All posts by lynne

“Film About a Father Who” Reviewed by Alliance of Women Film Journalists

FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO – Review
January 8, 2021 
by Diane Carson 
Alliance of Women Film Journalists
https://awfj.org/blog/2021/01/08/film-about-a-father-who-review-by-diane-carson/

Film About a Father Who examines a problematic relationship.
Among the most important, complex relationships are those with our parents, relationships often painful to probe. And yet, in Film About a Father Who, here’s documentarian Lynne Sachs courageously exploring thirty-five complicated, problematic years of interaction with her father Ira. In addition to archival 8- and 16-millimeter footage, she interrogates Ira, grandmother Maw-maw, brothers, sisters, an ex-wife, and Ira’s girlfriends.

And what she learns in her incredibly honest profile is deeply disturbing. For Ira was, though cheerful, emotionally detached and an unrepentant womanizer. His mother, Maw-maw, describes him as a cripple, handicapped, since he had a wife, a mistress, and, as much as he could, multiple women. Director Lynne, his daughter, explicitly asks Ira about his life and behavior, to which Ira repeatedly replies, “I don’t remember.” In her investigation, Lynne discovers two previously unknown siblings (Ira had nine children), Ira’s traumatic childhood, fueled by Maw-maw abandoning Ira to lead her own life, and his real name.

None of these details suggest the truly captivating appeal of Film About a Father Who. That resides in Lynne’s pursuit of an ever-elusive understanding of Ira, of his essence. In her quest, Lynne and her brother Adam describe Ira having “his own language and we were expected to speak it.” They concur that they loved him so much that they agreed “to his syntax, his set of rules,” though they always felt there was a dark hole somewhere in his youth. Significantly, Lynne and a sister also acknowledge a shared rage they couldn’t name for the man called the Hugh Hefner of Park City, Utah.

Film About a Father Who is an emotionally wrenching scrutiny of another person, much less a parent. In voiceover narration, Lynne defines her grappling with her father best when she says, “This is not a portrait. This is not a self-portrait. This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry, a story both protracted and compressed.” That she worked on this film for decades acknowledges the critical role her parents, and probably most of ours, play in our lives, their impact inestimable. It may raise the question, “Can we ever really understand another person?” Whatever the answer, Lynne Sachs shows her effort results in a powerful, haunting film.

Film About a Father Who is available on the Cinema Guild website.

GoIndieNow Presents TOP INDIE FILMS OF 2020, “Film About a Father Who” Featured

GoIndieNow Presents TOP INDIE FILMS OF 2020, PART 2: FILMS 10-6
By GoIndieNow
January 6, 2021
https://plotaholics.com/2021/01/06/goindienow-presents-top-indie-films-of-2020-part-2-films-10-6/

GoIndieNow Presents is an occasional column featuring the third Plotaholics, Joe Compton. In these columns, Joe will discuss that state of indie film and offer suggestions for worthwhile media to consume in that market. This iteration of GoIndieNow Presents is a three-part exploration of 2020’s indie film landscape.

Hello, Plotaholics faithful. Joe Compton (the third Plotaholic) here.

Let’s be honest: 2020 sucked. Who knows what all of it means as far as 2021 goes, especially when it comes to Independent Film, which is something I cover over at Go Indie Now. But as for now, I am here to continue discussing the best in indie film from 2020.

Today, we kick off my Top 10 list with entries 10-6.

10. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO – DOCUMENTARY (USA) 

SYNOPSIS: From 1984 to 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot film, videotape and digital images with her father, Ira Sachs, a bohemian businessman from Park City. This film is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to eight siblings, some of whom she has known all of her life, others she only recently discovered. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, her film offers sometimes contradictory views of one seemingly unknowable man who is always there, public, in the center of the frame, yet somehow ensconced in secrets.

WHAT THIS FILM DOES WELL: Lynne is a legend, and her style and abilities are at the top of the list in terms of Documentarians and their storytelling styles, but this one is so different. It is almost by nature that this has to be presented as it is, but it serves as a triumph and not a crutch or gimmick. There is no avoiding the fact that not every shot was composed and lit or mic’ ed properly. Yet, in true Lynne Sachs form, she weaves such an intricate and intimate narrative that twists and turns with the best of them. You almost expect there might have been some prior planned composition to those “home movie” shots.

It is also striking because the one being most affected in and throughout is her and her family. So, in a weird and interesting way, this film that starts looking into a family patriarch becomes a character-driven, dilemma story that interweaves the documenter with the subject matter and creates a mystery cloaked in a soap opera-type drama. The fun aspects are the ratio and framing of a lot of raw footage that gets shot over time on many different devices and how it enhances the experiences of the narrative–a skill set that editor Rebecca Shapass clearly possesses in spades.

Documentaries are often that idea that what you see is not what you will get in the end, and in a way because of the brave way in which Lynne chooses to put herself out there, comfortable or not, we really see a 4th wall crash that presents such a compelling and shocking result. In talking to her, I know this was a choice that was not easy to make. Yet this film has very few moments of bleakness and never are they overt–another display of the skill set that Lynne possesses as a proven Documentarian. Instead it chooses naturally to highlight and enhance the positive aspects of the reveals, which makes you wish your family or life was half as interesting as this one.

Lynne Sachs Interviewed by Jane Steuerwald, director of the Black Maria Film Festival

Black Maria Film Festival
Jane Steuerwald Interviews Lynne Sachs
Summer, 2020
https://www.blackmariafilmfestival.org/page.php?content=VirtualFestival-db

The Hoboken Museum & the Thomas Edison Black Maria Film Festival is pleased to host this special installment of “Meet the Filmmakers,” a lively pre-recorded discussion with Festival Director Jane Steuerwald and artist, feminist, activist, filmmaker, Lynne Sachs. Lynne’s work is supported by the Jerome Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and NY State Council on the Arts. Her films have screened at MoMA, Sundance, the New York FIlm Festival and venues around the world.

“Film About a Father Who” in Women and Hollywood January 2021 Preview

Women and Hollywood 
Feature – January 2021 Preview
December 31, 2021
By Tatiana McInnis and Shayna Maci Warner 

2020 has been an exercise of endurance, unspeakable loss, tragedy, anxiety, and rage, the scale of which cannot be addressed in any piece of writing. Many truths have been exposed this year, including that we are deeply invested in the stories we tell about our world — and other worlds! Many of us sought and found solace on screen, whether through binge-watching, virtual cinemas, or Zoom. While the challenging truths and issues laid bare in 2020 will not leave us when the clock strikes midnight on the 31st, we are hopeful about the stories we will tell, hear, and see in 2021. 

Premiering January 1, Roseanne Liang’s “Shadow in the Cloud” follows Chloë Grace Moretz as Captain Maude Garrett, a female flight captain navigating the challenges of WWII air warfare and the sexism of her crew.

Viewers can get an in-depth look at the life, loves, and career of beloved star Audrey Hepburn in Helena Coan’s “Audrey” (January 5). In a similar vein, they can learn more about an acclaimed artist and the eccentric collectors who will do anything to get ahold of his work with Oeke Hoogendijk’s “My Rembrandt” (January 6). Meanwhile, Yu Gu’s “A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem” (January 26) chronicles two former NFL cheerleaders’ legal fight for fair pay.

The month rounds out with two family dramas, Fernanda Valadez’s “Identifying Features” and Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s “Our Friend,” both out January 22. The former sees a Mexican woman trying to find out what happened to her son, who crossed the border into the U.S. and hasn’t been heard from since. “Our Friend” is about a family rocked by their matriarch’s terminal cancer diagnosis, and the friend who offers to help them in their time of need.

Here are the women-centric, women-directed, and women-written films debuting in January. All descriptions are from press materials unless otherwise noted.

JANUARY 15

“Film About a Father Who” (Documentary) – Directed by Lynne Sachs (Available in Virtual Cinemas)

Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8mm and 16mm film, videotape, and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. “Film About a Father Who” is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.

Orange Glow

Orange Glow
A film by Lynne Sachs (text) and Laura Harrison (image)
1 min. 30 sec., 2020

Description
In September 2020, Lynne Sachs was disturbed by the television images of San Francisco enveloped in wildfire smoke. When she looked at artist Laura Harrison’s gestural painting, she felt as if she was watching the eerie skies of California unfurl on the canvas. Together, Sachs’ words and Harrison’s images respond in horror to the devastating ecological disasters. 

Text
A face crumbling blueness fragment building crag in fuchsia light is not space but a stroke a swim a brush indivisible from the eye that carves sight some light is bulb and some is sun inside the gem each stroke so different a face in a frame becomes a wistful and also a box triangle home.

Enter fire. Enter smoke from the West caught in the air quality index of a dark 2 PM now hermetic hospitality dust in your lungs smoke in your ears.

Yes, I can hear the ringing in your ears rubbed by this image you made, not really San Francisco now but is for me, becomes that place.  Sends me there. Feel the heat. Nothing comes through the fog but the heat, the crackling of the burning brush underfoot, the heat, the worry, and through it all a line drawing itself spitting in motion in liquid.

Laura Harrison: “I wrote a text that became the painting for Orange Glow. Though the poem was supposed to be about air b and bs as escape hatches for covid ravaged California, the poem also suggested fires. The poem describes falling down red carpeted steps for the Oscars into hell. I painted the painting listening to my own poem over and over. My strokes were informed by it and out came a scabrous looking face.

Bios
Laura Harrison lives and works in Chicago. Her animations focus on marginalized, social outcasts with their own sub cultures. These fringe characters provide a focal point for her concerns with diaspora, trans humanism, gender and the loss of touch in an overwhelmingly visual world. Her films have shown at various festivals internationally including The New York Film Festival, Ottowa International Animation Festival, Japan Media Arts Festival, Boston International Film Festival, Florida Film Festival,  GLAS, Animafest Zagreb, VOID and Melbourne International Animation Festival. Her work has garnered many prizes, most recently a Guggenheim and Best Animation at Mammoth Lakes Film Festival.

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from experimental shorts to essay films to hybrid live performances. She has made 37 films included in retrospectives at Buenos Aires International Festival of Cinema, Havana Film Festival, China Women’s Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/ Fest. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Tender Buttons Press recently published Lynne’s book Year by Year Poems.

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.

DESISTFILM 2020 FILM ROUND-UP – “A Month of Single Frames” and ” So many ideas impossible to do all” selected

DESISTFILM 2020 FILM ROUND-UP: THE LISTS/LAS LISTAS
December 30, 2020
List by Ivonne Sheen 
https://desistfilm.com/desistfilm-2020-film-round-up-the-lists-las-listas/

2020 comes to an end, and with it, a great twist of the screw that seems to return the world to a primitive state, to recognize its own fragility and the precariousness of an economic and social system that crumbles like a house of cards. In the midst of chaos, at home, we take refuge in the light pulses of the cinema, in the rhythmic variations, in the echo of the sounds of our televisions, computers, screens. This is the record of a cinephilia that resists, that remains and reinvents itself. Within the chaos, the light of the cinema continues to shine on us.

2020 llega a su fin, y con el, un gran giro de tuerca que parece devolver al mundo a un estado primigenio, a reconocer su propia fragilidad y lo precario de un sistema económico/social que cae como una casa de cartas. En medio del caos, en casa, nos refugiamos en los pulsos lumínicos del cine, en las variantes rítmicas, en el eco de los sonidos de nuestros televisores, computadoras, pantallas. Este es el registro de una cinefilia que resiste, que permanece y se reinventa. Dentro del caos, la luz del cine nos sigue alumbrando.

Ivonne Sheen
Filmmaker, Film critic, staff Desistfilm (Peru)

After a year of many symbolic and real deaths, my relationship with cinema is also changing. A year full of emotional oscillations, due to constant changes and / or uncertainties. A year with limited emotional storage space, with nearby suffering and with radicalized inequalities. A year that feels multiplied in its duration. I share this list as an acknowledgment to those filmmakers and artists, whose work has given me experiences of wonder, questioning, learning, thinking, of encountering in the distance.

*

Luego de un año de muchas pérdidas vitales, mi relación con el cine también se viene transformando. Un año lleno de oscilaciones emocionales, debido a los constantes cambios y/o incertidumbres, un año con poco espacio de almacenamiento afectivo, con mucho sufrimiento circundante y con mucha desigualdad radicalizada. Un año que se siente multiplicado en su duración. Comparto esta lista como un agradecimiento a aquellas y aquellos cineastas/artistas, cuyos trabajos me han dado experiencias de asombro, de cuestionamiento, de aprendizaje, de pensamiento, de encuentro a la distancia.

En orden alfabético (alphabetical order):

A month of single frames (2019) – Lynne Sachs
Asparagus (1979) – Suzan Pit
Como el cielo después de llover (2020) – Mercedes Gaviria
E Unum Pluribus (2020) – Libertad Gills
Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit (2019) – Thomas Heise
Judy versus Capitalism (2020) – Mike Hoolboom
La obra audiovisual de María Galindo (vista en Youtube y Vimeo).
La obra de Sarah Maldoror (vista en muestras del Museo Reina Sofía y de Another Gaze).
Les Prostituées de Lyon parlent (1975) – Carole Roussopoulos
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2019) – Eliza Hittman
Oh My Homeland (2019) – Stephanie Barber
Río Turbio (2020) – Tatiana Mazú
Self-portrait film series (2010-2019) – Zhang Mengqi
So many ideas impossible to do all (2019) – Mark Street
Thorax (2019) – Siegfried A. Fruhauf
Variety (1983) – Bette Gordon
Vision Nocturna (2019) – Carolina Moscoso

“Thoughts on the Shift from Screen to Stream” in Millennium Film Journal

Thoughts on the Shift from Screen to Stream in our 2020 Pandemitime
Lynne Sachs
May 2020
http://www.mfj-online.org/

Most of us can recount the thirty days of March 2020 like a story, each day representing a chapter in a narrative comprised of bewilderment, apprehension, tension, drama and fear.  To use the word “overwhelming” is less hyperbolic than it is obvious.  Words could not describe…. and yet we tried to find them. From the start, whenever and wherever that may be, we were all characters in a complex, interwoven dynamic that became enormous and global so quickly, we hardly knew what was happening. 

In the spring of 2019, I was invited to be on the Ann Arbor Film Festival jury which would be held March 24 to 30 of 2020. I had a year to anticipate the experience of seeing and discussing a multitude of new short films with my fellow jurors in a town renowned for its passion for experimental cinema. Just a few weeks before the 2020 festival was to begin, my two adult daughters mounted a campaign to convince me that the Corona Virus had become so profoundly threatening that I needed to curtail all of my travel plans. I would be putting myself and our family in danger simply flying from NYC to Michigan. I might also be harming other people by asymptomatically carrying the virus from one place to another.  Something was happening to our zeitgeist but no one knew what it was. 

I have been making and traveling with my films for thirty years. I always feel committed to being where I have “promised” to be. It was not that I felt invincible but rather responsible, as if the survival of the alternative form of cinema I love so much depended on my sticking to the plan. Like all of us during that time, the Ann Arbor Festival was also responding to a situation that had only recently been labeled a pandemic in the context of their own commitment to presenting the work of hundreds of filmmakers in a grand theater for a devoted local audience. Within just a few days, the festival shifted from being the 58th Annual to being the 1st Virtual. 

Not long after the virtual festival was announced, I started to see some surprising posts on Facebook in conjunction with this radical shift from screen to stream.  Experimental filmmakers and enthusiasts from around the world were writing about the festival as if it had opened its curtains to an entirely new audience, one that had only been able to hear about this bastion of alternative, underground filmmaking from afar but had never expected to be able to see the films with their own eyes.  I’ll never forget the feeling of pathos and exhilaration that I had when I read a post from a filmmaker who wrote that she would not have been able to afford to pay for a ticket to fly from her country to the United States to attend her screening.  Now, she had the opportunity to see her work in the context of the entire festival, to feel a part of a global experimental film community. For me, the most moving aspect of the entire virtual shift during the first week of our global pandemic was watching five filmmakers from countries around the globe sitting on their beds talking through Zoom about their work, amongs themselves and with the public-at-large, this time very, very large.

“Everything That Surrounds Us Becomes Part of Us” – Screening, Reading & Workshop at SF Public Library

Author: Lynne Sachs, Poetry Readings Film Screening and Writing Workshop 
“Everything That Surrounds Us Becomes Part of Us”
Thursday 1/21/ 2021 6- 9PM PST – Zoom 
https://sfpl.org/events/2021/01/21/author-lynne-sachs-poetry-reading-film-screening-writing-workshop

Workshop featuring special guest, artist Ann Hamilton

On Thursday night I will read from my recent poetry book Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press) and screen film. I have invited artist ANN HAMILTON to join us to speak about her 1996 SF library installation where she asked local community people to annotate the catalogue cards which “embody the heart of the public library art collection – the text that is folded between the covers of the books and buried within the library stacks.” This is one of the most interesting and resonate examples of socially engaged art that I have ever seen. Very excited to talk with Ann and with the audience.This is also a workshop so all participants will be encouraged to write and interact. Yes, it’s virtual. Sign up and you will receive a Zoom invite.

Thanks to poetry librarian and arts enthusiast John Smalley, librarians Jaime Wong and Anissa Malady

Acclaimed poet and filmmaker Lynne Sachs reads from her recent book Year by Year Poems, a collection of 50 poems which began as a half-century marker in the author’s life. Sachs will also screen her film, Tip of My Tongue, which was based on these same poems. At the end of the screening, participants will be encouraged to write one poem in response to a chosen year in their own life.

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet who explores the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Sachs has made thirty-five films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art and more. In early 2020, her newest movie, Film About a Father Who, will premiere on opening night at the Slamdance Film Festival and in NYC at the Museum of Modern Art.’

About the Film “In Tip of My Tongue, eleven New Yorkers, including Sachs herself, born in the early 1960s ‘visit’ every year of their lives in a brash, self-reflexive experiment to create a film on what it’s meant to live in America over the last half century. Through poetry and flashes of archival footage, the past is ‘unearthed, turned over and reconsidered in new and astonishing ways.'” (Museum of Modern Art)

About the Book Year by Year Poems feature graceful, diaristic poems, successfully distilling events and themes in the poet’s life and simultaneously, magically, reflect larger movements of history and culture. Intimate and imagistic, the poems unfold a series of miniature stories with sensuous rhythms, telling visual detail and gentle humor.

Memphis Flyer Names “Film About A Father Who” Best Documentary

2020 on Screen: The Best and Worst of Film and TV 
by CHRIS MCCOY
Memphis Flyer 
December 23, 2020
https://www.memphisflyer.com/memphis/2020-on-screen-the-best-and-worst-of-film-and-tv/Content?oid=24444547

There’s no denying that 2020 was an unprecedented year, so I’m doing something unprecedented: combining film and TV into one year-end list.

Best Documentary: Film About a Father Who

More than 35 years in the making, Lynne Sachs’ portrait of her mercurial father, legendary Memphis bon vivant Ira Sachs Sr., is as raw and confessional as its subject is inscrutable. Rarely has a filmmaker opened such a deep vein and let the truth bleed out.

The Film Stage Releases “Film About A Father Who” Trailer – EXCLUSIVE

EXCLUSIVE TRAILER FOR LYNNE SACHS’ Film About A Father Who TAKES A PERSONAL LOOK AT FAMILIAL MYSTERIES
Jordan Raup
December 23, 2020
The Film Stage 
https://thefilmstage.com/exclusive-trailer-for-lynne-sachs-film-about-a-father-who-takes-a-personal-look-at-familial-mysteries/

From The Father to Dick Johnson Is Dead to Falling to Minari, 2020 has been an exemplary year for films exploring all facets of fatherhood. Premiering at Slamdance Film Festival earlier this year and now arriving in Virtual Cinemas next month, another poignant entry in this category is Lynne Sachs’ documentary Film About a Father Who. Featuring materials shot over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019 by Sachs herself, the film explores her father Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah, which leads to many unexpected discoveries. Set for a nationwide Virtual Cinema release beginning on January 15, Museum of Moving Image will also hold a a director retrospective that features five programs in their Virtual Cinema, from January 13-31.

Jared Mobarak said in his Slamdance Film Festival review earlier this year, “While director Lynne Sachs admits her latest documentary Film About a Father Who could be superficially construed as a portrait (the title alludes to and the content revolves around her father Ira), she labels it a reckoning instead. With thirty-five years of footage shot across varied formats and devices to cull through and piece together, the result becomes less about providing a clear picture of who this man is and more about understanding the cost of his actions. Whether it began that way or not, however, it surely didn’t take long to realize how deep a drop the rabbit hole of his life would prove. Sachs jumped in to discover truths surrounding her childhood only to fall through numerous false bottoms that revealed truths she couldn’t even imagine.”

See the exclusive trailer below.

Film About A Father Who opens on January 15 virtually nationwide alongside a director retrospective in Museum of Moving Image’s Virtual Cinema.