and fascinating piece of exploration, Sachs’ children tell the story of Sandor Lenard, a distant Hungarian cousin who fled a small town in Germany in 1938. 

Surrounded by death as he worked for the US to identify the broken bones of soldiers, his later project is intriguingly different: the translation of Winnie the Pooh into Latin. A so-called dead language, that he said best expressed dread, was applied to the philosophical exploits of children’s characters. Having watched many young men become soldiers, seeing Sachs’ kids interpret his letters and his translation brings out a deeper meaning within them. It’s a patchy portrait of a mysterious man that brings about a sense of existential crisis and a permanent exile from security. 

Your Day Is My Night (2013) 
My personal favourite, a window into the world of Chinese immigrants in New York City, who rent “shift-beds” in order to afford to live and work there. It’s a carefully orchestrated blend of performance art to highlight the nocturnal, upside-down lifestyle and monologues perfected to best tell the stories of each inhabitant. One stand out is Huang, a wedding singer who lives with his father, who shares his unique passions and fears. It is a tactile, emotional approach with many dimensions that helps the viewer begin to comprehend these experiences, and brings this hidden side of the city to light. 

The Washing Society (2018)
Co-directed with playwright Lizzie Olesker, this team effort is the culmination of a performance piece named ‘Every Fold Matters’, detailing and valuing the efforts of laundry workers. This film is named after the original Atlanta Washing Society of 1881, where thousands of African American laundresses unionised and demanded better pay and agency over clients. This revolutionary spirit is carried on, as the film juxtaposes three actresses with three workers, folding and carrying thousands of garments a day, unappreciated and undervalued. Through the combination of conversation and performances, the intimacy and volume of their work is brought to light. 

A Month In Single Frames (For Barbara Hammer) (2018) 
As filmmaker Barbara Hammer was undergoing chemotherapy, she gave certain filmmakers free reign with her unpublished work. In this case, Sachs plays with the footage taken on Hammer’s month long residency at Cape Cod. Particularly hypnotic are past Barbara’s meticulous and beautiful attempts to capture new colours in the sun, the sea and the sand, and the spontaneous originality with which she saw the same cabin and its surroundings. Here the translation is very much inter-generational, as Hammer reads from her journal at the time, and we overhear discussions between the two. Sachs revisits this time of creativity in an organic way and carefully scrapbooks it into a philosophical homage.

Note: this particular film makes a beautiful double bill with Lynne Ramsay’s Brigitte which will be out on Doc/Fest Selects in the autumn. She profiles a prolific portrait photographer, trying to see what Brigitte sees in her subjects, and turns that mirror towards her own life and approach to art.   

Full film available as part of Doc/Fest Selects here.

Throughout all these works, the partnership between Sachs and her subjects shines. Often she remains in contact with them, continuing to campaign alongside them. The collection boasts celebrating “translation as a political and poetic tool” and through this glimpse into her career, it is clear that the bridges she builds last. By the end of her films, it feels like both an honour and a necessity to inhabit these spaces and listen to these stories. 

“At Ease with Including Your Doubt” – Interview with Lynne Sachs on Ultra Dogme

By Tijana Perović 
July 2, 2020 
Ultra Dogme

When Lynne Sachs agreed to meet me on Skype, I was equally excited and nervous: excited, because I had just seen several of her movies, which left me feeling like I had entered a whole new world of visual and verbal language. Nervous, because her knowledge and experience in experimental/essay/documentary cinema were vast compared to mine. Nevertheless, we agreed on a meeting and it was one of the most honest and inspiring conversations I have had on film. I began the conversation by briefly introducing myself. I am a PhD student in a biology lab, where I often conduct experiments. Perhaps that is why I’m so drawn to experimental film, especially Lynne’s work.

Lynne Sachs: What you do in your lab – which is to dive into the unknown by using materials you understand, without knowing what will happen when they come together, without a script for what the results will be – shares something with experimental filmmaking. Although, as you might already know, Jonas Mekas didn’t like the term experimental. It is kind of like saying you’re an atheist, meaning you define yourself by what you’re not, so I understand, he just says: “I make films”.

Tijana Perović: Do you feel ok with the term experimental?

I personally do. I think it turns the noun into a verb because it says that the entity itself is devolving and can’t be made from a template. I like it and I think it’s liberating.

How did you get into filmmaking?

I definitely didn’t grow up watching personal art films, made by women. I hardly knew that women were making movies. But I always have written poetry and I always did a lot of art. In university, I pursued something that you might call more academic. I was a history major, but I did a lot of studio art. So in that time, when I was at university, I took a year, I went to Paris and I discovered Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras. This changed me. I realized that you can make films from this place of experience, or you can bring your attention to the small things in life. You could also bring in some politics or a change for women, etc.

In a sense, I got a chance to see that a film could be a vessel and that you could throw whatever you want into it and make your own recipe or idea. That was really exciting to me and a revelation. After college, I moved to New York and I started taking classes in Super 8 and video. I ended up going to graduate school in San Francisco. That was such a transformative experience, because there were so many people there.

You know Gunvor Nelson’s films? Gunvor was a teacher of mine. In fact, Carolee Schneeman, Gunvor Nelson and Barbara Hammer were all living in San Francisco at the time. Such powerful women. Powerful in a poetic way. Do you know George Kuchar’s films? They are very rowdy and irreverent. Craig Baldwin was also there. He is a filmmaker, quite renowned, almost all of his work is made from found footage. But he also has a small, still existent, screening space, called Other Cinema. It is just like a store front. And I spent almost every Saturday there, from 1987 to 1994, and that’s actually where my husband Mark Street and I met. It was a scene and that’s how I educated myself on film. I was not the kind of person who stayed up watching all the famous fiction films on TV until midnight. I hadn’t even seen Citizen Kane until I was in my mid-twenties. Now I am interested in all of film history, but that is not what brought me to this kind of filmmaking.

Funny that you mention that, because I just watched Jeanne Dielman 10 days ago.

I actually was thinking about Chantal Akerman, two days ago, because of our quarantine. Have you seen her film Là-bas (2006)? She went to Tel Aviv, to do some teaching there. It was during a very heightened period of violence, in Israel/Palestine, so she made the whole film from her window. To me, it’s very timely to think about the window as a frame in its relationship to the film frame. The thing about long films like Jeanne Dielman is their stature. You need to spend almost four hours with her film. But think about a book. When you read a book, you need to spend two weeks with it! Four hours really shouldn’t be a big thing.

What is really interesting for me in your movies is that in each one of them there is an idea, but it flowers, it grows. In your experience, how does this idea change during the process of actual moviemaking and in editing?

Sometimes when I make a film, it starts with the material. Is there any particular film on your mind?

Still from House of Science: a museum of false facts

The House of Science first comes to my mind.

Then I’ll talk about The House of Science. That actually started with the collages which are in the movie. It started with the idea that I felt alienated from my own body. And I probably felt that way for most of my life, maybe until I had a baby. I wanted to move through the world almost invisibly. I don’t think that if I were 30 today, I’d make the same film. But in 1991, I felt frustrated with how my culture was constructing me. Not with the feminism, 1st wave, 2nd wave – rather as I moved through the culture and I felt this alienation from the world of science. But then it became an equal distaste for art, while I was making it. So, that was a film where I said, any idea that comes to my head will go into the film. I called it a yes film. That film is a film essay. What defines a film essay is that you are at ease with including your doubt.

So you have this idea, and it is kind of a manifesto, but it isn’t really a manifesto because you are always second guessing yourself. In a sense, you have to have more confidence in what you say by including your doubt. If you didn’t, then it would be dogma or didactic. That film really came out of an idea. Did you see And Then We Marched? It is a super short film I made after the women’s march. I didn’t have a particular idea. I had collected Super 8 film from the 2017 Women’s March, and I wanted to do something with it. I didn’t want to just document it because I thought a lot of people are already doing that. I thought I needed to shake up my understanding of what that march was, and the only way I could do that was to talk to a child. That’s been common in a lot of my work. I struggled to make The Last Happy Day for years and years, until I started to work with some children.

Still from And Then We Marched

Also Wind in Our Hair, the film I made in Argentina. Sometimes working with kids doesn’t infantalize the situation, but it allows you to experiment more and listen to the materials more and to be surprised. Maybe it’s because I had two daughters and I brought them along. But I am also very intrigued by what children bring to it perceptually. So to take something as large as the Women’s March of 2017, and to think about it from that perspective was very invigorating and turned it into something more immediate. In the end, the Women’s March sadly did not have that much impact. It was like a plaintiff call, so it did connect all of us, but it didn’t bring structural change. It brought bonding amongst kindred spirits. When I’m making a film, I often have to figure out how can an idea that I had years ago can resonate today.

Last night, at 3:30 in the morning, I woke up. We’re not as active these days during the quarantine so sleeping is strange. I got up and I took a bath. But then I had this idea for a film I have been working on for many years. It is called The Company We Keep. It comes from an English expression, often you are judged by the people your are around, “the company that you keep.”  Some people use this expression in a rather judgemental way. Over many years, I’ve collected business cards, so I have about 500 of them. I’ve scanned most of them. I want to make this film kind of like an animated film where we go through them. The purpose of a business (calling) card is to be a mnemonic device. Surprisingly, I can remember a little bit about almost all of those people. I am playing with the idea of how these cards trigger something, not just what I remember, but how I understand myself in relationship to them. When you look at the cards, you remember who you were when you connected with that person, but also something about them.

Last night, I wrote myself a note. Most of the people whose business cards I have kept are in a group of people I will probably never know. But in the present, there is another group of people I will never know. These are the people whom I’m hearing about who died from the coronavirus.  Recently, a friend of my daughter’s told us about two African American men in her neighborhood in Brooklyn. They were quite old, already retired.  For years, they would sit on the stairs (what we call here the stoop) and talk to everybody on the block. Both of them died. Then another man I know lost a brother who was autistic. As you hear those stories, you imagine those people, you imagine them almost like a cut-out, paper-doll. You imagine their shape but they are gone. I wanted to weave that into this short film, because it makes it more vital to me now.

What is your definition of feminist filmmaking?

Many years ago, when I was in grad school, we would take turns shooting each other’s movies. A woman asked me to shoot her film, which I was excited about. We were on her set but I didn’t think that what she was espousing my concept of feminism. Even though I was very honored to be her cinematographer, I could not accept the imagery that she was creating and wanted me to co-create. I have been hesitant to shoot other people’s films ever since. This was the time when I realized that we talk about feminism in terms of holding the camera in addition to how the images of women’s bodies are constructed. I don’t cheer just because a woman gets an Academy Award. I am not actually even necessarily happy that Joe Biden has already announced that he will choose a woman. I feel like he did that as a political ploy. I am happy that he is going to choose a woman, but is that why he chose this woman? I think that a feminist approach to filmmaking takes the responsibility for the representation of women, but for me it must be broader than that. It has sensitivity to other categories of identification, whether you are talking about gender identity, etc.

I loved your talk for the Ann Arbor Festival. I especially agreed when you said that Godard has challenged the film world in many ways, but never in terms of the representation of women. So, who were your favorite feminist filmmakers and your inspirations?

Definitely all three of the  women in my film Carolee, Barbara, Gunvor. Each one for different reasons. I would say that they run the gamut of different approaches within the sector of personal filmmaking. I think Barbara Hammer and Carolee Schneemann were particularly at ease with their own bodies. Carolee challenged feminism in a profound way, because she was interested in sensuality, too. I think that’s very current, but she was criticized in other periods of feminism; for showing her own body, for exuding a kind of sensuality/sexuality. Barbara also showed her own body, but in a different way: it was more about strength, strength in the bareness and nudity. Gunvor Nelson made this film called Schmeerguntz. It is so wild, and it’s about motherhood, having babies, all the mess, the shit, the body, letting it all hang out. That’s kind of her take on it. They really run – to me – the gamut. I mentioned Chantal Akerman and loving her work, and her study of women’s bodies. But it’s not just about bodies, of course.

Have you heard about the Bechdel Test? Yes.

I think it’s pretty interesting for mainstream filmmaking. It’s a handy rubric for deciding what the presence of – let’s talk about narrative film – what the presence of a protagonist does or whether a character is able to speak. I think those are interesting things. They’re not the kind of films I’m making, but I do watch them, and I think that plenty of women who make it very high up in the industry, instead of trying to change that structure, actually think that the best way to get into the business is to replicate what already exists, and that’s a shame.

We had two movies at Berlinale this year that were pretty mainstream and feminist – The Assistant –

Oh I saw that! I really liked it. It’s controversial.

At her press conference, the director said that it was hard for her to get funding because she was criticizing the industry. Sometimes these norms are really hard to break. The other one was Never Rarely Sometimes Always.

I wanted to see that. It came out, and then [lockdown happened]. Now it’s online. The other movie that came out in the mainstream, like The Assistant, on the same topic – workplace dynamics – was a film called Bombshell. Did you see that?

No, but I heard about it.

Well…I did not like that movie at all. One of the reasons was, they were talking about the abusive power in the workplace, by men who had financial or other kinds of control in the workplace. But the people who were playing the women actually were bombshells. Do you know this expression? It’s old fashioned. A bombshell is an incredibly beautiful woman.

The movie’s called Bombshell because it’s about these women who are television anchors on broadcast news, who have to be bombshells to get those jobs, but then the story is that they also have to sleep with the boss. But the film, in its texture and representation, never breaks the mould. The women who play the parts are always presenting themselves with the best bodies and make-up, etc. Whereas in The Assistant, everything becomes much more austere and cerebral, and you think about the protagonist – who she is at her desk. I thought it was much more effective.

Another filmmaker who has had a very big influence on me is the Argentine director Lucretia Martel. I study her films, to help me figure out things, around editing. I’ve really been affected by her work.

Did you have a plan for your career? How did you find your direction?

The lucky part was that I found this way of working, and relationship to the media, that I loved. I think that’s been a setback for plenty of good friends of mine: they didn’t necessarily find something they were passionate about doing. I just continue to be excited about it. I had to find ways to make that work for me. The most practical thing I did when I moved to San Francisco, was that I enrolled in a program at a public university that also had a whole cinema studies component. I had a lot to catch up on, in terms of developing a foundation for the understanding of cinema. But the degree was a Master’s degree, and then there was an art school there at the time – The San Francisco Art Institute.

They offered a Master’s of Fine Arts – which in the States is considered a terminal degree, not just the first step. I ended up doing both programs because I was thinking ‘I might want to teach’ and I have been teaching pretty consistently for all these years, but I never aspired to a tenure track job. I’ve taught at probably 15 different art schools or universities, but I wasn’t trying to raise myself up in academia. So that was the most practical thing I did. The other part was that depending on where you teach, it could be hard to have time to do your work, e.g. if they have 7 classes a year. It depends on what is expected. I have had good relationships with places where I was teaching where they gave me funding for a project. Here, we have all different kinds of grants: we have grants from the government (which are not that big), or grants from private foundations, like the Guggenheim foundation.

How did you develop your aesthetic? Did you look back at your earlier works and think ‘oh I could have done this better’ or are you happy with each step?

No, not necessarily happy. Oh my God, sometimes I look at the credits and think ‘oh why did I do that? Why did I have so many names?’ I’m actually in the midst of doing some preservation work on some of my older films. I’m doing part of it with the Museum of Modern Art, they’re working on my film Which Way Is East. It’s been interesting because I’ve had to look at it very carefully, and they are very fastidious. They said, ‘when we make a new 4K scan, you can’t push us to try to make it look like you made this in 2020, because you made it in 1994’. You think about the film stocks and things like that.

NYU has a preservation program, and they are studying the preservation of one of my very first short films, it’s called Still Life with Woman and Four Objects. We’re working on that. They just transferred it to 4K.

That movie actually made me think of Chantal Akerman a lot.

Thank you for saying that. I was also very affected by Yvonne Rainer. I had seen Akerman for sure by that time, because I’d seen her in France, but I don’t know if I’d seen Yvonne Rainer’s [work].

My newest film is called Film About a Father Who. There’s a famous film that Yvonne Rainer made, called Film About a Woman Who… – from the ’70s. I have definitely been very influenced by Yvonne Rainer, but then I would say her films are more austere than mine are.

But you asked about aesthetics. I can’t impose any one aesthetic that I might’ve discovered on the next project, because the idea is the boss. The idea drives the aesthetic, mostly. Sometimes I just shoot, and it’s like I re-find my own material. Did you see this short film I made called Starfish Aorta Colossus?

No.

The whole film is shot with a regular 8mm camera that you wind-up. It’s collaboration between myself and poet Paolo Javier. That material I had shot over decades, and then he asked me if I would make a poem in honor of his book being published. I thought it was a good excuse to go back and look at all this old footage.  It wasn’t like I created the footage for his poem, but I put it together in response to his poem.

What was it like to have Bruce Conner as your mentor?

I had kind of like a short-term boyfriend, and he introduced me to Bruce. I was just getting involved in filmmaking, so I had negative skills. But we got along well. Some people thought he was a bit of a curmudgeon, but he wasn’t to me at all. I would just go to his house – I was supposed to be helping him splice his films, but he would look at my splicing ability and think it was so terrible that he ended up doing it himself.

I went once a week and he would tell me stories the whole time. We would just talk and talk. He had a long-term kidney problem. He actually lived for twenty more years, but he would always have to take a rest so I would hang out with his wife. Over the years, when both my children were born, he gave them lovely drawings and we stayed in contact. His found-footage work is profound. The ideas that happen between every shot in A Movie are so fantastic. Nothing is about ‘the archive being precious’ – [instead] the archive is about a way of finding irreverence, or irony, or poetry or politics. He was interested in the clash, rather than the archive being an illustration of a moment in history.

Does your approach change — and if so, how — when working with digital versus celluloid?

It takes a lot more for me to be excited about images that are shot on digital.

[She shows me a work in progress, from which the following still was taken.]

I like the unpredictability of film – the fact that as she circles around, you go into these dark areas. It can happen in video too, but I like the way it works on film, especially in black and white: the background that’s black becomes one kind of canvas, versus another kind of canvas. I also like that it’s not perfectly sharp, because I think that in television there’s too much attention on the face. The less you show, the more interesting the face is. The precision of digital and its ability to replicate reality makes it less compelling to me. Sometimes I shoot digital work I really do like. But in digital, people tend to overshoot: hours and hours. With film, I only shot three minutes of my daughter [running in cirlces], so I have to work with that.

It’s interesting how the film shapes what you make. I watched the XY Chromosome Project. [Made in collaboration with her husband Mark Street.]

That’s also the name of our – we sort of have a film company. It doesn’t really mean a company, but… you know. I’m glad you watched that.

How was it to collaborate? Did you plan it together and then shoot separately? Or did you shoot separately and then come together?

We made that during a period when our daughters, who are 23 and 25, were younger. We initially made it for this performance space here in New York that was also a restaurant, called Monkeytown. They’ve moved all over the world. There’s one person who runs it and sometimes I hear he’s in Australia, sometimes in Berlin. He had this restaurant (with delicious food), where everybody sat on the floor. They had projectors, so you could project on all four walls of the room. We thought it was Cartesian, so we had an X and a Y. But we also thought about XY as in Chromosomes, so that’s where we got the name.

We’ve made quite a few films together. More than films, we created projection evenings, and things like that. We did something at the Microscope Gallery, for example, here in Brooklyn. Anyway, in this particular case, Mark and I had each shot some of our own material, and we said we had to edit the film together: he would edit a shot, and I would come in on the same computer and edit the next one, like a Surrealist Exquisite Corpse. We constructed it that way, so it was not pre-planned.

How does language that you use mediate or affect your creative process? Language is so interesting in your movies. It’s very rare to find somebody who is so visual and lingual at the same time. Somehow people tend to choose one or the other.

That’s really true. And I think that’s one of the reasons I don’t necessarily identify with certain kinds of ‘purist’ wordless experimental films – but then I also really don’t identify with traditional documentaries that aren’t as playful with the image.

The thing is, that poetry is very close to experimental films. If you think about it, poetry breaks all the rules of grammar, a line break is like a cut between the shots. It makes sense that you don’t have to say ‘cine-poem’, but that poetry is in conversation with not just a love of a language, but a heightened love of language that would work with a heightened love of the film frame. Instead of it being one or the other. But for many people it is one or the other. I’m just excited about both.

It’s really nice. Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching mostly male experimental cinema for the longest time. I suddenly switched and thought maybe it’s just because women are more verbal.

That definitely could be. It’s interesting because Barbara Hammer and Carolee Scheemann both did a lot of writing. I would say in Carolee’s films, the words weren’t that important, but she wrote many books, and she was very engaged with text.

Film About a Father Who Streaming at Sarasota Film Festival and Q&A

“In Lynne Sachs’ FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO she tries to piece together who her father really is…and makes some unexpected discoveries. An intriguing puzzle – so don’t let anyone who sees it reveal its secrets.”

Steve Kopian, Unseen Films

Watch Film About a Father Who here through May 10th!

There will also be a Q & A with the director online soon.

“Taking visual cues from modern art, and a title borrowed from Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 drama “Film About a Woman Who…,” Lynne Sachs compiles a film that’s as colorful, as complex, and sometimes as inscrutable as her father. She may not have unlocked the secret of her father’s heart, but the attempt reveals touching, humorous and painful insights about what we think a father is and what he should be.”

-Sean P. Means, Movie Cricket

In response to popular demand from the Sarasota community and audiences across the country and around the globe for continued arts and storytelling, the 2020 virtual edition of the Sarasota Film Festival (SFF) has now extended its online edition to Sunday, May 10th. In conjunction with this extension, the festival has announced an additional feature film to the lineup 9/11 KIDS directed by Elizabeth St. Philip, Q&As for the upcoming weekend, and more visionary programming.

“The public has spoken and in an effort to continue providing dynamic and thoughtful entertainment, we are pleased to extend our programming for an additional week so that audiences can continue to enjoy these engaging films and celebrate independent storytellers that showcase the local Florida community,” said Mark Famiglio, Chairman and President of the Sarasota Film Festival.

SFF is presented with the generous support of various sponsors and partners from the Sarasota community including: The Famiglio Family, Amicus Foundation, 332 Cocoanut, Moon & Co Eyewear, Sage Restaurant, The Sack Family, Wallack Family Fund, Sarasota County Film & Entertainment Office, New College, Ringling College, Gates Construction, DSDG architects, BMW/Lamborghini of Sarasota, Embassy Suites-Hilton as well as granting organization Sarasota County Tourist Development Cultural/Arts and the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs.

EXTENDED DATE | SFF will now run through Sunday, May 10th, 2020.

“A Month of Single Frames” screening at the Iowa City Documentary Festival

April 30- May 2, 2020
The 17th Annual Iowa City International Documentary Festival

The Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival (ICDOCS) is an annual event run by students at the University of Iowa. Our mission is to engage local audiences with the exhibition of recent short films that explore the boundaries of nonfiction filmmaking. We seek innovative new works of 30 minutes or less that both complicate and expand upon conventional approaches to nonfiction and documentary.

COMPETITIVE PROGRAM #6 – A Primal Scream 

I Can’t / Lori Felker / US / 2020 / 5:00/ Silent – A roll of film is not a successful conduit for grief.

SIR BAILEY / Matthew Ripplinger / Canada / 2018 / 8:00 – A portrait of the filmmaker’s old friend. The film’s surgical cutting and state of decay symbolizes Bailey’s suffering of bone cancer, consisting of home made photographic emulsion, contact printing, and reticulation. Sir Bailey embarks on an existential journey through the shattering photo-chemical plane during his last day of life.

LIMEN / Kathryn Ramey / US / 2019 / 2:06 – Threshold. At the boundaries of perception. Between one state and another.

Ascensor / Adrian Garcia Gomez / US / 2019 / 8:02 – Ascensor is an exploration of grief, longing and mysticism through a queer lens. It documents a syncretic ritual that culls from the magical reverberations in Mexican culture to process the unexpected loss of a dear friend. The repetition of the ritual eventually leads to the transcendence of physical space, transforming unrelenting ache into shining resilience. Philip Horvitz 1960 – 2005

A Month of Single Frames / Lynne Sachs with and for Barbara Hammer US / 2019 / 14:00 – In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an artist residency in a shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds and writing from the residency to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Lynne explores Barbara’s experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces and times.

Pilgrim / Cauleen Smith US / 2016 / 11:00 – A live recording of an Alice Coltrane piano performance accompanied by a visual track that documents a pilgrimage across the USA taken by Cauleen Smith, tracing historic sites of creativity and generosity that were an inspiration to her: Alice Coltrane’s Sai Anantam Ashram; the Watts Towers; and the Watervliet Shaker Historic District.


https://icdocs.wordpress.com/icdocs-2020-copy/