“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, CinemaMagazine
“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
“Some filmmakers are known for their documentary works. Others for their narrative films. Still others—the better filmmakers (for me), generally—do not fit comfortably into either category. Or any category whatsoever. Poet / artist / filmmaker Lynne Sachs is one of the latter…. What is evident—from not just this film but all of (her) work—is that (she’s) very interested in making the seams of filmmaking fairly apparent in Every Contact Leaves a Trace … Clearly, within the structure, (she) introduces a whole array of possibilities.” – Jonathan Marlow, Hammer to Nail
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
Urban Video Project (UVP), a program of Light Work in partnership with the Everson Museum of Art and Onondaga County, is an outdoor architectural projection venue dedicated to the public presentation of film, video and moving image arts. UVP is one of few projects in the United States dedicated to ongoing public projections and adds a new chapter to Central New York’s legacy as one of the birthplaces of video art using cutting-edge technology to bring art of the highest caliber to Syracuse, New York.
Light Work UVP centers on a large-scale architectural projection onto the famous Everson Museum building designed by I.M. Pei. The projection can be viewed from the adjacent plaza. The Everson Museum is located in downtown Syracuse at 401 Harrison Street at the corner of Harrison and South State Streets, across from the War Memorial and OnCenter.
The Urban Video Project projection runs from dusk to 11pm, Thursday through Saturday during exhibition dates.
This Side of Salina
HD video and stereo sound Duration: 12 min 2024
Four Black women from the city of Syracuse, New York, reflect on sexuality, youthful regret, emotional vulnerability, raising a daughter, and working in reproductive health services. In a series of their own choreographed vignettes, each woman thoughtfully engages with the neighborhoods she’s known all of her life. Two performers flip through classic 1960s titles by Black authors in a bookstore. Others sit in a hat store finding time to pour into each other, as mentors and confidantes. These are businesses that are owned by local Black women, and they know it. In Brady Market, a community grocery, they playfully shop and chat with ease and confidence. They dance to their own rhythms in the outdoor plaza of the Everson Museum of Art. Together they look down at the city from its highest point and ponder how to battle the inequities of the place that they call home.
Featuring: J’Viona Baker, Vernahia Davis, Ja’Rhea Dixon, Angela Stroman Director: Lynne Sachs Cinematographers: Anneka Herre, Lynne Sachs, Zelikha Zohra Shoja, Monae Kyhara Sims Editor: G. Anthony Svatek Production support: Minnie S. McMillian, Devon Narine Singh, Hilary Warner Additional recording: Saptarshi Lahiri Sound Design: Kevin T. Allen
In consultation with Anneka Herre, Program Director of Light Work | Urban Video Project, Tiffany Lloyd, Director of Women’s Health and Empowerment, Allyn Foundation Campaign Manager, Layla’s Got You
Light Work’s Urban Video Project is pleased to present the exhibition of This Side of Salina exploring reproductive justice from October 10 – December 21 at the architectural projection venue on the Everson Museum facade in downtown Syracuse.
Four Black women from the city of Syracuse, New York, reflect on sexuality, youthful regret, emotional vulnerability, raising a daughter, and working in reproductive health services. In a series of their own choreographed vignettes, each woman thoughtfully engages with the neighborhoods she’s known all of her life. Two performers flip through classic 1960s titles by Black authors in a bookstore. Others sit in a hat store finding time to pour into each other, as mentors and confidantes. These are businesses that are owned by local Black women, and they know it. In Brady Market, a community grocery, they playfully shop and chat with ease and confidence. They dance to their own rhythms in the outdoor plaza of the Everson Museum of Art. Together they look down at the city from its highest point and ponder how to battle the inequities of the place that they call home.
Commissioned as a large-scale architectural projection by Light Work as part of the UVP Residential Media Commission program, supported by New York State Council for the Arts. The installation runs from October 10 – December 21, 2024.
CREDITS
Featuring: J’Viona Baker, Vernahia Davis, Ja’Rhea Dixon, Angela Stroman Director: Lynne Sachs Cinematographers: Anneka Herre, Lynne Sachs, Zelikha Zohra Shoja, Monae Kyhara Sims Editor: G. Anthony Svatek Production support: Minnie S. McMillian, Devon Narine Singh, Hilary Warner Additional recording: Saptarshi Lahiri Sound Design: Kevin T. Allen
In consultation with Anneka Herre, Program Director of Light Work | Urban Video Project, Tiffany Lloyd, Director of Women’s Health and Empowerment, Allyn Foundation Campaign Manager, Layla’s Got You
Light Work’s Urban Video Project is pleased to present the exhibition of This Side of Salina exploring reproductive justice from October 10 – December 21 at the architectural projection venue on the Everson Museum facade in downtown Syracuse.
In the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade, “Contractions” takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician and a reproductive rights activist who movingly lay out these vital issues. We watch 14 women and their male allies who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a state where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they can only “speak” with the full force of their collective presence.
On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion in the United States. Twenty-one states now ban abortion outright or earlier in pregnancy than the standard set by Roe v. Wade, which governed reproductive rights for half a century. The woman’s health care facility in this film no longer offers abortions.
Intimate confessions, paired with experimental choreography outside a woman’s clinic in Memphis, offer a glimpse into post Roe v. Wade America.
“A couple of years after the annulment of the ruling known as Roe v. Wade, which, since 1973, guaranteed the right to abortion in the United States, weeds are growing on the walls of an empty clinic in Memphis, Tennessee. In this abandoned setting, a group of women, some holding hands with their companions, seem to recreate a kind of off-screen abortion: the entrance and exit of the clinic. We do not see their faces, but the sound guides us: in the voices of two women we hear the testimonies of those who once exercised a right, now lost. “ – Karina Solórzano, Documenta Madrid
“The cast’s gestures enact trauma, nerves, and capriciousness in doing something once legally acceptable that is now the opposite. They carry a history where their reproduction rights are currently in paralysis.” – Dispatches from True/False, The Brooklyn Rail, Edward Frumkin
“Fourteen women and their male allies, their backs to the camera, stand in full force outside a Memphis health clinic that can no longer provide abortion services following the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. On the soundtrack, an expert obstetrician-gynecologist and an anonymous activist bear witness to the fearsome uncertainties and dangers that lie ahead.” – Josh Siegel, Curator of MoMA
“Contractions is a much-needed film in the current political climate, as the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. Offering an intimate look at abortion rights, this experimental short exposes the poignant testimonies of people directly connected to a clinic in Memphis, Tennessee. As we observe the slow march of women and their allies to the clinic, the voices of an obstetrician and a reproductive rights activist echo the disastrous consequences of ending women’s right to a safe, legal abortion in the United States. In the film, it’s the strength of community that shines through, as these people can no longer make decisions for their own bodies.” – Festival Filministes
Sachs records the participants in her film Contractions as they vocalize their reactions to the reduction of women’s bodily autonomy in the US.
Artist Statement
Maybe everyone has this feeling in some way. When something terrible happens in the world, we ask ourselves “What can I do?” More often than not, I feel hopeless and powerless and go on with my life. But sometimes, the despair so haunts me that I realize that I must respond in some way. I need my artistic practice to articulate how I am feeling, not so much as an act of persuasion but rather a witnessing. In the summer of 2023, I went back to my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee when abortion clinics across the country were closing their doors after the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, the 1973 landmark Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion nationwide. I worked with 14 activists – mostly women but also a few male allies – to perform with their backs to the camera in a unified expression of anger and sadness. We had also had the same number of volunteer marshals there with us — inside cars and in nearby buildings — to look out for us during the entire film production. These days, gathering together with kindred spirits to make a movie about abortion rights puts everyone involved in a vulnerable position. It was a relief to have a form of security there to support us. I interviewed two women for the film’s soundtrack: Dr. Kimberly Looney, an obstetrician gynecologist who had years of experience performing abortions prior to the changes in the local laws and a leader in the African-American family planning movement; and, an anonymous driver who is part of an underground reproductive justice community that takes pregnant women who want abortions across state lines.
Together, they bear witness to a troubled time in which women are losing their ability to control what happens to their own bodies. In addition, I recorded with our performers. Each participant sang, hummed, or simply verbally articulated their anguish over the situation they watch each and every day in the state of Tennessee and elsewhere around the country. Mixed in unison, their voices form an aural chorus, that can be heard in the film. Making Contractions has already given me the chance to spend time with others in the reproductive justice movement. Through the film, I have engaged with spokespeople in the medical field, underground activists with a commitment to acts of nonviolent civil-disobedience, and quiet powerfully committed volunteers. The experience of making this film has changed me. I am only beginning to discover how the film and our collective efforts will be experienced by audiences. I will smile if these moments of witnessing – whether in the theater or the living room — bring about introspection and recalibration.
Credits
Director Lynne Sachs
Voices Dr. Kimberly Looney Jane
Performers SaBrenna Boggan Chase Colling Shana J. Crispin Kimberly Hooper-Taylor Coe Lapossy A. Lloyd Audrey May Vanessa Mejia Natalie Richmond Krista Scott Neal Trotter J. Wright Nubia Yasin
Co-producers Emily Berisso Laura Goodman Lynne Sachs
Cinematographer Sean Hanley
Editor Anthony Svatek with assistance from Tiff Rekem
Studio recording Doug Easley
Sound mix Kevin T. Allen
Festivals and Selected Screenings:
True/False Film Fest, United States (2024) Cosmic Rays Film Festival, United States (2024) Ann Arbor Film Festival, United States (2024) Onion City Experimental Film Festival, United States (2024) Prismatic Ground Film Festival, United States (2024) Moviate Underground Film Festival, United States (2024) Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, United States (2024) DocumentaMadrid International Film Festival, Spain (2024) VIENNA SHORTS International Shorts Film Festival, Austria (2024) PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art | “Sentient Disobedients” Program, Canada (2024) DC/DOX Film Festival, United States (2024) Olhar de Cinema Festival Internacional de Curitiba, Brazil (2024) Other Cinema, San Francisco (2024) AGX Boston Film Collective, Films from the Abortion Clinic Film Collective, Boston (2024) Women Make Waves Film Festival, Taipei, Taiwan (2024) Mimesis Documentary Festival, Boulder, Colorado (2024) Camden International Film Festival, (2024) Chicago Underground Film Festival, (2024) Dialogues Documentary Festival, Milwaukee, WS (2024)
The Jitters 3 min. 16 mm, black and white, silent by Lynne Sachs
I wanted to create a film with my Bolex 16mm camera that reflects who I am at this moment in my life. I bought my camera in 1987, used. It has lived with me for four decades, and it has witnessed pretty much every aspect of my existence. I decided to shoot my roll of black and white film one frame at a time. With 24 frames in a second, this gave me the chance to work more expansively with the Bolex, pushing its capabilities as far as they might go. “The Jitters” includes three very specific performative elements. My partner Mark Street and I wiggle around, watching and celebrating who we are independently and together. I also include my three pet frogs because I like the way that they wiggle in unison and on their own. These small reptiles have been part of our family’s life for 19 years, they needed to be memorialized on film. Lastly, I bring two bonsai trees into the tableaux, because they too should be applauded, for their persistence and longevity. Strangely enough, they wiggle too, that’s part of the magic of film.
Screenings: Century of 16mm Celebration, Indiana University Film Archive; Petropresents at Petrohradská, Prague (2023); DCTV, New York City (2023); Monira Foundation In Collaboration with Film Diary NYC (2024); Ambulante Festival de Ciné Documental, Mexico (2024)
She Carries the Holiday in Her Eyes (2023) 4 min., silent
Performers: Barbara Friedman and Laetitia Mikles
A picture of parallels and swirls, two women touch with eyes closed, use cameras in motion, discover a holiday of optics. “I have seen an individual, whose manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, but were original and commanding, and held out protection and prosperity; one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his eye.” – from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Manners”
