The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer.

Cuff stuff

Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2025) and A Stranger Has No Eyes (2026)

https://chicagoreader.com/film-tv/the-moviegoer/chicago-underground-film-festival-2026/

by Kat Sachs
October 1, 2026

I’ve had business cards only once in my career thus far, when I worked for Music Box Films in 2018. I don’t think I gave out many, if any at all. This past weekend, while watching Lynne Sachs’s Every Contact Leaves a Trace at the Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF), which largely took place at the Harper Theater in Hyde Park, I reflected that I haven’t received many either. Sachs, on the other hand, has collected over 600 business cards over the past several decades, which is the impetus for her new film.

Sachs and I aren’t related, though she and I have known each other for several years; our relationship began when I wrote about her work for MUBI Notebook. I’m currently editing a collection of her interviews for a university press; as a result, I’ve become more intimately familiar with Sachs as both a person and an artist, and my identification with her has extended beyond my appreciation for her filmmaking. As with one of my favorite filmmakers, Agnès Varda, I like how Sachs sees the world and the people in it; knowing her personally now, I can attest to an uncommon curiosity that doesn’t discriminate, holding in equal measure everyone from her hairstylist to a controversial experimental filmmaker. 

Both people are included in Every Contact Leaves a Trace. (Incidentally, of the few business cards that I have amassed over the years, most come from hairstylists and other aestheticians.) Each card, then, reflects a contact—some, like her hairstylist, yielding years-long relationships, others from people she doesn’t even remember—that has left a trace, an assertion that holds true for Sachs especially. Just as she’s saved these cards, I believe that even the smallest of interactions has the potential to leave its mark. In an era and industry preoccupied with social media and clout, Sachs and her film remind me not just of a different time but of an entirely different mindset, in which individual connections were more transitory (business cards in and of themselves suggest an effort and tactility that merely adding people on LinkedIn or Instagram can’t replicate) yet ultimately more meaningful as a result.

Literal human connection is at the center of C.S. Nicholson’s documentary A Stranger Has No Eyes, which premiered as the closing-night film at CUFF. It’s a tricky one, centering on the descendants of Brazilian-born slave trader Francisco Félix de Souza in Benin, who are Black and, despite that legacy,  proud of their ancestry, nearly worshipping de Souza as a figure they call Chacha. It’s trickier, even, because Nicholson is white; the post-screening Q&A was moderated by Floyd Webb, local filmmaker and cofounder of the Blacklight International Film Festival, established in Chicago lin 1982. Webb brought unique insight from his time living in Africa and also, from his background in film, interesting questions about the decision-making processes inherent to filmmaking that can alter objectivity. The film’s title comes from a Yoruba proverb that professes, “A stranger has eyes, but they do not see.” That has an interesting connection to both cinema and life; both evade easy understanding (at least the very best of cinema is apt to do so), suggesting that even to see is not fully to comprehend.

Until next time, moviegoers.