Matthew Carey
December 17, 2025
https://deadline.com/2025/12/doc-talk-podcast-lynne-sachs-victor-kosskofsky-1236650761/
If you hand a business card to filmmaker Lynne Sachs, don’t be surprised if she holds onto it – for a very long time.
Over the course of several decades, Sachs has collected an enormous stack of them, numbering around 600. For her new documentary Every Contact Leaves a Trace, she decided to try to reconnect with some of the people whose identities are, in some sense, inscribed in those 2” x 3” cards. It’s a launching point to ponder the traces that are left behind when we interact with others – the residue, sometimes physical, often intangible.
Sachs’ documentary premiered in the Signed section of the recently concluded International Documentary Festival Amsterdam. Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast met up with Sachs at the festival to discuss her film and the people with whom she reconnected, including a therapist, a hairdresser and a Syrian immigrant, among others. She tells us how the work of pioneering French criminologist and forensic scientist Edmond Locard inspired her cinematic exploration. And she explains why an interaction at IDFA that involved the new way of exchanging contacts – by bumping phones – left her feeling slightly unnerved.
At IDFA, we also speak with the award-winning Russian-born documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky, who came to the festival to premiere his film Trillion. It’s perhaps one of the most mysterious documentaries ever made – shot in black and white and without dialogue. In gripping fashion, it follows the movements of “a woman [who] walks barefoot over a rocky outcrop, somewhere by the sea,” as the IDFA catalog puts it. She totes a burlap sack, reaching into it to cast a shimmering material across a stony peninsula. Kossakovsky tells us how the mystery woman became the center of the second in his projected “Empathy” trilogy (the first in the series was the Oscar-shortlisted Gunda).
Gunda, a film about the titular pig, as well as a one-legged chicken and other barnyard creatures, sprang from the director’s respect for sentient creatures – a moral position that made him a vegan from the age of about 5. Kossakovsky tells us about the experience he went through as a young boy that convinced him never to eat meat.
Doc Talk hosts John Ridley and Matt Carey also parse the list of documentaries announced for the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, the last Sundance that will be held in Park City, Utah.
That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk hosted by Oscar winner Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley), and Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios. Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.