AMERICAN FRINGE / NOVEMBER 12-14, 2021
New films from and of the margins of U.S. cinema.
https://www.amfringe.com/
AMERICAN FRINGE RETROSPECTIVE, SEASON 5
https://www.cinematheque.fr/seance/35796.html
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2021, 10:00 P.M.
GEORGES FRANJU ROOM
10 p.m. → 11:15 p.m. (74 min)
Film About a Father Who
Lynne sachsUnited States / 2020/74 min / DCP / VOSTF
With Ira Sachs Sr., Ira Sachs Jr., Dana Sachs.
From 1984 to 2019, Lynne Sachs shot 8mm, 16mm, video and digital footage of her father, a bon vivant businessman from Park City, Utah, in an effort to understand what binds a child to her father, and a sister to his siblings.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
It’s become increasingly difficult to define “independent cinema” in the United States. With well over 1,000 films being made every year, and the continuing reduction of studio-based production, just about anyone can claim to be an “independent.” Yet with this explosion of quantity has come a loss of meaning for the term; when the concept of an “independent cinema” first began to emerge in the 1930s—applied to movements as varied as the Workers’ Film and Photo Leagues and early avant-garde cinema—it meant work that was essentially different from that being produced by the commercial cinema of Hollywood: different forms of production, different strategies of distribution and exhibition, but most importantly different aesthetic forms and politics. Little of what passes for U.S. independent cinema today looks like anything more that a lower budget version of what you can easily find on television or in the local multiplex.
Happily, the spirit of that original independent cinema does live on, most often in works that appear “under the radar” of the major media and festivals. It was to celebrate and promote this kind of work that American Fringe was created; we’re honored and delighted to have been invited back to the Cinémathèque to present a fourth edition.
The films on view represent a range of subjects and styles, but what unites all of them is their shared commitment to bringing to the screen deeply personal visions of America today.
–Richard Peña and Livia Bloom Ingram, co-curators, American Fringe