Prodigal daughter Sachs returns with a dramatic ethnography on a little-seen subculture: older residents of “shift-bed” apartments in New York’s Chinatown, where immigrants are jammed into shared rooms, beds in use around the clock.
Sponsored by Film & Digital Media, Porter College, and Center for Documentary Arts and Research, University of California, Santa Cruz
n the future, we may all be personal filmmakers, making the kinds of films that fit few genres but truly express our innermost creative impulse. Lynne Sachs is just that filmmaker, and she’s this month’s guest at Speakeasy Cinema.
Filmmaker Lynne Sachs and performers Yi Chun Cao, Linda Y.H. Chan, Chung Qing Che, Ellen Ho, Yun Xiu Huang, and Sheut Hing Lee joined A/P/A Institute at NYU on Thursday, October 2, 2013 for a screening of the film and a conversation moderated by Karen Shimakawa (Chair of Performance Studies at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts). Lesley (Yiping) Qin served as translator.
The ground rules were set early on in the IFP Film Week panel “Neorealist Features & Hybrid Documentaries.” There was to be no talk about “business.” We were here to talk about art — the art of cinema and how to transcend categorization.
When the experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs taught avant-garde filmmaking at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992, few if any in our class had ever heard of the essayist Chris Marker, with whom she later collaborated on Three Cheers for the Whale, or Trinh T. Minh-ha, whose approach to filmmaking strongly influenced her own.
NYU’s Cinema Studies Department and Undergraduate Film & TV Department present the 4th Annual Experimental Lecture.
On July 15, The DocYard series, running Monday nights at the Brattle Theatre, will host writer-director Lynne Sachs and her gorgeous, intimate look inside one very crowded New York Chinatown apartment, Your Day Is My Night.
Combining scripted performance with improvisation, Your Day is My Night becomes immediately difficult to classify. Is it a documentary?
When director Lynne Sachs first got the idea to make a film about shift-bed houses, she googled “hot-bed house” and got X-rated results. That was three years ago.
