Lynne Sachs’ EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE (US/Documentary)
Sunday, 2:30pm
I’m not related to Lynne Sachs, though I do know her personally, and one of the things I appreciate about her work is how it feels like an extension of spending time with her. Sachs often shares intimate details of her life in her films, yet she does so in a modest, convivial, and discursive way, as if she were initiating a discussion with the audience rather than simply confessing to them. She also reveals things about herself in order to get her onscreen subjects to do the same, regardless of whether they’re strangers or members of her family. In EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE, she engages in conversation with both; to find the strangers (or at least people she doesn’t know well), she draws on her collection of the roughly 600 business cards she’s collected over the past four decades and seeks out the contacts whom she thinks will make for compelling presences in her movie. The interviewees range from Sachs’ hairdresser to a forensic scientist to the artist and filmmaker Lawrence Brose, who through no fault of his own spent two years under FBI surveillance. Sachs interweaves these stories eloquently (perhaps not coincidentally, one of the interviewees gives her a lesson in stitching), creating a cinematic tapestry of interesting lives. In between the varied profiles, the filmmaker reflects on how these subjects have affected her, reminding us (as per the title) of how the lives we encounter can mark our own. Sachs doesn’t make a to-do about this; like Agnès Varda’s nonfiction work, EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE feels informal despite asking big questions. This informality, of course, is deceptive—you’re likely to come away from the film feeling stimulated, compelled to reconsider how each life is a make-up of various others. (2025, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]