We’re incredibly excited to announce the selection of three esteemed jurors for the 58th Ann Arbor Film Festival, scheduled for March 24–29, 2020. The three will attend the six-day festival, viewing more than 120 films in competition and awarding roughly $22,500 in cash and in-kind awards. In addition, each juror will present a specially curated program of work during the festival. Check out their bios below!
The
58th Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF) will be presented as a free
live-streamed six-day event March 24-March 29, 2020! We made the
decision to suspend all in-person events for the 58th AAFF due to
growing health concerns surrounding COVID-19, and instead present short
and feature films in competition entirely online.
The online event will be streamed through Vimeo as a one-time event and will be accessible worldwide. All listed times are in Eastern Daylight Time (UTC -04:00). Moderated live Q&As with filmmakers will be streamed following the film screenings in order to continue discourse between filmmakers and our audience. Jurors will fulfill their commitment of reviewing programmed films in competition in order to confer the $22,500 in awards.
Each program is different. Films are not rated. All programs are intended for mature audiences, unless otherwise noted. Some films have imagery of a stroboscopic nature.
Judges
Osbert Parker
Three-time BAFTA-nominated director Osbert Parker is perhaps best known for his signature style of using cut-out animation mixed with live-action to create one-of-a-kind imaginary landscapes within commercials and short films. He directed eight short films for the Channel 4 series Misfits (2012) and co-directed (with Laurie Hill) the short film Sir John Lubbock’s Pet Wasp (2018) for Instagram, based on Untold Stories, commissioned by animate projects and Anim18. As a freelance director, Parker worked at Quentin Tarantino’s production company, A Band Apart, as its first commercial director in 1995 and as Steve Barron’s second unit director on Hallmark’s TV feature Arabian Nights. Parker’s short films have received great acclaim on the international film festival circuit. Film Noir was nominated for best short animated film by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in 2006 and was also nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Yours Truly, was awarded Best Short Animated Film at the British Animation Awards.
Lisa Steele
Lisa
Steele is a pioneer in video art, educator, curator, and co-founder of
the Toronto-based organization Vtape, an award-winning media center and
distributor of video art. She has collaborated with her partner Kim
Tomczak since 1983 in producing videotapes, performances, and photo/text
works. Their awards include the Bell Canada Award in Video Art, a
Toronto Arts Award for media arts, and in 2005, a Governor General’s
Award in Visual and Media Arts. Currently, Steele teaches at the
University of Toronto as part of the John H. Daniels Faculty of
Architecture, Landscape, and Design.
Lynne Sachs
Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, performances, and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics, and layered sound design. Between 1994 and 2009, her five essay films took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy, and Germany – sites affected by international war – where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Sachs has made 35 films, which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney. Lynne studied history and studio art at Brown University and studied film at both the San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State University. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches experimental and documentary film. In 2014, Lynne received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Film and Video. “Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet whose moving-image work ranges from short experimental films to essay films to hybrid live performances,” according to filmmaker Kelly Spivey.
From 2007 – 2023, Lynne has curated and organized The Experimental Lecture at NYU, with the support of the Cinema Studies Department and the Undergraduate Film and TV Department, Prof. Jonathan Kahana and Prof. Dan Streible, and most recently Prof. Jessica Bardsley.
“From the beginning, I imagined this talk to be one in which someone who had immersed him or herself in the world of alternative, experimental film would reveal something about the process of making their work by visiting pieces that were either unfinished, unresolved, bewitching or even untouchable. The intention was to lay bare the challenges rather than the successes, the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art.”
Please visit each of the pages for these lectures here on my website:
When filmmaker Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she dedicated herself to writing a poem for every year of her life, so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in Sachs’ life and the swirl of events beyond her domestic universe. Published by Tender Buttons Press, Year by Year Poems juxtaposes Sachs’ finished poems, which move from her birth in 1961 to her half-century marker in 2011, with her original handwritten first drafts. In this way, she reveals her process of navigating within and alongside historical events such as the Moon Landing, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., streaking, the Anita Hill hearings, the Columbine shootings, and controversies around universal health care. In Year by Year Poems, Lynne Sachs realizes the long anticipated leap from her extraordinary career in filmmaking to this, her first book of poems. With an introduction by Paolo Javier, former Queens Poet Laureate and author of Court of the Dragon, and book design by Abby Goldstein.
Praise for book:
“The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit. With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne Sachs shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.”
–– Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body and Against Joie de Vivre
“The highly acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs is also a captivating and surprising poet. Year by Year distills five decades into lyric, a lustrous tapestry woven of memory, wisdom, cultural apprehension and the delicate specificities of lived life.”
–– Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs and When the World Was Steady
“In Year by Year, Lynne Sachs selects and distills from larger fields of notation, acute scenes representing her life and the world she was born into. Her measured, spare account brings her to an understanding and acceptance of the terrible and beautiful fact that history both moves us and moves through us, and, more significantly, how by contending with its uncompromising force, we define an ethics that guides our fate.”
– Michael Collier author of Dark Wild Realm
“Renowned experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs wrote one of 2019’s best books of poetry. In 2011, after deciding to write one poem for each of the fifty years of her life, Sachs asked herself, “How have the private, most intimate moments of my life been affected by the public world beyond?” The graceful, diaristic poems that she went on to produce successfully distill 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. Thus in “1969” a young Sachs imagines Neil Armstrong calling on the telephone, then turning “to look at all of us (from the moon).” This beautifully designed book includes facsimiles of many of the poetry’s initial drafts, which subtly illumine this artist’s creative process.”
“As an artist, Sachs keeps playing, again and again, with each of the thirty-three films she has made over the decades and now, with her first book of poems, which are just as inventive and fresh, just as delightfully playful with form. These poems are innovative but never intimidating or deliberately opaque. Instead, they invite us in, encouraging us to play along. They give us a structure to enter into our own retrospective lives, our own distillations of time, our own superimpositions of the newsworthy world onto our most intimate moments.”
“Powerful collection! We’re loving Year by Year, a rich poetry and visual journey of ideas by filmmaker Lynne Sachs. The book includes original handwritten first drafts with each finished piece. Unique process immersion. Fascinating to view with the complete pieces, exploring them together like a map, what is gained and lost as we move through time and ideas. Elegant and elegiac.”
– Margot Douaihy, Northern New England Review (posted in Twitter)
Founded by poet Lee Ann Brown in 1989, Tender Buttons Press publishes experimental women’s and gender-expansive poetry through innovative forms that play with the boundaries between life and art, generations and generativity.
Jan. 12 – WBAI 99.5 Radio in NYC & Pacifica Affiliates “Arts Express” (Global Arts Magazine) with Host Prairie Miller – start at 29 min. 22 sec. – Lynne reads from Year by Year Poems on broadcast week of Jan. 13 and is archived here: https://www.wbai.org/archive/program/episode/?id=9151
Our 2020 Slamdance Film Festival coverage includes a pair of documentaries featuring very different types of protagonists, settings, and filmic styles, but they share something integral in common: both are portraits of unconventional families. Post-Slamdance, these two films will be making their way across the festival circuit (one, Film About a Father Who, recently had its New York City premiere at the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight earlier this month), and both are worth your time.
(Feel free to also check out our feature on a trio of Slamdance documentaries reflecting on the challenges facing the county here.)
Daring and intimate, Film About a Father Who probes the life and times of the filmmaker’s father, erstwhile hotelier, and playboy Ira Sachs Sr. Director Lynne Sachs assembles a collage using more than three decades worth of home videos, which often result in a raw and ragged look. Yet there is also an undeniable sense of immediacy from having the principals involved in her father’s series of broken marriages and illicit affairs speaking directly to the camera; some have vivid enough personas that they seem bigger than life.
Sachs presents multiple perspectives by liberally jumping backwards and forwards in time, capturing Ira at different ages and points in his life. In doing so, the film doesn’t draw attention to how he changes so much as what stays the same: how he seems cut off from his own emotions, never running too hot or cool. The theme of numerous observations also applies to the interviews of past wives, lovers, children both legitimate and illegitimate, and, perhaps most unforgettably, Ira’s mother, each of whom contribute a different facet to what is ultimately a complex portrait of a serial philanderer who simultaneously had multiple families.
At the same time Ira is being deconstructed, the film builds toward an epiphany about the nature of family via a parallel narrative involving Sachs and her two siblings from Ira’s first marriage. They recount how they first learned about their father’s affairs, how they subsequently navigated his existence as the Hugh Hefner of Park City, Utah, and how alienating it was for the Sachs children as he cycled through women.
The director’s attitude toward her father—who in the present day has become elderly and senile and, as such, even more enigmatic than he had been in earlier years—never approaches hostile, but she reserves most of her genuine warmth for her brothers, sisters, and half-siblings. Some are considerably younger than her and were kept secret from her. As the camera frames them side-by-side with Sachs, it lingers on their faces as if to marvel at the physical traits they all share.
Eventually, all of Ira’s progeny come together to ponder weighty themes—whether or not they share a parent is enough to make them family. But the documentary seems to argue that due to the complexity of familial bonds, only those caught inside should get to define them. That’s a universal message that will resonate with most viewers, who will likely find Sachs’s objective considerably more admirable than her main subject.
Lynne Sachsmakes films and writes poems that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Her work embraces hybrid form and combines memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include live performance with moving image. Lynne was first exposed to poetry by her great aunt as a child in Memphis, Tennessee. Soon she was frequenting workshops at the local library and getting a chance to learn from poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Ethridge Knight. As an active member of Brown University’s undergraduate poetry community, she shared her early poems with fellow poet Stacy Doris. Lynne later discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneeman, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Lynne has made thirty-five films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Festivals in Buenos Aires, Beijing and Havana have presented retrospectives of her work. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship. 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. Lynne lives in Brooklyn. Year by Year Poemsis her first book of poetry.
1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?Writing YEAR BY YEAR POEMS did not just change my life, it was my life. When I turned 50, I decided to reconnect with every year of my life, so far, by writing a poem that explores the relationship I had had with something beyond my control, outside my domestic universe. The personal confronts the public, and vice-versa. Writing these poems forced me to carve out precise distillations of these moments in my time and our shared time.
2 – How did you come to filmmaking first, as opposed to, say, poetry, fiction or non-fiction? I have been writing poetry since I was a child and filmmaking is actually an extension of this desire to process my bewilderment and occasional understanding of the world that spins around me. The personal, experimental, essayistic, documentary approaches I bring to my filmmaking are extensions of the thinking involved in writing a poem.
3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes? I adore first drafts and for this reason I try to write my poems by hand, with a pen on paper. I return to them like an archeologist, relishing every gesture that I see on the page. With this in mind, I included many of my first drafts – as images almost – in YEAR BY YEAR POEMS. So far, readers have generally appreciated seeing these visualizations of the process of writing, moving back-and-forth between the inchoate first draft to the finished, edited, typed version. My mother was the only person who thought some of the poems were better and more fleshed-out in the original drafts. I thought this was apt, since her perspective on my life is probably the most complete.
4 – Where does a poem, work of prose or film-script usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning? Each poem in YEAR BY YEAR POEMS begins with a year. In fact, I gave myself the pleasure of inventing a new graphic font for each of these 50 years, and these designs/ doodles became the cover of the book. Limitations or constraints on the writing of a poem actually allow me to work in a more expansive way. I feel less overwhelmed by the daunting challenge of trying to say something. In terms of my filmmaking, I have made 35 films, the shortest being 3 minutes and the longest 83. I just completed FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO which is 74 minutes and will premiere next month as the opening night film at Slamdance Film Festival in Park City and then at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in February. Believe it or not, I started this film in 1984 and just finished it. The only way I could find its structure was to create many short films and then to find search for compelling transitions.
5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? I have finally discovered the joy of reading from my book in front of an audience. I have never ever been an actor so it did not really appeal to me before. Now, when I am reading from my own book, I feel deeply connected to the listeners in the room. It is so much fun to watch people responding. I have recently read or will read at Berl’s Poetry Bookshop, Topos Books, McNally Jackson Bookstore, KGB Lit Bar, Court Tree Gallery, Penn Book Center, and Museum of Modern Art Buenos Aires (with a translator). I will be reading from my book and showing my films at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library for National Poetry Month in April, 2020.
6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are? I think my deepest concerns stem from my visceral devotion to feminism.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be? A writer should stir of up thought and encourage a fascination with language. Writers who have found a place in the community should also encourage others with less experience through workshops that bring in people who have not yet named themselves as “writers.”
8 – Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? I absolutely adore working with an editor, both people I know and trust to be honest and kind and people who care only about one thing – making the text better. In writing my first book of poems, I worked with my Tender Buttons Press editrix Lee Ann Brown who had some uncannily astute suggestions that included line breaks, word choices, finding clarity, carving way too much explication and everything in between. Working with her as well as my poet friends Michael Ruby and Michele Somerville was a gift. In addition, very early on, I actually hired a graduate student in creative writing to meet with me just a few times. She would read the poems with such distance and objectivity. It was refreshing, and I didn’t feel guilty asking her to explain what she thought since I was paying her.
9 – What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? Read your poems out loud to yourself. Listen to the rhythm and feel it in your body.
10 – How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to filmmaking to multimedia)? What do you see as the appeal? Oh, you really ask such insightful questions. What do I call myself? Am I filmmaker who writes poems? Can I be more than one thing? Can I just be an artist? Can I change according to my surroundings? I think our culture is actually becoming more open to these permutations. Patti Smith (musician and author) and Tony Kushner(playwright, screenwriter and children’s book writer) are two of my heroes in this respect. Finding visual or textual distillations is at the foundation of both my writing and my filmmaking. In neither situation do I ever call myself a storyteller.
11 – What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin? On a writing day, I do what so many other writers do. I am not particularly ingenious in any way. I go out to a café, buy a cup of tea (preferably in a teapot) and begin to write. As long as the music is good and people are not talking on their cell phones, I am happy.
12 – When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? When my writing feels hampered by the clutter of my life, I set limits. I frame my ambition by a constraint, like only thinking about one particular conceit or finding my way to the bottom of the page. I try, though I am rarely successful, not to read what I have written as a reader but rather as co-conspirator with absolutely no taste. Taste is dangerous. So is the internet, so I try to reject that in any way possible.
13 – What fragrance reminds you of home? About twenty-five years ago, I was visiting the Glen Canyon Dam at Lake Powell in Utah. It’s a very strange and other-wordly lake, mostly because it is artificial and built by recreation lovers who didn’t mind filling in a canyon in a naturally arid landscape to create a place for water-skiers. My sister Dana Sachs and I were together in the elevator descending to its lowest level. When the elevator doors opened, we immediately turned to one another and remarked that this dark, intimidating, cement space smelled like our grandparents’ home in Memphis, Tennessee, a place we had not been inside since we were children. Recognizing that “fragrance” concretized our sensory bond as sisters who were carrying so many of the same memories.
14 – David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art? I am very influenced by the conceptually rigorous approaches of Vito Acconci, Ana Medietta, Carolee Schneemann, Adrian Piper, and Hans Haacke.
15 – What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? Last week, I finished reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. It took me six months and the experience was fantastic and awful, ultimately ending with ecstasy. The experience was convulsive and exasperating. I was transformed in a way that was truly extraordinary. I am a different person now that I have read Molly Bloom’s treatise on her body in the book’s last chapter; her one-sentence no-punctuation 25,000 word spin through the sensual made me reel and dream and sing. I would add to that a few other writers who come to mind today: filmmaker and poet Trinh T. Minh-ha, author and scholar Tera W. Hunter, author Claire Messud, poet Lee Ann Brown, and poet Katy Bohinc.
16 – What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done? Canadian film director François Gerard completed his highly successful film Thirty-TwoShort Films About Glenn Gould in 1993. In an interview, a reporter asked him what he planned to do next. His response was that he planned to donothing. Doing nothing for an artist can be transformative. I envy people who claim to be bored. I do not have ahorror vacui. I search for emptiness and find a sense of tranquility. Ultimately, it is very productive.
17 – If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer? I did consider being a human rights attorney, a pediatrician or an anthropologist. I also wish I could cook well, though I don’t aim to be a chef.
18 – What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?Writing gives me so much oxygen. When you write, you feel like you added one minute to the 1440 minutes in a day.
19 – What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? As written above, I recently completed Ulysses, but you know that is a great one. I also was very taken with Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts which showed me how to weave together intimate personal writing with more theoretical investigations. I return over and over and over again to filmmaker Ken Jacobs’ Star Spangled To Death, which is his opus film that he bravely refuses to complete.
20 – What are you currently working on? Oh Ida: The Fluid Time Travels of a Radical Spirit, an experimental, sci-fi essay film that will trace the erasure and recent emergence (in the form of monuments) of the story of activist and journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett who spent her early years in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee and committed her life to nurturing a spirit of liberation in the face of resounding racial violence. I am making this film with author Tera Hunter and a few weeks ago we started shooting. It’s a blissful, intense collaboration.
(Feel free to also check out our feature on a trio of Slamdance documentaries reflecting on the challenges facing the county here.)
Daring and intimate, Film About a Father Who probes the life and times of the filmmaker’s father, erstwhile hotelier, and playboy Ira Sachs Sr. Director Lynne Sachs assembles a collage using more than three decades worth of home videos, which often result in a raw and ragged look. Yet there is also an undeniable sense of immediacy from having the principals involved in her father’s series of broken marriages and illicit affairs speaking directly to the camera; some have vivid enough personas that they seem bigger than life.
Sachs presents multiple perspectives by liberally jumping backwards and forwards in time, capturing Ira at different ages and points in his life. In doing so, the film doesn’t draw attention to how he changes so much as what stays the same: how he seems cut off from his own emotions, never running too hot or cool. The theme of numerous observations also applies to the interviews of past wives, lovers, children both legitimate and illegitimate, and, perhaps most unforgettably, Ira’s mother, each of whom contribute a different facet to what is ultimately a complex portrait of a serial philanderer who simultaneously had multiple families.
At the same time Ira is being deconstructed, the film builds toward an epiphany about the nature of family via a parallel narrative involving Sachs and her two siblings from Ira’s first marriage. They recount how they first learned about their father’s affairs, how they subsequently navigated his existence as the Hugh Hefner of Park City, Utah, and how alienating it was for the Sachs children as he cycled through women.
The director’s attitude toward her father—who in the present day has become elderly and senile and, as such, even more enigmatic than he had been in earlier years—never approaches hostile, but she reserves most of her genuine warmth for her brothers, sisters, and half-siblings. Some are considerably younger than her and were kept secret from her. As the camera frames them side-by-side with Sachs, it lingers on their faces as if to marvel at the physical traits they all share.
Eventually, all of Ira’s progeny come together to ponder weighty themes—whether or not they share a parent is enough to make them family. But the documentary seems to argue that due to the complexity of familial bonds, only those caught inside should get to define them. That’s a universal message that will resonate with most viewers, who will likely find Sachs’s objective considerably more admirable than her main subject.
The mostly upbeat Queen of the Capital centers on Daniel Hays, a Washington, DC–based drag artist who performs exclusively to raise money for charity. Hays is also a member of his city’s chapter of the Imperial Court, a nonprofit consisting of and run by his fellow drag queens and kings. Director Joshua Davidsburg follows Hays as he embarks on a campaign to be elected as the organization’s next leader, although given what friendly terms all of the members seem to be on with each other, the end result is quite possibly the least suspenseful documentary about an election ever made.
The film does, however, boast considerable insight into life of a modern-day drag artist in our nation’s capital, including the way in which “drag families” here grow and develop, which is often through established performers taking younger ones under their wings. Hays’ drag father, Jon Shelby, though only a year older than Hays, comes across world-weary enough that their father-child relationship is completely believable. The more we learn about Shelby, especially some of the darker incidents of his life, the more touching are his scenes with Hays, who had his own share of troubles during his youth.
Through a combination of archived footage as well as interviews, Queen of the Capital also provides a rousing history lesson about drag’s place in the city, including such colorful episodes as the bitter war between rival clubs from which the Imperial Court emerged. But we also get an idea of how the day-to-day lives of drag performers—and LGBTQ men and women in general—have improved significantly from decades past, with Hays and others having jobs in the federal government in which they can openly discuss what they do outside of the office. The extent to which they have become comfortably integrated into the fabric of Washington, DC, is apparent in the footage of the Imperial Court’s charitable events, in which people of all stripes engage with them warmly.
Though the film’s election season story line isn’t a nail-biter, Davidsburg seems to be eyeing something that’s more inspiring than politics, and he largely captures it.
I had never heard of experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs before stumbling upon her poetry collection at McNally Jackson on a day when I finished my commute book on my way downtown, but if her films are anything like these sharp, personal, evocative time capsules then I can’t wait to watch them.
This collection, which is comprised of a poem for each year of Sachs’s first fifty, is a perfect example of how making art that’s specific and personal somehow feels universal. She, in telling her own stories of milestones both political (how watching the Watergate hearings with her dad she, “finally became real to him”) and personal (love lost and kept, children’s births, friends illnesses) perfectly captures the way that all of our lives interweave with larger events.
I read this book through 2 times on the day I bought it. Then I copied out lines I liked and took up 2 full pages of my notebook. I have a feeling it will be sticking with me for a long time. Highly recommended.
What we saw at Sundance, Part 2: A side-trip to Slamdance
By Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
Culling through the forty features viewed at both the Sundance and Slamdance Film Festivals last week has been as much fun as watching them in the first place. Here is a spoiler-free account of some the fest’s best to bookmark in your calendar for the upcoming year. Read part one here.
Allotting some of my precious “Sundance movie going time” to make the hop-skip-and-a-jump up Main Street to attend rivaling venue Slamdance, has been immensely important since its inception in 1995. Slamdance’s commitment to “emerging artists and low-budget independent cinema” was born out of the inevitable missteps made by the ever-growing Sundance Institute. Every year I am rewarded with a truly remarkable debut that Sundance passed on, such as Christopher Nolan’s Following (1998), Bong Joon-ho’s Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), Jared Hess’s Peluca (2003), the nine-minute short film that inspired Napoleon Dynamite, and Ben Zeitlin’s Egg (2004)—a thesis project which led to creation of Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)—Marilyn Agrelo’s crowd-cheering Mad Hot Ballroom (2005), and Oren Peli’s low budget phenomenon Paranormal Activity (2008).
To my absolute astonishment, I can easily say that this year’s 2020 festival delivered the most moving amount of films of any previous year. Returning again and again to program after program, I found the rough edges, bold moments, and surprising personalities that I often find lacking from many of Sundance’s US Premiere and US Dramatic categories. (Thankfully Sundance re-invented their “Spectrum” category in the late 2000s and conceived the “NEXT” program, which provides a showcase for what the festival calls “pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to story-telling.” Or in other words, the Slamdance Film Festival.
Film About a Father Who (USA)
Experimental filmmaking legend Lynne Sachs kicked off Slamdance on opening night with an emotionally striking feature exploring the complexities of her narcissistically charming father. Using 8mm, 16mm, videotape, and digital footage, and shot over 35 years (from 1984 to 2019), her perennial process of documenting “bon vivant and pioneering Utah businessman” Ira Sachs Sr. will undoubtedly hit quite a nerve with anyone who’s grown up with an egotistically captivating fountainhead for a father. But Sachs isn’t just airing her family’s dirty laundry here—including interviews with Lynne’s younger brother, iconic indie filmmaker Ira Sachs: see The Delta (1997), Forty Shades of Blue (2005), Keep the Lights On (2012), and Love Is Strange(2014). This unique and epic familial expedition masterfully employs an experimental inventiveness that swims through a myriad harrowing home movies captured within more than a few fascinating formats, and diverse decades. Sachs, referencing the title of Yvonne Rainer’s landmark feminist feature Film About a Woman Who (1974), practices what Rainer was preaching—and in turn has constructed one of the most powerfully pertinent documentaries of recent years.
Double Trouble in the Roaring Twenties: Valery Oisteanu and Lynne Sachs (PRINCE)
02/18/2020
New York poets Valery Oisteanu and Lynne Sachs make distillations, sometimes with words, sometimes with images. As a collagist, Valery imbibes the detritus of visual culture, using the materials he has consumed to construct surreal, oneiric designs. As an experimental filmmaker, Lynne collects images and sounds and reshapes them into cinema poems that warp and enliven our awareness of reality. In the mid 1980s, Lynne’s father Ira Sachs met Valery and his wife Ruth in Bali, Indonesia at the beginning of their shared multi-year engagement with the island and its rich culture. Soon, Ira introduced Valery to Lynne during his visits to New York City. It was during these regular familial interactions over thirty years that Lynne and Valery discovered their shared passions for making image-based work as well as writing poems. Tonight’s Double Trouble reading at McNally Jackson marks their first public poetry convergence, as they celebrate the beginning of the Roaring Twenties!
When Lynne turned fifty, she dedicated herself to writing a poem for every year of her life, so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in Sachs’ life and the swirl of events beyond her domestic universe. Published by Tender Buttons Press, Year by Year Poems juxtaposes Sachs’ finished poems, which move from her birth in 1961 to her half-century marker in 2011, with her original handwritten first drafts. In this way, she reveals her process of navigating within and alongside historical events such as the Moon Landing, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., streaking, the Anita Hill hearings, the Columbine shootings, and controversies around universal health care. With intro by Paolo Javier and design by Abby Goldstein.
For more than 30 years the Jewish filmmaker Lynne Sachs followed her father with her camera. Her father is Ira Sachs Senior, the lauded, and hedonistic Real Estate entrepreneur. From this intimate footage grew her last film, which combines memories, discoveries of siblings and a self examination of her family and herself. In an interview before her NY premier, she shares her personal doubts and her timid feelings regarding the film’s revealing quality. In this interview, she also discusses the documentary she made in Israel about Revital Ohaion who was murdered in a terror attack in 2002.
For more than three decades filmmaker Lynne Sachs have been making experimental documentaries. Her films that deal with political conflicts, social and personal matters took her to various places in the US, Bosnia, Vietnam, and Israel. However, throughout that period, 59- year-old Ms. Sachs kept working on a film that was most close to her heart: an intimate documentary that deals with the story of her father Ira Sachs Sr.
After the premier of “Film About a Father Who” at Slamdance in Park City, Utah, which occurs concurrently with the famous Sundance film fest, the film travels to Sachs home, New York City, where it will screen on Friday at the Museum of Modern Art. “As I stand shortly before the film’s first NY screening, among my community, I still think ‘have I made a mistake?’. Said Sachs in an interview before the film’s NY premier.
In her new film, Sachs provide the audience with an almost unmediated point of view into her family cell. A nuclear cell that sprawled with her father’s sexual adventures. In an attempt to capture the character of Sachs Sr. who had a reputation of a unique entrepreneur with a hedonistic lifestyle and of being a womanize. She digs into her memories, her mother’s, her father’s lovers, and that of her eight siblings from several women. She includes her brother Ira Sachs the well known film director (Love is Strange, Frankie), and her sister the writer Dana Sachs. The film that was constructed among others from a vast home video archive is a portrait of a man with lust for life. A man that inspired but also hurt many around him. Through her loving and compassionate look, Sachs weaves the perspectives of her close relatives, including some she discovers while making the film. She collects pieces of memories in an attempt to create the figure of her father. Ira Sr. is still alive, but being in old age his health deteriorates. He has difficulties to speak and difficulties to remember.
Lynne Sachs
“I walked the path of this film most of my adult life. Eventually I had to either accept it or forget about it”. Sachs explains. “If you don’t write a diary, poetry, or other kind of documentation, you basically advocate intentional obliviousness. Most of us do it very well”. Those were the motives that kept her committed to this project for so many years. “Either you speak out or you repress. The easy way is to ignore. I have two sisters whom I haven’t met till a few years ago. One of them was very involved in my father’s life. The film gives them a space to express their point of view. We all have step siblings. The nuclear family became a more rare thing nowadays with DNA support. My film is not about DNA, rather it takes place in a society where secrets are harder to keep”.
The Family dynamic around your father is very complex, and it brings some strong, mixed emotions, from your family and from yourself.
“I have been working on this film about my father for 30 years. I didn’t know exactly what I’m doing. But I knew it had a strong presence in my life. It was the starting point to start deciphering our parental fingerprint. No matter how unstable or complicated they were, or if they were awful and you disengaged from it in adolescence, and if so does if it had a positive effect on your life.
The last few weeks after completing the film, I had come to the realization that the frame of contemplating other people’s lives opens a door inwards. I felt the need that this time my door will open within. In order to see how it feels to be watched. As I myself watched my family and myself. This is one of the special merits that cinema possesses. When you carry a camera in public everybody is looking back at you.
The film also shows the process of an active man getting old. It is not an easy experience.
Cinema has the possibility to allow us to process things unlike any other medium. My father is getting old along the film, but so do I, and so all the other characters in the film. We are all getting old. Unfortunately, in our society it is common to hear “you don’t look your age’. It became an antonym to success. The truth is that we do get old. However, cinema launches you backwards and forwards into somebody else’s life, or your own, to parallel or different periods in life. Nowadays, my father is quite frail and has a hard time articulating his words. However, I didn’t want the film to be about that, rather I wanted the film to focus on the access and repulsion from the memory itself.
Still from Film About a Father Who (2020)
The biography of Ira Sachs Sr. Is full of twists and turns even from his childhood. He was born to an American parents from Jewish heritage, and grew up with his mother and stepfather. Both were converted to Christianity after WWII. As he got older, he promoted large scale developing projects for wealthy investors. He alway kept time for hiking and exclusive clubs. His first wife gave birth to his first three kids: Dana, Lynne and Ira. During his marriage and after his divorce, he conducted multiple relationships with different women with whom he brought more children. Not a role model father figure with American values. Not to mention Jewish ones. Nevertheless, Lynne says that Jewish identity was present from an early age, and she has made a few films exploring Jewish themes. Biography of Lilith (1997), The Last Happy Day (2009), and States of Unbelonging (2005) about Revital Ohaion who was murder in a terror attack. (Source: diesem Link)
States of Unbelonging was screened in 2006 at the Jerusalem Film Festival. The film is an attempt to decipher the character of Ohaion who was a film teacher. She was murdered with her two sons by a Palestinian terrorist in her house on kibbutz Metser. An article in the NY TImes ignites Sachs’s interest and sent her to explore the death of a woman in the other side of the globe, a process that Sachs describes as an obsession. She creates an abstract portraits of Ohaion with letters correspondence with her Israeli student Nir Zats. While Sachs is drawn deeper into the character of Ohaion, Zats was providing her with the sights and sounds of Israel. Among others she interview Ohaion’s family and ex-husband. Sachs is captivated not only with Ohioan herself but also with the landscape in which she has lived in. Eventually Sachs decided to visit Israel herself and deal with her complicated feelings.
Still from Film About a Father Who (2020)
“I was so obsessed with her” Sachs says. The subject matters that came in that film are still resonance with me. “I remember how I called Avi, her ex-husband over and over. At first it seemed he hesitated talking to me. Many things happened. I traced her younger brother here in NY. He is the one who gave me some of her home videos. He has never watched it. It was too traumatic for him. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. The only thing that disappointed me in all the erosion of working on this film was that I wasn’t related to the films she has made. It really bothered me for days. I have told myself that I must like her works. I tried to convince myself that it is all right since she was more of a teacher than a filmmaker, and I also teach film. Anyway not everything must fit. I was so immersed in seeing the world through her eyes.
Although Sachs inclines toward the personal. Her film inevitably was also part of the general political context. Different people expected her to take sides in the Palestinian Israeli conflict. “Following the making of the film I met a few Jewish American artists that were supporting BDS. I on the other hand was looking for a way to create a dialogue, and to meet with the peace support movement on both sides”. Sachs says that although she identified with Revital who was murder by a Palestinian, she was looking the complexity in the story. “When I started working on the film there was an expectation to protest the terror toward Israel. And there are different kinds of terror, military, organized and more. Eventually I was trying to avoid talking about the terror in itself”.
That must raise some questions with certain people.
When I submitted the film to the Jerusalem Film Fest, I had to coordinate the film hard copy delivery. I have called and talked to someone in the festival office. He said the jury would probably not like the film. When I was wondering why, he said that it is obviously very pro Zionists, and the jury are definitely not. When I wonder what made the film pro Zionist, he claims that the reason is that I focus on a woman that was killed in a terror attack. I said that I am searching for a more complex point of view. So he said: ok so they might like it after all. He himself was with a set of preliminary points of view about my work. When I reached the festival I was so excited. But then the second war in Lebanon has erupted. We were supposed to have a tour with the film in several places in Israel, but all was canceled. It was so disappointing.
