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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 MΓ©xico, 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.
