Screening April 29, 2026 at 7:00 PM at BAMPFA
POV Award: Lynne Sachs + Every Contact Leaves a Trace
This year’s Persistence of Vision Award celebrates experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. Following a moderated conversation, there will be a screening of Lynne’s new film Every Contact Leaves a Trace, a rumination of memory and assumptions using as inspiration a stack of business cards collected over 40 years.
The POV Award honors the achievement of a filmmaker whose main body of work falls outside the realm of narrative feature filmmaking each year. This year, the award goes to experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs.
Film Description
A swirl of images and sonic sound accompanies SFFILM’s award-winner Lynne Sachs’s rumination of memory and assumptions, using as her inspiration a stack of business cards collected over 40 years.
In forensic science, “trace” is the material left behind at crime scenes: fibers, gunshot residue, and other evidence that detectives use as they develop suspects and leads. SFFILM Persistence of Vision award winner Lynne Sachs takes inspiration from this concept to investigate her own life and assumptions, using as her “trace” 600 business cards she amassed over 40 years, representing everyone from a boy she slept with in college to tradespeople to film world associates. She settles on a handful to probe in depth—including a textile artist, a hairdresser, a therapist, a film festival director, and Lawrence Brose, a gay filmmaker “canceled” after his conviction for possessing child pornography. With a mass of swirling imagery, Sachs’s own narration, and a sonic sound design underpinned by Stephen Vitiello’s omnipresent score, the film becomes a personal epiphany as Sachs comes to realize that the trace is not only in the cards but in her own imperfect memory. —Pam Grady