“Scenic Ruptures: Land, Space and Sky in Experimental Film” A Virtual Lecture (on Zoom) Experimental Film Laboratory at the Saint Petersburg School of New Cinema Lynne Sachs With Gevorg Galstian
June 10, 2026 – 11 am – 1 pm NYC / EST time
An open lecture by Lynne Sachs, poet and experimental filmmaker.
The online meeting will be held on the Zoom platform. Participation is free. Pre-registration is required.
Lynne Sachs is an American poet and experimental filmmaker. For the past four decades, she has been creating cinematic works that resist genre definitions: hybrid forms born from the intersection of various disciplines and incorporating elements of essay, documentary, performance, and collage. She draws on letters, archives, diaries, and music to guide the viewer along a critical journey through reality and memory, exploring the connections between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.
Retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Cork Film Festival, China Women’s Film Festival, Costa Rica International Film Festival, Oberhausen (Germany), and Ambulante Festival of Documentary Film (Mexico). She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts.
Her books include Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press) and Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process and the Labor of Laundry (punctum books).
by Lynne Sachs/Lizzie Olesker, 65:00, 2018, US. When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there by observing these disappearing neighborhood spaces and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. The juxtaposition of narrative and documentary elements in The Washing Society creates a dream-like, yet hyper-real portrayal of a day in the life of a laundry worker, both past and present.
The fifth edition of Poetics + Politics will be centered around the theme: Poetics in the Politics of Now. The symposium will be held at the University of California at Santa Cruz between May 14-17, 2026.
This intentionally broad theme aims to engender a space of open dialogue about the interplay of aesthetics, politics, and history as they emerge in our various and discrete practices, commitments, regions and contexts. What are ‘poetics’ in the politics of now? Or, what are the ‘politics’ of the poetics of now? What is ‘now’? How are the pervasive topics that tend to cluster around documentary (realism, fidelity, responsibility, ethics, representation) animated or challenged or changed by this contemporary moment? What work does documentary do, and what can it do, in a media space increasingly dominated by altered images and facts? In a world increasingly shaped by the forces of financialization and nationalism? What could investing in form and poetics do in a moment like this?
Keynotes for this year’s symposium are DeeDee Halleck and Miko Revereza. DeeDee Halleck is a filmmaker, author, community and media activist, the founder of Paper Tiger Television and co-founder of Deep Dish Television, the first grass roots community television network. Her work to broaden and remake media landscapes has been recognized by major cultural and funding institutions. Miko Revereza is an award winning filmmaker whose body of work experiments with and examines the process of documenting the undocumented, moving through themes of diaspora, colonialism, and Americanization.
The 2026 symposium will be an in-person gathering: we are committed to the community-building work of physical presence and to creating an intentional space for shared and durational conversation across our time together.
Our call for proposals for the 2026 symposium is closed.
*The symposium has been moved off UCSC campus to honor the AFSCME strike which was called on May 7th, and called off on May 14th. We will gather at two locations: Barrios Unidos (1817 Soquel Ave, Santa Cruz, CA 95062) —please enter Barrios Unidos through cafe door with Poetics and Politics poster on the corner of Soquel ave and Trevethan ave— and 418 Project (155 River St , Santa Cruz, CA 95060)—please enter through the entrance marked Door 3 on River Street .For more information about the venues, parking, etc see Travel and Accommodation. To download a digital version of the old (and logistically defunct albeit very lovely and filled with bios) program—click here.
Registration Check in, collect program and name badge
Barrios Unidos
5:00pm -5:30pm
Welcome Honoring Land Relations: Matte Hewitt Opening Remarks: Irene Gustafson, Hannah Jayanti, and Irene Lusztig
Barrios Unidos
5:30pm – 7:30pm
SESSION 1 Poetics of Solidarity John Greyson, Raed El Rafei, Mary Jirmanus Saba [Moderated by Irene Lusztig] In a presentation spanning nude Walt Whitman, a megaphone choir, a boycott duet, and a wartime Gaza hospital diary, John Greyson explores questions of poetics and witness, solidarity and activism, asking: what does it mean to sing queer songs against the tsunami of a genocide? Raed Rafei’s essay film-in-progress, tentatively titled To be in a Time of War, is a reflection on the cognitive dissonance of witnessing the devastating war in Gaza from the safety of San Francisco, a supposed queer utopian haven that both obscures US support and fosters solidarity. Mary Jirmanus Saba will show clips from a collaborative work in progress (with Native Studies Scholar Balraj Gill and Massachusett Sagamore War Chief Faries Gray) offering a framework of spatial sensing as countercartography that asks: what kind of relationships to land and place does embodied sensing foster? What kinds of artistic sensibilities might we as documentarians help to cultivate that could confront the profound challenges of our contemporary moment? This opening session moves expansively from a series of gay marches in San Francisco between the 70s and 90s, to a hospital in Khan Younis, to a protest in a Toronto university lobby, to Indigenous land in Massachusetts, oscillating between there and here, then and now. Collectively, we hope this presentation will offer images and ideas to ground our conversation to come in questions about solidarity across time and space—and how to make art in the most challenging of times.
Barrios Unidos
7:30pm – 9:00pm
Opening Night Reception Outside drinks, light snacks, mingling, processing!
KEYNOTE Martial Arts: Defending Ourselves and Others DeeDee Halleck [In conversation with Marty Lucas] Halleck will look at the history of activism in the arts — from satire, posters and murals to boycotts, whistles, disruption, occupation, and general strike.
418 Project
11:30am – 1:00pm
SESSION 2 Aftermath Practices Adam Sekuler, The Abortion Clinic Film Collective (Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, Đoan Hoàng Curtis, Lynne Sachs), Helen De Michiel [Moderated by S. Topiary Landberg] “What does it mean to practice documentary when familiar structures no longer hold? This panel is framed by this timely provocation, posed by filmmaker Helen De Michiel, who invites us to think beyond questions of “organizing to restore our legacy institutions,” towards, instead, considering a framework of “aftermath practice — not retreat or defeat, but exploration and discovery.” Filmmaker-members of the Abortion Clinic Film Collective (Đoan Hoàng Curtis, Kristy Guevera Flanagan, Lynne Sachs) share urgent filmmaking and distribution strategies emerging from the frontlines of the post-Roe v. Wade reproductive health crisis. Filmmaker Adam Sekuler invites us to linger in the aftermath of film festival programming, and to attend to the “unseen archive” of what gets left out—silenced forms, counter-temporalities, and other refusals. The presenters in this panel collectively grapple with questions of “aftermath”—how to make work in new ways in spite of—or ignited by—the unraveling of political, public health, and arts institutions at every scale.
418 Project
1:00pm – 2:00pm
Lunch We will be downtown where there are many places to eat. We can recommend Abbot Square food court for outdoor seating, but also see Travel and Accommodation for suggestions.
2:00pm – 3:30pm
SESSION 3 Gestures of Repair Rosie Reed Hillman, Eva Knopf, Erin Wilkerson [Moderated by Hope Tucker] How can we explore the “poetics of repair in a seemingly broken world?” We’ve taken this resonant question posed by filmmaker Eva Knopf (who unfortunately could not attend in person) as a frame for this conversation between three filmmakers. Filmmaker Roșie Reed Hillman creates a tender feminist portrait of witches— working-class women in midlife, “using magic to transform and transport.” Filmmaker and media artist Erin Wilkerson calls for “feral” filmmaking and situated knowledge in a live autoethnographic video performance exploring colonial landscapes, early American settlement and expansion, and botanical-based fieldwork. Knopf’s work in progress Movie Kintsugi explores “how we deal with breakages, repairs and the broken pieces of everyday life – in a world of pieces and multiple crises. What do fracture lines tell us that would otherwise remain hidden?”
418 Project
3:30pm- 4:00pm
Break
4:00pm-5:30pm
SESSION 4 Reframing Interference Hanna Rose Shell, Anna Friz, Nadia Ahmed [Moderated by Rebecca Ora (rora)] The three presenters in this panel reframe interferences such as sun flare, noise, fuzziness, and ephemerality as productive modes of inquiry rather than obstacles to knowledge. We’ve borrowed the title of this session from Anna Friz’s practice of “detunement” which embraces the uncertainty that research and empirical observation have typically sought to filter out. Through a practice of listening and noticing across radio bands, foggy Icelandic landscapes, and Chile’s industrialized Atacama desert, Friz treats perceptual ambiguity as a methodology for a complex world. Hanna Rose Shell’s work-in-progress, Flare Patrol / Parallax Vision, weaves together 35mm solar-detection films from Cold War-era coronagraphs, and contemporaneous news archives. Placing these in “parallax” across seemingly incommensurable vantage points, Shell explores whether shifting the scale towards the solar can open new ways of thinking about fidelity, frequency, and the politics of “now.” Nadia Ahmed’s Wetlands of Mass Destruction explores how the shifting marshlands of southern Iraq’s Al-Ahwar has long functioned as ecological and political endurance. Reading across myth, indigenous Ahwari poetry, and environmental policy, Nadia argues that foreign restoration efforts fail when they treat the ephemeral nature of these waters as interference to be corrected rather than resilience.
418 Project
5:30pm – 6:30pm
SESSION 5 | WORKSHOP Documentary as Health Care Liz Roberts, Alex Juhasz Juhasz and Roberts screen clips from two new works, Please Hold and Love is the Drug to engage facilitated conversation with workshop participants about community-situated documentary practice in spaces of health related vulnerability. Both works engage with the durational crisis of HIV/AIDS. Engaging with Juhasz’s definition of queer feminist media praxis, our facilitated experience invites participants to think together in an expansive way through the poetics and practices of activist media. The works are deeply archival, across time and format, but use experimental form to show how all those times can be copresent now, that grief is spatial, and care is always possible.
KEYNOTE Undocumentability and Smuggling Through Loophole Cinema Miko Revereza [in conversation with Hannah Jayanti] This talk engages Miko Revereza’s practice through notions of undocumentability and smuggling through what Revereza calls loophole cinema. Emerging from his experiences growing up as an undocumented immigrant in the United States, his research begins with the question: how does an undocumented documentary filmmaker document themself? Revereza explores the ontological loopholes between bureaucratic and cinematic documents and how these forms might contaminate each other. His filmmaking practice, operating within registers of visibility and invisibility, becomes entangled with existential decisions such as self-deportation and exile, treating cinema as a stage for refusal and as a tactical method for infiltrating, transmitting, or smuggling himself through borders. In this talk Revereza will explore the evolution of personal filmmaking, departing from his initial question towards a new one: how might an undocumented documentary filmmaker become undocumentable?
418 Project
11:30am-1pm
SESSION 8 XO & Struggle: A Case Study in Tactical Film Programming & Exhibition Emily Rose Apter and Keisha Knight Featuring work by Saeedah Cook, Kelly Gallagher, Cameron A. Granger, Christopher Harris, Alex Johnston, and Matazi Weathers [Moderated by Abram Stern] Solidarity Media Network presents XO & Struggle, a film screening dedicated to the George Jackson Brigade’s enduring legacy of both love and struggle. Drawing inspiration from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s notion of abolition as presence, the program explores possibilities of anti-carceral image-making while maintaining that art alone cannot transform the conditions that produce carceral violence. Previous iterations of XO & Struggle appeared in cinema and organizing spaces across NYC, evolving in collaboration with participating artists, organizers, and political educators. This screening will be followed by a facilitated discussion and brainstorm session focused on nourishing an abolitionist imaginary, strengthening inside/outside collaboration, and expanding the use of media in support of global freedom struggles.
418 Project
1:00pm-2:00pm
Lunchbreak / part of group moves to Barrios Unidos
2:00pm – 3:30pm
SESSION 9 (Sessions 9+13 are concurrent presentations at DIFFERENT LOCATIONS) Tracing Terrains Amir Husak, Jenny Lion, Amy Reid [Moderated by Leslie Tai] This session explores filmmaking through what Amir Husak refers to as “a cartographic and poetic act,” where terrains are traced through the histories, politics, and communities that shape them. Husak’s film-in-progress, The Eye of the Mountain, turns an intentionally slow and meditative gaze on Plješevica mountain in Northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina. Investigating how EU border policy is inscribed into the landscape, the project foregrounds stillness, atmosphere, and ecological attention as a form of counter-surveillance. Jenny Lion brings a durational practice to moving-image works set in militarized landscapes of the American West. Lion’s presentation will include excerpts from the work-in progress cinematic essay Dixie Valley which has been shot over twenty years in a remote Nevada valley emptied of its inhabitants by the U.S. Navy and remade as a staging ground for electronic warfare. Amy Reid’s documentary Grandmother’s Garden finds its cartography in the American quilt, tracing histories of enslavement, sharecropping, and women’s labor that are threaded through domestic life. Filmed with quilters across the country over several years, Reid asks what these objects reveal about the economic landscape we have inherited, and what they can teach us about our contemporary moments.
418 Project
2:00pm – 3:30pm
SESSION 13 (Sessions 9+13are concurrent presentations at DIFFERENT LOCATIONS) Balancing the Scales Jason Fox, Paige Sarlin, Sharon Daniel [Moderated by Pooja Rangan] Positioned at the nexus of journalistic and documentary discourses, this panel engages with national narratives of fairness and justice. Fox’s work-in-progress, a feature-length live cinema project, *A Social History of Fairness*, explores forms and frameworks for judgment animating various scenes of modern athletic spectacle across the 20th and 21st centuries, suggesting that there is much to learn here about our American purposes and desires; the collective satisfactions we think we seek. Sarlin’s presentation considers how ‘interview work’– the production, reproduction, editing, and representation of interviews –has been drawn into the politics of the present. Using the October 2024 ‘60 Minutes’ interview with Kamala Harris as a case study, Sarlin considers the status of editing in recent attempts to establish ethical norms for documentary practice. Daniel’s multi-part, multi-media project, Reasonable Doubt, examines the subjective nature of investigation and the ephemerality, instability and opacity of “evidence” – exploring the failure science and law, ethics and aesthetics, politics and representation, in efforts to resist structural racism, capitalism and corruption.
Barrios Unidos
3:30pm-4:00pm
Break / everyone moves to Barrios Unidos
4:00pm -5:30pm
SESSION 11 Mediations of Place EB Landesberg, Eli Boonin-Vail, Liz Miller [Moderated by Selmin Kara] Place is a starting point for these presenters to interrogate larger systems. EB Landesberg’s work-in-progress film Con Todo Combina examines Peru’s Inca Kola in order to trace entangled histories and “the legacies of colonialism as they are felt in everyday life.” Through juxtaposing various forms of production—capitalist, cultural, historical—Landesberg asks about the aesthetics of global capitalism and the construction of national imaginaries. Eli Boonin-Vail’s video essay Panorama of Western State Penitentiary considers an abandoned Pittsburgh prison repurposed as a film set in order to explore the relationship between prisons and media. Through presenting excerpts from the film alongside historical contexts, theoretical underpinnings, and an exploration of the artistic process, Boonin-Vail “proposes reflexive methods for researching images under carceral capitalism.” Liz Miller’s collaborative installation In the Wake of the Hochelaga Archipelago follows the water infrastructures shaping Tioh:tiáke/Montréal. Through a practice dedicated to “the poetics and politics of water, waste, consumption, collaboration and place-based documentary methods,” Miller interrogates how technological representations, such as aerial imagery, and documentary methods including non-linear forms, can create alternate imaginaries.
Barrios Unidos
5:30pm- 7:00pm
SESSION 12 Frictional Filmmaking Chico Pereira, Brett Kashmere, Solomon Turner, Jackson Kroopf [Moderated by Maya Scherr-Willson] How does history exert its pressure on the present moment? Pereira’s Fiction Enters Town (working title), emerged from the experience of making his previous film–where a reenactment of a miner’s strike from the 1980s activated collective memory, energized public discourse and inspired political action, all the while being dismissed by local authorities as “only fiction.” The new project probes the distinctions between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ even further by testing whether cinema can intervene where reality itself seems to stall. In a presentation on their collaboratively produced film, Hundred Yard Universe, Kashmere and Turner speculate about the historical imaginary of American football: how the ‘now’ is shaped by cultural forces and how the future might emerge through a collective processing of physical, emotional, and political traumas. Kroopf’s hybrid non-fiction film project The Art of Survival (or What in the Son-of-a-Bitchin-Fuck IS That?) features 97 year-old acting teacher, movement artist, and Holocaust survivor Maria Wida. Her simultaneous desire for representation and also her resistance against it, sets the stage for the film’s query of imaginary and historical selves.
Barrios Unidos
7:00pm – 10:00pm
SYMPOSIUM DINNER for symposium presenters and moderators only
SESSION 14 Physical Imprints Sophie Hamacher, Kym McDaniel, Lalu Ozban, Chisato (Chisa) Hughes [Moderated by Inês Pedrosa e Melo] The sensing, feeling, resilient and, also, vulnerable body is both a site of inquiry and the location from which these three presenters stage questions about ethics, care and the medicalized body. Hamacher’s multimedia installation, Piece of My Heart: A Laboratory asks how visual systems—like medical imaging and surveillance—shape our perception of care, vulnerability, and the body. Through an essayistic video address, ceramic speakers, and silkscreen prints, the work explores how political and environmental forces inscribe themselves on the human heart, a simultaneous metaphorical and tangible organ. In her in-progress film, Memory Recall, McDaniel uses animation, montage theory, and text-on-screen to explore trauma narratives.The film is both a method of processing embodied trauma as well as an invitation to question and resist medicalized and depersonalized approaches to the topic and experience of trauma. Lalu Ozban’s work-in-progress documents two collective porn-watching events—one in Istanbul in 2021, another in Santa Cruz in 2026—examining how communal viewing might function as a practice of transfeminist solidarity. Filming the second event with thermal cameras, Ozban prioritizes heat and presence over legible identity, enacting a “poetics of anonymity” and repurposing technologies often used for surveillance.
418 Project
11:30am – 1:00pm
SESSION 15 Common Threads Ernest Larsen, Sherry Millner, Alex Johnston, Jeanne C. Finley [Moderated by Anita Chang] Through practices of engaged collaboration, this panel imagines how filmmaking can enact care and relationship building processes. In a presentation on their in-progress experimental essay film, Uprooted, Larsen and Millner reflect upon the “complex, anti-authoritarian poetics, rooted in and uprooted from the multiply determining contexts” in which the film and the filmmakers themselves are embedded. Johnston explores the intimate nature of his in progress film, Cozy Cuddly, Armed and Dangerous: A Film with the George Jackson Brigade. His presentation considers the film’s acts of relational and political entanglement and ponders the ways we learn and listen and teach and love one another amidst historical periods of dislocation, isolation, and precarity. An extended meditation on the necessary and complex nature of hope– as an orientation of the heart– Finley will discuss her latest documentary A Radical Thread.
418 Project
1:00pm -1:30pm
Closing Remarks
418 Project
Ernie Larson and Gene FinleyDeeDee Halleck, Keynote #1Revereza, Keynote #2Hannah Jayanti, Irene Lusztig, and Irene GustafsonĐoan Hoàng Curtis, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, and Lynne SachsJason Fox
Presented in association with the Roxie Theater Admission: $15 General / $12 Cinematheque Members Event tickets here* SOLD OUT *
For nearly 50 years, the Bay Area filmmaker and curator Craig Baldwin has been an inspiring figure in contemporary media arts. His acerbic, densely-packed found footage films have traveled the globe, encouraging scores of nascent collage-essayists, culture jammers, and mockumentarians to action. […] Ever seeking to revise and hybridize existing modes and genres, and invent and name new ones, Baldwin’s filmmaking amalgamates cinephilic literacy and voraciousness, a sharp understanding of political and cultural history, and a sly critical polemics. His films are further energized by an encyclopedic knowledge of his own sprawling collection of cast-off educational films and B-grade features and a perverse proclivity for sourcing surreally sublime moments from industrial film effluvia. Informed by left politics, cult cinemas, agit-prop activism, structural film, the Situationists, the Yippies, Arte Povera, media archeology, compilation documentary, and other found footage forms, Baldwin’s praxis is bound by a dual commitment to materiality and aesthetics on the one hand, and disruptive action and fervent, antagonal rhetoric on the other; all the while articulating a contrarian (and at times utopian) sense of apocalyptic historiography. (Craig Baldwin: Avant Savant by Brett Kashmere and Steve Polta, published 2023 in Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live!)
Resonating with Craig Baldwin: Ephemera Unearthed!—on view at the SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive through May 29—Cinematheque, the Roxie and the SFAI Legacy Foundation welcome King of Found Footage Craig Baldwin to present a personal guided tour through fifty years of radical filmmaking, from the mid-70s/mid-Market San Francisco cinema-scape Stolen Movie (1976) to the recent 3-D short Communique for the Cube (2023) and points in between. More than just a movie show, this evening’s overview will present highlights of the maestro’s oeuvre replete with personal reminisces and war stories with Baldwin in conversation with filmmaker Lynne Sachs and Cinematheque’s Steve Polta.
SCREENING: Stolen Movie (1976, excerpt); Wild Gunman (1978) RocketKitKongoKit (1986, excerpt); Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991, excerpt); ¡O No Coronado! (1992) Sonic Outlaws (1995, excerpt); Spectres of the Spectrum (1999, excerpt); Mock Up On Mu (2008, excerpt); Bulletin (2015); Communique for the Cube (2023)
Baldwin’s radical fusion of form and content is on display throughout his body of work, and is unified by an unabashed embrace of marginality and cultural abjection, and by his faithful adherence to the twin tenets of “availablism” and “artifactuality.” Availablism, simply put, is the edict that the artist make do with what is at hand and not let the lack of resources—lack of “perfect” footage, lack of filmmaking equipment, or lack of funding— stand in the way of completing a project. Artifactuality, a related idea, rests in the belief that archival source materials are permeated with industrial and cultural histories which invariably contribute meaning. Part of Baldwinian filmmaking is to allow these meanings to resonate as part of the completed work. This latter concept also applies to Baldwin’s use, in his “collage-narrative” films, of underground and B-movie filmmaking methods which, in the spirit of Jack Smith, George and Mike Kuchar, Doris Wishman, and Ed Wood, revel in their poverty, placing their bargain basement budgets proudly on display, and thereby allow their “amateurish” appearances to manifest as inspirational art. (Craig Baldwin: Avant Savant by Brett Kashmere and Steve Polta, published 2023 in Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live!)
Gunvor Nelson Tribute II: Moons Pool Ted Mann Theater Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Los Angeles March 27, 2026
Presented by: Cherlyn Liu and K.J. Relth-Miller, Academy Museum; Adam Hyman, LA Film Forum: and Film Form, Sweden
Programmed and notes by Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu and Steve Anker
Video Introduction by Lynne Sachs and Steve Anker in person
A pioneer of personal cinema and feminist film, Gunvor Nelson produced innovative work combining painting, collage, and sound experimentation with humor, resistance, intimacy, and tactile sensation. Her early films frequently reflect the qualities, thoughts, and voices of women in the 1960s and 1970s; homes, daughters, and mothers are particularly important themes. Moving from painting to still photography and from analog film to digital media, her work delves deeper into the texture of life and the past, uncovering an intuitive yet delicate sensibility that retreats from the real world into another, imaginatively reconstructed one. During her time teaching in San Francisco, Nelson inspired countless experimental filmmakers and artists. After returning to Sweden, she continued to explore new audiovisual languages, leaving us with a rich legacy.
… The program trilogy is co-presented by LA Filmforum, Rotations, the Academy Museum, and UCLA Film & Television Archive on March 22, 27, and 28. The screenings begin with introductions by film scholar Steve Anker and a prerecorded video with filmmaker Lynne Sachs.
This program covers a range of Nelson’s works, from her debut film, the feminist classic Schmeerguntz (1966) co-directed with Dorothy Wiley, to the late abstract video art Snowdrift (aka Snowstorm, 2001), with several other essential and influential masterpieces created during the years in between.
All films directed by Gunvor Nelson unless otherwise noted.
Schmeerguntz DIRECTED BY: Gunvor Nelson, Dorothy Wiley 1966. 15 min. USA. Black-and-White. Sound. 16mm
My Name is Oona 1969. 10 min. USA. Black-and-White. English, Swedish. 16mm
Fog Pumas DIRECTED BY: Gunvor Nelson, Dorothy Wiley 1967. 25 min. USA. Black-and-White/Color. English. 16mm
Moons Pool 1973. 15 min. USA. Color. English. Digital
Snowdrift (aka Snowstorm) 2001. 9 min. USA. Color. Sound. Digital Total program runtime: approx. 74 min.
“The title of this imaginative essay film, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, is a basic principle of forensic science, coined by Edward Locard, a pioneer in the field. And any trace can link a person to a place, another person or an object. If that’s true, Sachs wonders, might every personal encounter not also leave a trace on your being?” – IDFA International Documentary Festival Amsterdam
Contact— tactile, evocative of one person touching another, physically and emotionally. Trace—a reckoning with the residue of that initial encounter, filtered by time and the imperfection of memory. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs has lived most of her life before the internet brought people together. She’s also saved every business card anyone has ever given her. Each card is a portal to her past, a reminder of how someone she actually met in person shifted her consciousness and left a residue of their being in hers: a German woman grappling with the history of her country; a therapist who erased all records of her own life; an artist faced with government censorship. Sachs selects seven cards from hundreds and throws herself into finding out how and why they’ve left an imprint. When she is able, she embraces clues and seeks out reunions. Replaying fleeting experiences in a kitchen, a park, an office, or a festival, she carries her cards to a forensic scientist’s lab to find out more about their DNA remains. In both real and imagined ways, her essay teases apart resonances almost forgotten but somehow felt, entwining emotional memory with geopolitical history through visual abstraction, music, and a poet’s sense of introspection.
Director’s Statement
For most of my adult life, I’ve collected business cards strangers have pulled from their wallets and placed in my hand. I sometimes remember the precise moment they were offered to me, other times they are a mystery. Now in this virtual era, being in the same space with others happens less and less. Filled with hundreds of names, numbers and addresses, the small plastic box that holds the cards takes on an uncanny resonance. Chance meetings become distinct and revealing punctums, each physical interaction an encounter that pricks.
I select seven cards from the hundreds and throw myself into finding out how and why they’ve left an imprint on my consciousness. In the spirit of a documentary practice, the facts leftover from a haptic engagement are an enticing beginning. I’m curious to find out if there are still fingerprints on the cards so I visit a forensic scientist who excavates their DNA residue. It takes months of detective work and travel, but eventually I reconnect face-to-face with some of these people who passed through
my life. A German woman born in the early 1940s grapples with the war she witnessed as a child. Our conversation opens up my own thinking, as an American Jewish woman, about the situation in Gaza today. I speak with an artist who faced censorship and persecution from Homeland Security. In listening to his candid and vulnerable account, I reckon with his psychic trauma.
When research does not provide access to who these people have become, I turn to cinematic inventions that can shape the fragments I have in my grasp in speculative and revealing ways. I can’t forget one woman therapist whose advice once changed my life, so I imagine what it would be like to visit her apartment, create a set and perform with an actor embodying her presence. The resistance of a Syrian chef to engage with my camera forces me to think about the inherent power imbalance between a director and her subject. To conjure a memory of this woman, I cook one of her tried and true recipes and film my own culinary incompetence in the kitchen.
Throughout the years of making this film, my young niece and nephew come to my home to discuss what an accumulation of fleeting encounters – like mine — might really mean in their lives. Like a chorus in a play, their youthful and insightful interpretations across generations put my investigations into perspective.
When I am able, I embrace clues and seek out reunions. But when there is no trace, I gamble with the imaginary histories of my unwitting protagonists. My film “Every Contact Leaves a Trace” confronts a lifetime of tactile encounters with small pieces of paper – distillations of identities passed from hand to hand.
Selected Press Quotes
“(In) a collage of words, sounds and images … Sachs lays bare onscreen her own uncertainty, foibles and vulnerabilities.” – Lauren Wissot, Filmmaker Magazine
“(This) essay … on memory and responsibility touches on moral ambiguity without resorting to sensationalism. Sachs reveals her strength: she captures beauty in the mundane, elevates the casual to poetry, and shows that even the most fleeting encounter leaves a lasting legacy.” – Martijn Smit, Cinema Magazine
“A marvelous, totally distinctive film, and just purely fascinating. So many documentary filmmakers are too literal– the image must exactly match what the narration or the interviewer is saying. (Sachs) expands our mind in a really interesting way where we have to think about the visual and what we’re hearing.” – Matt Carey, Deadline
“Lynne Sachs’ latest film is another wonderful addition to her long body of perceptive, funny and warm feminist-informed explorations of creativity, memory, seriality and politics.” – Herbert, Gambill, Mystery Catalogue
“Sachs extends the interpersonal scale of her inquiry into a more expansive awareness. Her on-screen interlocutors serve as mirrors into her own wandering mind, a gesture toward entanglement reminiscent of Chris Marker’s reflexive Sans Soleil (1983).” Delaney Holton, Screen Slate
“For those willing to look — and just as importantly, listen — Every Contact Leaves a Trace will, … leave an indelible mark, asking important, open-ended questions about life, art, and mortality.” – Mel Valentin, ScreenAnarchy
Join us for LAUNDRY CYCLES, a lively afternoon literary performance and conversation celebrating two new books that look inside neighborhood spaces where the work of laundry gets done.
Author Alvin Eng will read from OUR LAUNDRY, OUR TOWN: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond, a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of his upbringing in Flushing, Queens, in the 1970s. Eng will also present songs and monologues from his acoustic punk raconteur performance piece, HERE COMES JOHNNY YEN AGAIN (or How I Kicked Punk).
“Powerful, funny at times and consistently inspiring… Alvin Eng’s memoir looks back at the past to envision a better future.” David Henry Hwang, playwright
Co-authors Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs will read fromHAND BOOK: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry, a collection of writings and images from a performance and film set within New York City laundromats. Their book is a quasi-cinematic encounter, calling to mind the intimacy of touching other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body. Actor-collaborators Ching Valdez-Aran and Tony Torn will perform from the book’s playscript, a rumination on the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire. With clips from Olesker and Sachs’s hybrid documentary THE WASHING SOCIETY.
“A generously kaleidoscopic offering of perspectives, histories and bodies.” Christopher Harris, filmmaker
Alvin Eng is anative NYC author/playwright, songwriter, educator and performer. His plays and performances have been seen Off-Broadway, in Paris, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China.As a 2024-25 New York Public Library Fellow, he began researching a companion book to his memoir, Our Laundry, Our Town (Fordham University Press).
Lizzie Olesker makes theater reflecting on the politics and poetry of everyday experience, seen in NYC at New Georges, the Cherry Lane, and Public Theater. Her most recent plays include 5 Stages of Grief, Night Shift, and the collaborative Language of Dolls.
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet who investigates the connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Embracing archives, found images, letters, and journals, her work enacts a critical journey through reality and memory. Her feature film Every Contact Leaves a Trace will have its world premiere at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam in November.
Ching Valdes-Aran is aFilipino-American actress of stage, television, and film, who was trained as a dancer. Her many credits include an international tour of Geoff Sobel’s Home, Lav Diaz’s film From What is Before, and multiple appearances at La Mama, Mabou Mines, and New York Theater Workshop.
Tony Torn is an actor and director with more than 100 stage and screen credits including Ubu Sings Ubu, King Lear, Mud, and In the Solitude of Cotton Fields at Hudson River Park Pier 45. He recently directed the acclaimed play The Whole of Time at Torn Page and the Brick Theater, and is known for his extensive work with legendary experimental theater artists Richard Foreman and Reza Abdoh.
We will be having our first bookstore event for Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry at the wonderful UNNAMEABLE BOOKS in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn on Monday, September 8 at 7PM.
September 8th, 7 – 8:30 PM
Unnameable Books
Reading and performance with special guests Silvia Federici and Veraalba Santa
615 Vanderbilt Ave. Brooklyn
Please join us in the bookstore’s inimitable outdoor space for our reading. We’ve invited feminist historian Silvia Federici, who wrote our foreword, and dancer Veraalba Santa who collaborated with us on our performance Every Fold Matters and film The Washing Society to join us on this special evening. You may remember Vera dancing on top of the laundromat’s machines!
Hand Book: A Manual is a collection of writings and images derived from our film and performance project which looked at the neighborhood laundromat as a microcosm of service work within our city. With a focus on the people who are paid to wash and fold, Hand Book: A Manual explores the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire.
Hand Book at Unnameable Books – Run of Show
Monday, Sept. 1, 2025
Notes: Remember adapters Folding table Costumes? Colors Vera’s props, costumes, gloves Lint books Ask Mark to record.
Lizzie and Lynne read from intro. Vera is with us.
P. 29 LS – “Lint” Poem Welcome – LO, LS, Veraalba LO – overall project, each of us intros ourselves LS – Veraalba over 10 years LO – timing, plan, performance, intro Silvia Federici
Vera sits.
P.19 LO “This is not a play….performance.” LS “Making a mark….Manual.” LO “We are a playwright… working artists. LS “We couldn’t know ….urban life.”
P 20 LO “We discovered…..re-enacting.” LS “Our focus …. obvious outsiders.”
P 21 LO “All of the ….Brooklyn.”
Vera starts to transform while Lizzie and Lynne speak. Set up table.
LS “We invited actors…an Imagined laundromat.” LO “Through an open …..textual construction.”
P. 24 LS “Throughout our process…body.”
Vera’s gestures.
LO “You are the audience…another.” LS “Holding….experience.”
P. 25 List of laundromats – Lynne, Lizzie and Veraalba
P. 37 – Veraalba LO “Score for a folding dance.” LS by Veraalba Santa “Stand still … quickly.”
Vera picks up EVERY FOLD MATTERS sign and waves in air. Vera folding dance, starting with less intensity. No music.
Title page of script LO “Every Fold Matters LS a playscript”
P. 1 – 2 (Script) LS “As the audience enters ….overlapping.” LO as Ching: “I don’t want to talk about it.” Vera “Nothing/sorry.” LO “My boss says no.”
P. 3-4 (Script) LO “I think about other things when I’m doing it.” Vera “I meet different people…every customer.”
P. 13 (Script) Vera’s monologue “Sometimes the boss comes… from me.”
P. 12 (Script) LO: I don’t want to talk about it. Vera: Nothing to say (in Spanish)
LO: The boss says no. Return of Vera’s folding dance. With music.
Vera removes layers of clothing that would slowly be peeling away, throughout the reading, as she weaves through with movement. The last layer is removed revealing the worker’s smock. She dances and then removes the smock, revealing one more shirt with writing that’s removed revealing the black actor’s shirt.
P. 38 (Script) Last Paragraph of Score for a Folding Dance: “The body spins… back to folding.”
LO & LS at computer with music, “Watery Variation”.
IMAGE 01 handbook cover IMAGE 02 Introduction page IMAGE 03 Ching in Every Fold Matters performance IMAGE 04 Sky and sign IMAGE 05 In Motion – Two Women Folding in Brooklyn Laundromat IMAGE 06 Ching and Vera transform 1 IMAGE 07 Ching and Vera transform2 IMAGE 08 Ching and Vera transform 3 IMAGE 09a Lulabelle 1 IMAGE 09b Lulabelle 2 IMAGE 09c lint page IMAGE 09d Hand Book pages outdoor performance and list of shows IMAGE 09e Ching in Every Fold Matters performance pp 12 and 13
P. 179 “Epilogue” LO “Things change…launderette..” LS “Now there is an app….it’s guaranteed.” LO “With the sunrise….folded.”
Introduce Silvia Federici and how we met… helping with her archive… George Caffentzis
P. 15 Foreword “The washing of clothes….organization.”
P. 16 “Does Art Embody…..struggle.”
Silvia will talk about: Andrea’s essay “Service not Servitude” p. 136 Here interview – p; 139 and 143
Please join us for a performative book event with authors Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker and actor/writer Jasmine Holloway celebrating the publication of Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry. Just published by punctum books, an independent queer- and scholar-led, community-formed publisher, Hand Book is a collection of writings and images that came out of a hybrid documentary performance and film made by Sachs and Olesker that was set within a neighborhood laundromat, a microcosm of service work within our city. With a focus on the people who wash and fold “drop-off” loads, Hand Book explores the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire. This theatrical reading will include short essayistic pieces, a dramatic monologue and poetic dialogue distilled from real conversations with laundromat workers, against a backdrop of projected photographic images. The work will call to mind the intimacy of laundering other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body.
Jasmine Holloway is an actor, singer, and writer who works to excavate the bones of a character before she can tell their story, honoring the life and times of the people she is portraying in a performance. Her New York theater credits include Generations atSoho Rep, and The Wiz, In The Heights, and Tambourines To Glory at Harlem Repertory Theatre.
Le Petit Versailles is a vibrant community garden, performance space, music venue and public forum for workshops, screenings and exhibitions. It is Allied’s primary program and a focal point for participants enhancing the public spaces of our neighborhood, Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The garden has an active performance and exhibit schedule during the summer months. LPV is an NYC Parks GreenThumb garden. Le Petit Versailles occupies a 20’ by 60’ lot that was formerly the site of an auto body “chop shop”. In 1996, Peter Cramer and Jack Waters began developing the site into a garden. With years of work they created a lush open space dominated by a stage that fulfills their comittment to providing a place for performers, filmmakers, and visual artists to show their work. Since its founding, Le Petit Versailles has been home to countless art exhibitions, performances, readings, film screenings, and more.
In the Abortion Clinic Film Collective series, we hear from medical directors and staff, mothers and daughters, criminal defense attorneys and advocates, about how their personal and professional lives have been affected post-Dobbs. Each portal provides a window into the broad and life-threatening ramifications of that Supreme Court decision and its devastating legacy for the health and well-being of our country and people.
“The ACFC was born out of rage. After the overturn of Roe V Wade and the end to a woman’s federal right to abortion, I began reaching out to filmmakers from across the country. I asked if they would contribute to a project looking at the impact from different states’ perspectives, especially in those areas most affected. The Abortion Clinic Film Collective was born. In haste and with limited access to resources, seven films were created focusing on states from Arizona to Tennessee, South Dakota to Texas, and beyond. I directed one of the films, As Long as We Can, that chronicles the chaos Arizona was thrown into when abortion legality was thrown back to states.
We hope that each portal provides a window into the broad and life-threatening ramifications of significantly reducing our country’s access to abortion and the devastating legacy such confusion brings to the health of our country. It has been a profound and meaningful collaboration that continues to grow.” Kristy Guevara-Flanagan February, 2025
A Mile and a Half – Raymond Rea 2024, 5 minutes The border between North Dakota and Minnesota is physically only a narrow river but legislatively a canyon. In the sister city straddling that border a move of a mile and a half saved lives.
Raymond Rea is a filmmaker and writer. His film work has screened widely including Light Field, Engauge, Mimesis, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival (Frameline), BFI, Translations, Lost & Found, Outfest, Los Angeles, Inside Out, Mix Mexico, Mix NYC, New Fest, Out on Screen, Reeling, Hamburg LGBT Film Festival, Melbourne GLBT Film Festival, Union Docs, ATA, Flex Fest, The Nightingale, and Aurora Picture Show, as well as other national and international spaces. His interactive work screened at the Plains Art Museum as part of the ND Human Rights Arts Festival. Ray’s writing has been produced at EXIT Stage Left, EXIT Mainstage in San Francisco and at Theatre B in Minnesota. Ray’s work often challenges assumptions, hints at theatricality, and uses a raw LoFi aesthetic to address complexities.
Contractions – Lynne Sachs 2024, 12 minutes In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, we listen to an OB-GYN who can no longer perform abortions and a “Jane” who drives patients across state lines while a group of activists perform outside a women’s healthcare clinic.
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker, poet, and teacher living in Brooklyn, New York, and originally from Memphis. Over the last three decades, she has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of documentary, performance, and collage. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences, often from a personal, self-reflexive point of view. With each project, Sachs investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Sachs’ early works on celluloid offer a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing — a commitment which has grounded her vision ever since. In essay films such as “The House of Science: a museum of False Facts” (1991), “A Biography of Lilith” (1997), and “Tip of My Tongue” (2017), she specifically investigates issues around women’s bodies, politics, and control. Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, Sundance, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives of Sachs’ work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, Cork, and China Women’s Film Festival.www.lynnesachs.com
As Long as We Can – Kristy Guevara-Flanagan 2024, 11.5 minutes AS LONG AS WE CAN captures a day-in-the-life of an Arizona reproductive health clinic trying to navigate the turbulent aftermath of the 2022 Dobbs decision
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan / Project Creator and Director has been making documentary and experimental films about gender, the Latinx community, and representation for nearly two decades. Her first feature-length film, Going on 13 (2009, co-directed with Dawn Valadez), covers four years in the lives of four adolescent girls and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines (2013), traces the evolution and legacy of the comic book hero Wonder Woman as a way to reflect on society’s anxieties about women’s liberation. What Happened to Her (2016) explores our cultural obsession with images of the dead woman on screen. Guevara-Flanagan has won many accolades for her newest short film, Águilas (2021, co-directed with Maite Zubiaurre), about an all-volunteer organization that searches for migrants who go missing as they cross the border between Mexico and the United States. Águilas won Best Short Documentary at SXSW and was shortlisted for the Academy Awards. Her Sundance-supported feature documentary, Body Parts (2022), looks at the making of sex scenes in Hollywood.
Kristy had an abortion while in college that required multiple visits due to complications and is grateful for this abortion which allowed her to graduate from college.www.chuparosafilms.com
Retracing Our Steps – Kelly Gallagher 2024, 8 minutes A woman reflects back on her time spent assisting abortion seekers when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land.
Kelly Gallagher / Director is a filmmaker, animator, and Associate Professor of Film at Syracuse University. Her creative work is rooted in themes of resistance, struggle, political histories, and personal explorations. Her award-winning films and commissioned animations have screened internationally at venues including: the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, the Smithsonian Institution, and Anthology Film Archives. Her most recent animations have also screened on Netflix and PBS. She’s presented solo programs of her work at institutions including: SFMOMA, Close-Up Cinema London, SF Cinematheque, and Wexner Center for the Arts. Kelly enthusiastically organizes and facilitates fun and inclusive film workshops, camps, and masterclasses for communities and groups of all ages, from Kentucky to California, from New York to Iowa and beyond.purpleriot.com
We Are About to Commit a Felony – Sasha Waters 2024, 4 minutes Arson at a Planned Parenthood and the closing of a community clinic endanger the lives of women in Knoxville, TN. A teaching doctor reflects on what the post-Dobbs world means for her patients and her students, who are the next generation of reproductive care workers.
Sasha Waters, Director / Knoxville, TN is a moving image artist and Professor of Film at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 1998, Sasha has produced and directed 18 documentary and experimental films, 14 of which originate in 16mm. Her most recent feature documentary, Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable, won a Special Jury Prize for “Best Feminist Reconsideration of a Male Artist” at the SXSW Film Festival. Following its theatrical run, the film aired on the PBS series American Masters. Sasha’s past documentary, experimental and essay films have screened at the Telluride Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kassel Dokfest, IMAGES in Toronto, Microscope Gallery, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, the Tribeca, Ann Arbor, Woodstock, Chicago Underground and Big Sky Documentary Film Festivals among other international venues.
Sasha had an abortion while in college, became a member of the Ann Arbor Committee to Defend Abortion Rights, and participated in many clinic defense actions during the “abortion wars” of the late 1980s. www.pieshake.com
Hemorrhage – Ruth Hayes 2024, 4 minutes Overturning Roe v. Wade motivated me to create Hemorrhage. Seeking an outlet for my anger, I animated a sequence of crayon and watercolor rubbings of a coat hanger. Through iterative processes of filming and repeated rubbings, and incorporating images and text appropriated from the Sunday print edition of The New York Times, I further developed the sequence. With Peter Randlette’s score featuring voices sampled from the Supreme Court arguments in Dobbs, my initial formal experiments evolved into an expression of outrage against increasingly repressive forces eviscerating women’s rights and endangering our health and well-being.
Ruth Hayes animates in film, video and pre-cinema devices, experimenting with form and content while exploring visual phenomena, engaging in political critique, and mining personal experience. Ruth’s recent projects involve 16mm cameraless processes, however the U.S. Supreme Court decision eviscerating American women’s rights to bodily autonomy compelled her to return to animating on paper. For Hemorrhage, she integrated rubbings, appropriated imagery and voices sampled from arguments before the Supreme Court. Ruth learned to animate at Harvard, earned her MFA in Experimental Animation from California Institute of the Arts, and taught animation in the interdisciplinary curriculum of The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington for 25 years, retiring with emerita status in 2021.www.randommotion.com
Catch Us On The Way Down – Cali M. Banks 2025, 7 minutes A poetic and reflexive documentary approach to reproductive healthcare access in North Carolina, specifically on Indigenous reservations.
Cali M. Banks (Munsee Lenape/Scottish) is a lens-based artist based in Syracuse, NY. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado Boulder, and a BA in Art and Technology and Global Health Studies from Allegheny College. Cali is the Communications Coordinator for Light Work, and is also an Adjunct Professor of Photography, Video Art and Filmmaking for Syracuse University, Pratt Munson, and Indiana University campuses. Cali is also a 2024 En Foco Photography Fellow, and recently received the VIsionary Project Award from Film Photo Award. Her artistic practice reclaims identity through auto-ethnographic, experimental photography and filmmaking. Her work explores personal and collective histories, relational intimacies, and the expansion of narrow, flattened definitions of indigenous art. In recent times, she has exhibited work during Art Basel Miami and Every Woman Biennial London, and other notable venues such as Smack Mellon, RedLine Contemporary Art Center, the Everson Museum of Art, Atlanta Film Festival, and Anthology Film Archives. Her work has also been published on Lomography, Lenscratch, and Rolling Stone France. calimariebanks.com
Eggshells – Luiza Parvu 2025, 11:40 minutes A transcontinental daughter-mother conversation about the life of Romanian women under dictatorship and patriarchy is catalyzed by sea changes in the Arizona abortion law, Orthodox Easter egg painting, and the migrant experience. Through sisterhood and solidarity, the film seeks to create common ground and heal intergenerational trauma.
Luiza Parvu is a filmmaker and visual artist, an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University’s Poitier Film School, a Senior Programmer at the Mimesis Documentary Festival in Boulder and an affiliate of the Melikian Center at ASU. A member of the European Film Academy, she has directed and edited feature and short films that have screened at festivals worldwide, including Sundance, BFI London, Karlovy Vary and Tribeca. Her work explores identity, memory, and transformation, often in conversation with other artists, scientists or collectives. From human migration and environmental transformation to intergenerational reverberations of oppression, in projects produced across North America, Europe and Eurasia, she seeks often-invisible connections between the past and present to imagine possibilities for a better future. She is an alumna of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and a co-founder of Root Films, a Bucharest-based production company that sustains her research, creation, and community-building. rootfilms.org
Freedom From (Working Title) – Lori Felker Work in Progress Chicago, IL, 2024 – After many delays, a noise ordinance was passed to protect the work going on at a family planning clinic in the middle of the city. Since Dobbs v. Jackson, Chicago doctors, patients, and escorts had been struggling against increasing protests using amplified sounds, sometimes made by hundreds of protestors,which shook the walls and windows and drowned out important communications inside the building. This is the story “Freedom of Speech” vs Freedom from Harassment.
Lori Felker is a filmmaker, teacher, programmer, and performer. Her films study the ineloquent, frustrating, and chaotic qualities of human interaction and have explored empathy, discontinuity, grief, and multiple dimensions. She eschews any particular style or genre in favor of letting content and concerns guide form. She loves every facet of filmmaking and has worked as a cinematographer, editor, and/or actor for various artists and directors and has programmed for the likes of the Chicago Underground Film Festival and Slamdance and was a projectionist at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Her award-winning short films and one feature documentary have screen internationally, and she is the recipient of various grants/fellowships including a Fulbright (Berlin), a Wexner Center Residency and is a 2025 Creative Capital Awardee. She lives in Chicago and is an Assistant Professor at DePaul University. Safe and legal access to health services and reproductive care in all states is really important to her. Her film Spontaneous (2020) about her experience having a miscarriage while out of state is available on The Criterion Channel. www.felkercommalori.com
