Every Contact Leaves a Trace | Lynne Sachs: experimental documentary filmmaker

Every Contact Leaves a Trace
83 min, 2025

World Premiere
IDFA International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
SIGNED Section. Netherlands (2025)

“The title of this imaginative essay film, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, is a basic principle of forensic science, coined by Edward Locard, a pioneer in the field. And any trace can link a person to a place, another person or an object. If that’s true, Sachs wonders, might every personal encounter not also leave a trace on your being?” – IDFA International Documentary Festival Amsterdam

Contact— tactile, evocative of one person touching another, physically and emotionally. Trace—a reckoning with the residue of that initial encounter, filtered by time and the imperfection of memory. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs has lived most of her life before the internet brought people together. She’s also saved every business card anyone has ever given her. Each card is a portal to her past, a reminder of how someone she actually met in person shifted her consciousness and left a residue of their being in hers: a German woman grappling with the history of her country; a therapist who erased all records of her own life; an artist faced with government censorship. Sachs selects seven cards from hundreds and throws herself into finding out how and why they’ve left an imprint. When she is able, she embraces clues and seeks out reunions. Replaying fleeting experiences in a kitchen, a park, an office, or a festival, she carries her cards to a forensic scientist’s lab to find out more about their DNA remains. In both real and imagined ways, her essay teases apart resonances almost forgotten but somehow felt, entwining emotional memory with geopolitical history through visual abstraction, music, and a poet’s sense of introspection.

Director’s Statement

For most of my adult life, I’ve collected business cards strangers have pulled from their wallets and placed in my hand. I sometimes remember the precise moment they were offered to me, other times they are a mystery. Now in this virtual era, being in the same space with others happens less and less. Filled with hundreds of names, numbers and addresses, the small plastic box that holds the cards takes on an uncanny resonance. Chance meetings become distinct and revealing punctums, each physical interaction an encounter that pricks.

I select seven cards from the hundreds and throw myself into finding out how and why they’ve left an imprint on my consciousness. In the spirit of a documentary practice, the facts leftover from a haptic engagement are an enticing beginning. I’m curious to find out if there are still fingerprints on the cards so I visit a forensic scientist who excavates their DNA residue. It takes months of detective work and travel, but eventually I reconnect face-to-face with some of these people who passed through

my life. A German woman born in the early 1940s grapples with the war she witnessed as a child. Our conversation opens up my own thinking, as an American Jewish woman, about the situation in Gaza today. I speak with an artist who faced censorship and persecution from Homeland Security. In listening to his candid and vulnerable account, I reckon with his psychic trauma.

When research does not provide access to who these people have become, I turn to cinematic inventions that can shape the fragments I have in my grasp in speculative and revealing ways. I can’t forget one woman therapist whose advice once changed my life, so I imagine what it would be like to visit her apartment, create a set and perform with an actor embodying her presence. The resistance of a Syrian chef to engage with my camera forces me to think about the inherent power imbalance between a director and her subject. To conjure a memory of this woman, I cook one of her tried and true recipes and film my own culinary incompetence in the kitchen.

Throughout the years of making this film, my young niece and nephew come to my home to discuss what an accumulation of fleeting encounters – like mine — might really mean in their lives. Like a chorus in a play, their youthful and insightful interpretations across generations put my investigations into perspective.

When I am able, I embrace clues and seek out reunions. But when there is no trace, I gamble with the imaginary histories of my unwitting protagonists. My film “Every Contact Leaves a Trace” confronts a lifetime of tactile encounters with small pieces of paper – distillations of identities passed from hand to hand.