Tag Archives: Retrospective

The 19th edition of “Ambulante Documentary Tour” coverage by Centro de Cultura Digital, Periodistas Unidos, Morelia Film Festival, and Marvin

PERIODISTAS UNIDOS

La 19.ª edición de «Ambulante Gira de Documentales» inicia su recorrido el 10 de abril en CDMX

https://periodistasunidos.com.mx/nacional/caleidoscopio/la-19-a-edicion-de-ambulante-gira-de-documentales-inicia-su-recorrido-el-10-de-abril-en-cdmx/

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

https://www.centroculturadigital.mx/actividad/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

https://marvin.com.mx/el-cine-mas-alla-del-lec-y-ccd-en-la-cineteca/

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.  

Discover the complete  Cinema Beyond programming  on the networks of the CCD @ccdmx and those of the Cineteca Nacional @cinetecanacionalmx , on their website  centroculturadigital.mx and  cinetecanacional.net .

Morelia Film Festival

Ambulante announces the titles that complete its 2024 edition

https://moreliafilmfest.com/ambulante-anuncia-los-titulos-que-completan-su-edicion-2024

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.

Previously, Ambulante announced the programming of its Pulses and Coordenadas sections . Now, two more spaces are revealed in the four: Ambulantito, Rearview Mirror, Intersections and Invocations. Here we tell you everything about them.

Ambulantito

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.

Invocaciones / Lynne Sachs Retrospective at Ambulante, Mexico City

𝗔𝗠𝗕𝗨𝗟𝗔𝗡𝗧𝗘 • the 𝗖𝗜𝗡𝗘𝗧𝗘𝗖𝗔 𝗡𝗔𝗖𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗔𝗟 𝗠É𝗫𝗜𝗖𝗢 •  the 𝗟𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗥𝗔𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗜𝗢 𝗘𝗫𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗟 𝗗𝗘 𝗖𝗜𝗡𝗘 (𝗟𝗘𝗖) •  and the 𝗖𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗥𝗢 𝗗𝗘 𝗖𝗨𝗟𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗔 𝗗𝗜𝗚𝗜𝗧𝗔𝗟

https://ambulante.org/blog/invocaciones-retrospectiva-lynne-sachs

April 11-14, 2024

Invocations | Lynne Sachs Retrospective

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”.

Participants: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.

Southwest Contemporary – Upcoming: Sachs’ Santa Fe Retrospective

Southwest Contemporary
FEATURE – SOUTHWEST – VOL. 4 WINTER 2021
Expanding Cinema: A Guide to Art Film in Five Southwest Cities
OCTOBER 29, 2021
https://southwestcontemporary.com/expanding-cinema-a-guide-to-art-film-in-five-southwest-cities/

An upswing for independently owned arthouses, festival one-offs, and screening series across the Southwest was in motion before the COVID-19 pandemic paused in-person gatherings. Now a grateful energy is flowing back into theaters—new online venues transcend the limits of geography while giving viewers a specific experience with local programmers.

What do careful gatherings look like for film scenes in such an eager phase of rebuilding? Serious facilitators in different cities are perhaps more connected than ever. How might filmmakers be emboldened by new modes of distribution?

We found red-letter signs of new life in five cities. Is there something happening where you live that we should know about? Let us know at editor@southwestcontemporary.com.

SANTA FE

Projects born online during pandemic lockdowns are manifesting in person. The No Name Cinema underground film screening series will roam around Santa Fe at to-be-announced locations and events beginning this fall. Artist Justin Clifford Rhody streamed eighteen programs on No Name’s Twitch channel from January to August of this year. A mini-retrospective of work by diaristic film poet Lynne Sachs and a screening of the home-video-lover’s dream Memorial Day 2000 channeled Rhody’s penchant for tender bricolage and castoff materials.

Rhody spent six years organizing a well-attended series called Vernacular Visions in Oakland, California, where he presented slideshows of found images on 35mm. He took the screenings to a level of ceremony. Setting up in a different location every time, Rhody produced soundtracks tailored to the programs and handed out physical copies to attendees.

No Name Cinema screenings will be free to attend.

“The issue of finances was and is always secondary to getting the job done [with Vernacular Visions],” Rhody says. “[The late Grit Lit novelist] Harry Crews said this great thing about sports, and I think it translates well to art as well, especially since the majority of art that’s appreciated in America doesn’t cut the criteria:

“‘I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bull- shit… if you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we’ll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can’t do it—you can’t bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.’”

Up next: Before the end of the year, No Name will host the world premiere of a structuralist short film shot on Super 8 by JC Gonzo titled The Virgin Viewed from Multiple Sides (2021) and the New Mexico premiere of Do You Think Jesus Liked Hard Boiled Eggs (2020) by Ben Kujawski. Both filmmakers are from Santa Fe.

Plan ahead: Part of the magic of No Name is surprise. That could include unannounced microshorts and last-minute directives. Follow @noname.cinema on Instagram for updates.

ALBUQUERQUE

Gifted selectors build whole worlds. Keif Henley’s offerings online via Guild Cinema made that clear. The Guild’s website design remained unrepentant in its loyalty to function over form when the theater Guild Cinema (3405 Central Avenue NE), closed its doors to the public and opened online like a friendly local video store gone by.

At guildcinema.com, one could encounter, for example, a portrait of a square dance caller for whom a community center in a Black neighborhood of Waterloo, Iowa, is named (Northend Stories [part two] by Jim Morrison, a videographer who lives in that city). There was also Un Film Dramatique, an inquiry into the philosophy of cinema made about and with twenty-two Paris middle schoolers as they learned how to use a camera.

“Likely one of the bottom lines, in part anyway, for a lot of arthouses like us is to expand the existing notions of what humanity is, looks like, et cetera,” Henley says.

Up next: The Guild is open at full capacity as of press time. The theater is scheduled to host the expanded cinema and live sound collage project Negativland! It’s Normal from Somethings to Come to Your Attention Tour featuring SUE-C November 13, 2021.

Plan ahead: Basement Films’s Experiments in Cinema comes to the Guild in April 2022. It’s a defiantly self-styled “micro-community” of international screenings and workshops for media activists with no awards hierarchy or festival posturing—a favorite of Henley’s each year, he says.

DALLAS

Arthouse spaces themselves are expanding despite all odds. The elegant Texas Theatre, where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, opened a second screening room upstairs in September. It seats 165 people. This addition to the landmark arthouse came just before a significant finale in the same film community: Dallas Video Fest held its last annual festival after thirty-four years as a serious entry for new filmmakers and a haven for experimental shorts.

Video Fest founder Bart Weiss, known for the way he lovingly introduces films and leads Q+As after screenings each year at the festival, says he’ll miss the occasion to linger in foyers afterward with artists, students, and all kinds of dynamic personalities attracted to Video Fest’s programming. “Unless you’re in school for film, you really don’t get a chance to just talk about movies,” Weiss says.

That spirit will continue in other projects under the festival’s name like Video Fest’s monthly Cinematic Conversations series. The virtual gathering has encouraged hour-long appreciations of lyrical films like RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which is that director’s first feature. Weiss invites a co-host to help choose a film and lead the discussion. Avantgarde choreographer and theater-maker Danielle Georgiou had a turn, as did filmmaker Sam Pollard.

Up next: Weiss’s Frame of Mind on KERA-TV will continue to offer an outlet for local shorts. Its twenty-ninth season extends through December and includes, among so much else: compassionate, regional storytelling from inside 2020’s uprisings, experimental theater made for TV, and a musical in black and white.

Plan ahead: Frame of Mind will go state-wide next year, airing on public TV stations across Texas.

OKLAHOMA CITY

Rodeo Cinema opened a new location in June on Film Row downtown. It lives inside the old Paramount Building, where the giants of Hollywood studios would screen films for theater owners to consider as part of a national exchange program circa 1907.

A few series have landed at Rodeo Cinema Film Row. Notably: the camp-friendly garage cinema stamp VHSANDCHILL, which has been around in some form since 2016 for ’80s sci-fi obsessives and lovers of B-movies. Femme Film will show movies by “femme directors or those who have lived experiences of misogyny” as per organizers, with local director Paris Burris as host.

DENVER

An heir to the parlor screenings Stan Brakhage would host on Sundays in his home state of Colorado, the Denver Underground Film Festival is beloved for paying filmmakers in a forty/sixty split (and not so much known for parties or spectacle adjacent to the fest). Every film in the entire program is a short.

Recent awardees include Tom Bessoir’s mathy 2020 with a score by Thurston Moore, who Bessoir photographed in the early 1980s with Sonic Youth. Part two of this year’s festival is November 19-21 at a venue to be announced. Check back in at DUFF’s FilmFreeway profile.

Lynne Sachs on “Into the Mothlight” Podcast

EP.32 – Lynne Sachs
10/18/2021
by Jason Moyes
https://www.intothemothlight.com/home/ep32-lynne-sachs

Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry.  Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, she investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. 

After comprehensive career retrospectives at Sheffield Documentary festival in 2020 and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York this year, her latest feature ‘Film about a Father Who’ is being screened on the Criterion Channel along with seven other short films. Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne 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. 

We chat about ‘Film About a Father Who’, her approach to experimental documentary making and living and working in San Francisco in 80’s

You can stream 8 of Lynne’s films including FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO on the Criterion Channel here. 

Interview Transcript

“Into the Mothlight” – TRANSCRIPT FOR DOWNLOADDownload

People, places and films Lynne references include:

The work about civil disobedience is ‘Investigation of a Flame:  A Portrait of the Catonsville Nine’ (2001) 

We discuss the films that feature Lynne’s daughter Maya, including ‘Maya at 24‘ (2021) 

‘Photograph of wind‘ (2001) – the title taken from an expression used by the photographer Robert Frank   

And ‘Same Stream Twice‘ (2012) 

Quote from the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa from The Book of Disquiet. 

“Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of a great Spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind.” 

People and places in San Francisco. 

Lynne worked with the Vietnamese filmmaker, writer and composer Trinh T. Minh-ha 

She learned cinematography from Babette Mangolte  who had also worked with Chantal Akerman  

A mention of Walter Benjamin, and in particular his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ 

She studied with the Swedish American filmmaker   Gunvor Nelson – Read Lynne’s throughs on the films of this artists here. 

The underground film maker George Kuchar 

Barbara Hammer – read about Lynne’s film ‘A Month of Single Frames’ (2019) here, and see an excerpt from ‘Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor’ here

Filmmaker and curator and her “compatriot big brother and dear dear friend Craig Baldwin and the programmes he would curate at Other Cinema  

Seeing Stan Brakhage films at the San Francisco Cinematheque and the Millennium Film Workshop (New York) 

Stan Brakhage’s annual programme at the Anthology film Archives where he included Lynne’s work ‘The House of Science: a museum of false facts’ (1991)  

Lynne mentions her husband, the filmmaker Mark Street – read about Mark here

The First Person Cinema Salon that Stan Brakhage ran in Boulder, Colorado, and showing silent works by Joseph Cornell from his own collection.  

Teaching filmmaking at the Flowchart Foundation 

And remember that you can support Into the Mothlight on Patreon here. 

About Into the Mothlight Podcast

Experimental film and installation artist Jason Moyes lives and works in rural Scotland and has been exploring the moving image since 2007. His work has been shown in the UK, North America, Europe and Asia. He is a founding member of the Moving Image Makers Collective.

Lynne Sachs on the Projection Booth Podcast

The Projection Booth Podcast
OCTOBER 15, 2021
Special Report: Lynne Sachs
By Mike White
https://www.projectionboothpodcast.com/2021/10/special-report-lynne-sachs.html

Listen:
Mike spoke with filmmaker Lynne Sachs about her career including an octet of films that are currently showing on The Criterion Channe

Music:
“Figure and I” – Kristine Leschperl.

Watch: 

Lynne Sachs intro for “Film About a Father Who” at the Vancouver Cinemtheque from Lynne Sachs on Vimeo.

Filmwax Radio
Oct 15, 2021
http://www.filmwaxradio.com/podcasts/episode-691/

Ep 691: Ed Lachman • Lynne Sachs

[6 mins. 27 secs.] Legendary cinematographer Ed Lachman (“Ken Park”, “Far From Heaven”) returns to discuss his work with frequent collaborator Todd Haynes on the documentary “The Velvet Underground“. The documentary explores the multiple threads that converged to bring together one of the most influential bands in rock and roll. Those participating in the film include John Cale, Maureen Tucker, Jonathan Richman and Mary Woronov. It is currently enjoying a theatrical run at NYC’s Film Forum and premieres today on the Apple TV+ streaming service.

[33 mins. 45 secs.] Lynne Sachs returns to the show for her 4th visit. This time we are discussing the Criterion Channel’s celebration of her work which includes their streaming premiere of her most recent feature work of non fiction filmmaking, “Film About A Father Who“. Over a period of thirty-five years between 1984 and 2019, Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16 mm film, videotape, and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah in her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. Additionally, they are streaming 7 of her short films.

ABOUT THE PODCAST

Filmwax Radio is America’s favorite podcast featuring luminaries from the indie film community. Guests include actors, filmmakers, festival programmers, journalists and just about anyone else with a stake in the game.

Hosted by Adam Schartoff, Filmwax Radio began in September of 2011 and it wasn’t long before the show became the spot to stop by and discuss your latest project.

Beginning in the summer of 2013, Filmwax Radio began a partnership with Rooftop Films. As a result, the show may be listened to on the Rooftop Films website using the built-in audio player, as well as by subscribing on iTunes or Stitcher at no cost.

Writers on Film – “Lynne Sachs: Portrait of a Filmmaker Who”

Writers on Film
Season 1, Ep. 23
by John Bleasdale
10/14/2021

https://shows.acast.com/writers-on-film/episodes/lynne-sachs-portrait-of-a-filmmaker-who

John Bleasdale talks to Lynne Sachs, the Memphis born, Brooklyn based filmmaker on the eve of a season of her works being streamed on the Criterion Channel. Since the 1980s, Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, she investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.

Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NYFA, and Jerome Foundation. Sachs has made 40 films (including Tip of My Tongue, Your Day is My Night, Investigation of a Flame, and Which Way is East). Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center, the Walker, the Getty, New York Film Festival, and Sundance. In 2021, Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at Maysles Documentary Center awarded Sachs for her body of work.

Sachs is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems. In 2020 and 2021, she taught film and poetry workshops at Beyond Baroque, Flowchart Foundation, San Francisco Public Library, and Hunter.  www.lynnesachs.com

After comprehensive career retrospectives at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 and the Museum of the Moving Image in 2021, the Criterion Channel is delighted to announce that director Lynne Sachs’ films will join the Channel in October 2021 along with a newly recorded director interview exploring her works. Sachs will be making her the Criterion Channel debut with seven earlier works followed by her latest feature, Film About a Father Who, recently released theatrically by Cinema Guild and receiving its exclusive streaming premiere with the Criterion Channel. 

Interview Transcript

Writers on Film – “Lynne Sachs: Portrait of a Filmmaker Who” – TRANSCRIPT FOR DOWNLOADDownload

Day Residue: A Filmmaking Workshop on the Every Day [Online] – May 2021

Northwest Film Forum 
Monday, May 24, 6:30 – 8:00 PM

https://nwfilmforum.org/education/workshops/day-residue-filmmaking-workshop-lynne-sachs-may-2021/

A virtual, collaborative workshop.
REGISTER HERE: https://form.jotform.com/211246497155155

Sliding scale, $0-$75. Please pay what you are able to support the work and make the workshop accessible to all. 

Instructor: Lynne Sachs

About
Day Residue:  A Filmmaking Workshop on the Every Day

According to Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams, our day residue is composed of the memory traces left by the events of our waking state.  In this workshop, we explore the ways in which fragments of our daily lives can become material for the making of a personal film. While many people in the film industry rely upon a chronological process that begins with the development phase and ends with post-production, our Day Residue workshop will build on an entirely different creative paradigm that encourages artists to embraces the nuances, surprises and challenges of their daily lives as a foundation for a diaristic practice.

HOW TO PREPARE
As a way to jump right into the workshop, we encourage each participant to shoot a one-minute cell phone film in their homes using one object that “matters” and one object that “matters-not.” Please come to the workshop with your video file downloaded to your computer and ready to share.  In this way, we will all arrive together with raw, quotidian material to discuss, confront and embrace.

Lynne Sachs
“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)

Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.

Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living and studying in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trihn T. Minh-ha. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her body of work ever since.

She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. In tandem with making films, Lynne is also deeply engaged with poetry.  In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems.

Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa.

Northwest Film Forum to Present Lynne Sachs Retrospective

Lynne Sachs Retrospective: Between Thought and Expression [Online]
May 14-31, 2021
https://nwfilmforum.org/films/lynne-sachs-retrospective-between-thought-and-expression-online/

Lynne Sachs • US • 2001-2021

About
“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)

The following three programs are from Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression, the Museum of the Moving Image’s retrospective series of five programs of her films.

Films in this series:

Your Day Is My Night
(Lynne Sachs, US, 2013, 64 min)
“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.

Tip of My Tongue
(Lynne Sachs, US, 2017, 80 min)
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.

Short film program: Time Passes
(Lynne Sachs, US, 2001-2017, 51 min TRT)
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.

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

About Lynne Sachs
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet who grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and is currently living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from short experimental films to essay films to hybrid live performances. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Between 1994 and 2006, she produced 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 subjective perceptions. Looking at the world from a feminist lens, she expresses intimacy by the way she uses her camera. Objects, places, reflections, faces, hands, all come so close to us in her 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 her work with every new project. With the making of Your Day is My Night (2013), Every Fold Matters (2015), and The Washing Society (2018), Lynne expanded her practice to include live performance.

As of 2020, Lynne has made 37 films. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, China Women’s Film Festival, and Sheffield Doc/ Fest have all presented retrospectives of her films. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.

About Edo Choi
Edo Choi is Assistant Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image. Previously, he served in the dual capacity of programming manager and chief projectionist for the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem. He has organized programs as an independent curator for the New York Public Library and the Documentary Film Group, film society at the University of Chicago, where he held the position of Programming Chair between 2008 and 2010. He also works as a freelance projectionist at venues around New York City.