Artistic Differences: BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND
This program is part of Artistic Differences with Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen
ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES is back with Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen this April to present BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND.
Co-curator Cíntia Gil has assembled a mini-retrospective at this year’s festival on one of our longtime collaborators, the beloved and brilliant Lynne Sachs. We’re delighted to focus on one of these three programs for an upcoming Study Group on April 15th from noon-2:30PM Est.
The title of this retrospective and program quotes Lynne Sachs in her 1991 film The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts. It speaks of a zone of experimentation that crosses Sachs’ work and grounds filmmaking as a practice of dislocating words, gestures and modes of being into open ontologies. What can be a woman, a word, a color, a shade, a line, a rule or an object? The negotiation between the body of the body and the body of the mind is another way of saying that things exist both as affections and as processes of meaning, and that filmmaking is the art of not choosing sides in that equation. That is why Sachs’ work is inseparable from the events of life, while being resolutely non-biographical. It is a circular, dynamic practice of translation and reconnection of what appears to be separated.
There are many ways of approaching Lynne Sachs’ full body of work, and many different programmes would have been possible for this retrospective. Films resonate among each other. Like threads, themes link different times. Repetition and transformation are a constant obsession in the way images, places, people and ideas are revisited. While looking for an angle for this programme, we tried to look at some of the lines that seem to us the most constant, even if sometimes subterraneous, throughout the films. The three programmes are not systematically bounding themes and building typologies. They are three different doors to the same arena where body (and the ‘in-between’ bodies) is the main ‘topos’: translation, collaboration, and inseparability of the affective and the political. Yet, none of these terms seems to truly speak of what’s at stake here.
Lynne Sachs knows about the impotency problem of words and concepts, about the difference between the synchronicity of life and the linearity of discourse. She also knows that words can be both symptoms and demiurgic actors. That is maybe why she wrote poems, and that is why this programme was inspired by her book, “Year By Year Poems”.
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FILM PROGRAM
The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts by Lynne Sachs 30 min | 16mm | Color | 1991 Combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural collage, the film explores the representation of women and the construction of the feminine otherness. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming of age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.
Drawn and Quartered by Lynne Sachs 4 min | 16mm | Color | Silent | 1986 Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium. A declaration of desire of and through cinema.
Maya at 24 by Lynne Sachs 4 min | 16mm to Digital Transfer | B&W | 2021 “My daughterʼs name is Maya. Iʼve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.” Lynne filmed Maya at ages 6, 16 and 24, running around her, in a circle – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward.
A Biography of Lilith by Lynne Sachs 35 min | 16mm | Color | 1997 Off-beat narrative, collage and memoir, updating the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman. Lilith’s betrayal by Adam in Eden and subsequent vow of revenge is recast as a modern tale. Interweaving mystical texts from Jewish folklore with interviews, music and poetry, Sachs reclaims this cabalistic parable to frame her own role as a mother.
STUDY GROUP — ONLINE – APR 15
We’re thrilled to come together for a Study Group Session structured around these incredible films! Like a kind of grassroots book club, but for documentary art, it’s all about sparking discussion and deeper investigation, through reading, listening and responding in small, self-organized groups that together form a larger collective experience.
You will get access to the film program through our Membership Hub a few days in advance. Sign up now and stay tuned in your inbox for further instructions!
PUBLIC DIALOGUE – AT THE FESTIVAL – APR 30 – MAY 1
If you’re interested in hearing from the filmmakers & artists themselves as well as the ideas generated in collaboration with our Study Group be sure to catch our regular public dialogues for each film program on the UNDO Member’s Hub. These conversations sample from the festival dialogues, the study group and an in-depth interview hosted by Artistic Differences with the featured artists. Sign Up to receive a note when it’s released.
144 Moody StreetBuilding 18Waltham, MA, United States (map)
A night of short films and discussion with legendary filmmaker Lynne Sachs featuring some of her works on/about/alongside women be they daughters, mentors, idols or friends.
Lynne Sachs will attend in person for a post-screening discussion.
FILM PROGRAM – Screening order subject to change
Photograph of Wind| 4 min | 16mm | b&w and color | silent | 2001 My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. Screened in 16mm.
Noa, Noa | 8 min | b&w and color | sound | 2006 by Lynne Sachs with Noa Street-Sachs Over the course of three years, Sachs collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of Brooklyn with camera and costumes in hand. Noa’s grand finale is her own rendition of the bluegrass classic “Crawdad Song”.
Same Stream Twice | 4 min | 16mm | b & w and color | silent | 2012 by Lynne Sachs with Maya Street-Sachs My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. Eleven years later, I pull out my 16mm Bolex camera once again and she allows me to film her – different but somehow the same.
“And Then We Marched” | 3 min |S8mm | sound | 2017 Lynne shoots Super 8mm film of the Jan. 21 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this recent footage with archival material of early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote, 1960s antiwar activists and 1970s advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment. Lynne then talks about the experience of marching with her seven-year old neighbor who offers disarmingly insightful observations on the meaning of their shared actions.
Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor | 8 min | Super 8mm and 16mm film transferred to digital | 2018 Three renowned women artists discuss their passion for filmmaking. From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.
A Year in Notes and Numbers | 4 min | video | silent | 2018 A year’s worth of to-do lists confronts the unavoidable numbers that are part and parcel of an annual visit to the doctor. The quotidian and the corporeal mingle and mix. Family commitments, errands and artistic effusions trade places with the daunting reality of sugar, cholesterol, and bone.
A Month of Single Frames| 4 min | color | sound | 2019 In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in Cape Cod. While there, she shot 16mm film, recorded sounds and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack materials to Lynne and invited her to make a film. “While editing the film, the words on the screen came to me in a dream. I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her and the film. My text is a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces at once.”
Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home| 3 min | 16mm | b&w | sound | 2020 In July 1971, avant-garde writer and language poet Bernadette Mayer produced Memory, a multimedia project in which she shot one roll of 35mm film each day and kept a daily journal. In honor of the project’s compilation and release as a book, Lynne Sachs embarks on a study of the memory and language of place. Journeying to Mayer’s childhood home in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens, Sachs pays homage to Mayer in a collage of architecture, light, and rhythm.
Maya at 24| 4 min | 16mm | b&w | sound | 2021 with editing and animation by Rebecca Shapass music by Kevin T. Allen Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle – clockwise – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.
Total Running Time: 42 min.
Doors open at 6:30PM – Show at 7:00PM Seating is first-come, first served. Admission is free, however a $5-10 suggested donation is encouraged. Donations will be split between the guest artist and AgX. Donations help support future film programming at AgX.
Lynne Sachs’ FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (US/Documentary) Review by Kat Sachs Monday, 6pm
In Horace’s Odes, one among many texts where this sentiment endures, the Roman poet wrote, “For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer.” It’s hardly an esoteric dictum, but nevertheless it’s duly reflected in experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ wholehearted documentary portrait of her father, Ira Sachs Sr. Something of a longstanding work-in-progress, the film draws from decades of footage shot by Sachs, her father, and her filmmaker brother, Ira Sachs Jr. (whose own 2005 film FORTY SHADES OF BLUE was inspired by the same so-called “Hugh Hefner of Park City”), plus others, documenting not just the sybaritic “hippie-businessman” patriarch, but also his numerous descendants. Sachs’ knotty chronicle reveals that her father has a total of nine children with several different women, two of whom the other siblings found out about only a few years back. (The film opens with Sachs brushing her elderly father’s hair, working out a particularly unpleasant snarl. “Sorry, dad,” she says. “There’s just one part that’s very tangly.” The irony is faint and benevolent, but present even so.) Sachs considers the enveloping imbroglio from her own perspective, but also takes into account the viewpoints of her eight siblings, her father’s ex-wives (including her own mother) and girlfriends, plus Ira’s mother, a gracefully cantankerous old woman in a certain amount of denial over her son’s wanton predilections and the role she played in his dysfunction. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO—the title an homage to Yvonne Rainer’s FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO…—is comprised of footage recorded between 1965 and 2019 and shot on 8mm, 16mm, VHS, Hi8, Mini DV, and digital; the fusion of all this material (by editor Rebecca Shapass) ranks among the most astounding use of personal archives that I’ve ever seen. It all exists in a state between documentary and home-movie footage, a paradigm that aptly reflects the conflict between reality and perspective, and the uncomfortable middle-ground that bisects the two. Sachs’ work often features her family, but this feels like an apotheosis of her autobiographical predisposition, likewise a question—why do the sins of the father linger?—and an answer. Among the most affecting scenes are roundtable discussions between the siblings where they consider revelations about their father and the implications of his actions. These scenes are heartrending not for their sadness, but rather for their naked honesty; it’s not just a film about a father who, but also a film about a love that defines a family. Sachs’ filmography is centered on infinite poetic quandaries (in voice over, she explores some of them here, such as when she muses on her father’s profession as a developer in Utah: “What happens when you own a horizon?”) and this feels like a logical conclusion to a lifetime of such profound impasses, though I’ve no doubt she’ll continue to probe life and its enigmas in a similarly masterful fashion. For all the suffering on display, Sachs has created an indelible work that, like those within it, perseveres by way of honesty and love. Followed by a post-screening conversation between Sachs and local filmmaker Lori Felker. (2020, 74 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker’s THE WASHING SOCIETY (US Documentary) Thursday, 6pm
Much like filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ acclaimed 2013 documentary hybrid YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, THE WASHING SOCIETY, a medium-length quasi-documentary she co-directed with performer-playwright Lizzie Olesker, penetrates the hidden worlds that exist adjacent to us. Just as in YOUR DAY Sachs explored the circumstances of immigrants living in “shift-bed” apartments in New York City’s Chinatown, she and Olesker here probe the mysterious world of urban laundromats, where workers—often immigrants or those from similarly disenfranchised groups—take on a task that’s historically been outsourced, at least in some capacity—that of washing and folding peoples’ laundry. The historical evocation is literal; the film’s title and one of its recurring motifs refer to a real organization from the 1880s called the Washing Society, which started in Atlanta and was comprised of washerwomen (most of them Black) who came together to demand higher pay and opportunities for self-regulation. A young actor, Jasmine Holloway, plays one such laundress, reading from texts written by the organization and whose presence haunts the modern-day laundromats. Soon other ‘characters,’ both real and fictitious, take their places in this mysterious realm, hidden away in plain sight. Ching Valdes-Aran and Veraalba Santa (actors who, along with Holloway, impressed me tremendously) appear as contemporary laundromat workers, representing ethnicities that tend to dominate the profession. It’s unclear at first that Valdes-Aran and Santa are performing, especially as real laundromat workers begin to appear in documentary vignettes, detailing the trials and tribulations of their physically demanding job. The stories are different, yet similar, personal to the individuals but representative of a society in which workers suffer en masse, still, from the very injustices against which the Washing Society were fighting. The actors’ scenes soon veer into more performative territory, a tactic which Sachs deployed, albeit differently, in YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT. Much like that film, the evolution of THE WASHING SOCIETY included live performances in real laundromats around New York City, some scenes of which, it would seem, are included in the film. There’s a bit of voiceover from Sachs, explaining the directors’ mission to go into many different laundromats, and from voice actors who read monologues that are tenuously connected to Valdes-Aran and Santa’s ‘characters.’ There are also visceral interludes involving accumulated lint that add another layer to the experimentation; there’s a bluntness to the filmmakers’ artistic ambitions, as with much of Sachs’ work, that makes the intentions discernible but no less effective. Sachs has previously employed egalitarian methods, such as considering the people she works with to be collaborators rather than subjects, cast, and crew. In a film about unseen labor, seeing that labor—notably in a self-referential scene toward the end in which a group of said collaborators prepare to exit a laundromat after shooting—is important. In light of what’s happening now, when so much essential labor is either coyly unseen or brazenly unacknowledged (or both), it’s crucial. Like the 1880s’ washerwoman, the victims (and, likewise, the combatants) of capitalism are ghosts that haunt us. Followed by a post-screening conversation between Sachs and Cine-File managing editor Kat Sachs. (2018, 44 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]
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Screening as part of a shorts program entitled “A Collection & a Conversation,” which includes Sachs’ short films DRIFT AND BOUGH (2014, 6 min, Digital Projection); MAYA AT 24 (2021, 4 min, Digital Projection); VISIT TO BERNADETTE MAYER’S CHILDHOOD HOME (2020, 3 min, Digital Projection) and SWERVE (2022, 7 min, Digital Projection).
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, Steve Erickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Raphael Jose Martinez, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael W. Phillips, Jr., Joe Rubin, Harrison Sherrod
:: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10 – THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16 :: →
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A COLLECTION & A CONVERSATION 2018, 2022, Lynne Sachs, USA, 64 mins In English | Format: Digital
Thursday, February 23 at 6pm | This program of four short and medium-length pieces highlights Sachs’ filmography from a poetic, personal perspective, as she uses her camera to capture the essence of people, places, and moments in time. The scope of this work includes DRIFT AND BOUGH (2014, USA, 6 min., No dialogue / Format: 8mm on digital), an assemblage of 8mm footage from a winter morning in Central Park. Set to sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s delicate and assured score, the contrasting darkness – of skyscrapers, fences, trees, and people – against bright snow, gives way to a meditative living picture. In MAYA AT 24 (2021, USA, 4 min., No dialogue / Format: 16mm on digital), Sachs presents a spinning, swirling cinematic record of her daughter Maya, chronicled at ages 6, 16, and 24. As Maya runs, she glances – furtively, lovingly, distractedly – through the lens and at her mother, conveying a wordless bond between parent and child, and capturing the breathtakingly quick nature of time. Presented for the first time publicly, in VISIT TO BERNADETTE MAYER’S CHILDHOOD HOME (2020, USA, 3 min., In English / Format: 16mm on digital), Sachs visits poet Bernadette Mayer’s childhood home in Queens to celebrate Mayer’s work, through a reverent, flowing collage. Queens, New York is also the backdrop for the poetry of Paolo Javier in SWERVE (2022, USA, 7 min., in various languages with English subtitles / Format: Digital), a “COVID film” that documents people emerging – cautiously, distanced, masked – from the global pandemic, finding their way in the liminal space between “before” and “after,” and connected by language and verse. In collaboration with playwright Lizzie Olesker, THE WASHING SOCIETY (2018, USA, 44 min., In English / Format: Digital) explores the once ubiquitous but now endangered public laundromat. Inspired by “To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War” by Tera W. Hunter, THE WASHING SOCIETY is an observational study of lather and labor, a document of the lives of working class women who – largely overlooked and underappreciated – load, dry, fold, and repeat. Post-screening conversation with Lynne Sachs.
Your films are often so collaborative in nature – inspired by or featuring poets, authors, fellow artists, musicians. How do you forge these partnerships? From the very beginning of my life as a filmmaker, I resisted the traditional, pyramid structure for the industry. If film is an art, why does it have to embrace this kind of corporate model? I never wanted to direct movies. I wanted to make films. Rigid hierarchies just seem anachronistic and patriarchal to me. When I work with other people on my films, I look for kindred spirits with a shared passion and enthusiasm. In 1991, I shot film of a dear friend rolling nude down a sand dune in Death Valley. She only agreed to take off her clothes if I would stand nude while doing the filming. I had to agree, of course. That was a collaboration for THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE. In 1994, I traveled with my Bolex, a cassette recorder and a notebook through Vietnam with my sister to make WHICH WAY IS EAST, an essay film constructed around our sometimes parallel, sometimes divergent perspectives. That was another collaboration. In 2006, I asked a former student to exchange letters with me as we both contemplated the fraught situation in Israel/ Palestine. Our epistolary exchange became the foundation for a collaborative writing endeavor. In 2018, artist Barbara Hammer asked me to work with film material that she had shot twenty years before. She knew she was dying and that our friendship could transform her images into a collaborative experience. I completed this cross-generational collaboration and called it A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES. Perhaps my most sustained collaboration has been with sound artist Stephen Vitiello. His deeply inventive approach to making music continuously reminds me of how lucky I am to live in a world with other creative people who find sustenance from the shared joy of making work. When I look at DRIFT AND BOUGH, YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, THE WASHING SOCIETY, TIP OF MY TONGUE, and FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO, I am reminded of our connections, what we did together and what I learned from this vital human being.
Who are your cinematic heroes? Sometimes a person is lucky enough to experience a hero and a mentor all wrapped into one. That is what happened to me. The first time I witnessed (as opposed to just saw) Bruce Conner’s iconoclastic and irreverent collage films in 1984 (A MOVIE, VALSE TRISTE, and CROSSROADS), I was transfixed. Never before had I imagined that a short, experimental film could be so radical, so rhythmic and so inexplicably resonant. I wrote to him a year later expressing an interest in working with him as an assistant in his studio in San Francisco. To my surprise, he said yes. Though I had little to offer except for curiosity and enthusiasm, I spent a year at his side, helping him organize his archive, parsing through letters he’d received from fans and driving him around in his convertible looking for Geiger counters with which to assess the radioactivity in his neighborhood. Not long after I completed my work with Bruce, I began a two year assistant position with Trịnh T. Minh Hà. Her presence in my life pushed me in completely different ways. As a filmmaker, poet, and cultural theorist, Minh-ha showed me how artists with cameras could analyze the way that they look at the world. She really introduced me to the idea of self-reflexivity in cinema. An artist’s embrace of words and images should bring together observation and introspection through a constant lens of doubt. I recorded sound on her films (SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM and SHOOT FOR THE CONTENTS) and assisted in her editing room. Other filmmaker heroes whose set my mind a-spinning, include: Peggy Ahwesh, Zeinabu Irene Davis, Maya Deren, Jeanne Finley, Christopher Harris, Su Friedrich, Zora Neal Hurston, Lucretia Martel, Yvonne Rainer, Julia Reichardt, Mark Street, Reverend L.O. Taylor, Kidlat Tahimik, and so many more.
What advice would you give to students studying film/filmmaking? Early in my career as a filmmaker, I gave up a volunteer job working for a the brilliant, progressive documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple to take a paid job with a commercial company making Marine Corp promotional videos. It was horrible, and I cried every afternoon sitting at the telephone answering calls. I was an unglorified secretary. In retrospect, I wish I had continued waitressing (even after I spilled an entire tray on a woman’s lap) to pay the bills so that I could keep my production assistant position on Kopple’s AMERICAN DREAM, where I would have learned more and been more inspired. Continue to make short films throughout your life as an artist. Making features can be a deeply meaningful and totally immersive experience, but the joy of coming up with an idea and then seeing it to completion over a few months or a year is equally profound. It’s like deciding between writing a poem or a novel. Both are worthy, but one is certainly more likely to be cheaper and more liberating to produce. Plus interest in short films is soaring these days! Being part of an artist community is as gratifying as establishing yourself as a successful filmmaker. Create a collective for exhibiting your work as well as those of other artist friends by curating programs in alternative spaces like garages, attics, backyards and basements. Support each other by telling your friends about grant opportunities, bringing cupcakes to their set, or teaching them how to use a Bolex 16mm camera. Show compassion to other artists by engaging with them around their struggles and their joys.
What is a memorable moviegoing experience you’ve had? I had always wanted to see Czech New-Wave filmmaker Věra Chytilová’s 1966 feature film DAISIES, a renowned, anti-authoritarian send-up of insatiable desires and female friendship. My own friend Kathy Geritz, now a curator at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and I got hold of a 16mm print and invited anyone who was interested to join us in a small theater. For weeks, we were giddy with anticipation. The day arrived and both of us set ourselves up in the projection booth, happy to be responsible for what we saw as a historical event, at least in our lives. Together, we swooned with excitement in the booth, completely taken with Chytilová’s brilliant direction. From behind the glass between the booth and the theater, we caught site of two arms flailing in the air. Only once the credits started to roll, and the audience began to exit the theater did we discover that a man in the room had had a disturbing and mysterious episode that involved loud grunting and running around the room during the film. I never figured out if he hated the film or was, himself, so deeply moved by the exhilarating performance of its two female stars that he too chose to let it all hang out.
What film do you watch again and again? I have watched SANS SOLEIL by Chris Marker at least 20 times. I discover something about the punctum in an image – the accident that pricks, as Roland Barthes might call it – in his discursive, layered, evocative, astute essay film every time I watch it.
Lynne Sachs: A Poet’s Perspective
Committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Embracing archives, letters, portraits, confessions, poetry, and music, her films take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Regardless of the passage of time, these films continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent, and radical in their artistic conception.
Lynne has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations, and web projects. Over the course of her career, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Sachs’ films have screened at MoMA, Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, the New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale, and Doclisboa, among others. In 2021, Sachs received awards from both Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center for her achievements in the experimental and documentary fields.
The Film Center, in collaboration with Conversations at the Edge and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation program, is honored to welcome Sachs to the Film Center in person for two evenings of her work, followed by in-depth conversations. Photo credit: Inés Espinosa López.
As the years linger on, I’ve come to realize that we’re living in a very nostalgic period. I’m not discussing so much in a franchise way, but more this sense of witnessing and coming to terms with our mortality. Even as 2022 ends with significantly fewer COVID-19 fatalities than in previous years, the reality is that it’s still a thing. The winter has run rampant with a triple flu and countries outside America are still experiencing millions of losses. Even then, those who have taken precautions have likely grown nostalgic for a few reasons. Maybe they’re coming to terms with what they’d leave behind or the fragility of a human body.
It’s why films like The Fabelmans (2022), Armageddon Time (2022), and Bardo (2022) have found established auteurs looking into their past to find greater meaning in their relationships. Whereas these would’ve been seen as self-indulgent exercises five years ago, I find myself in a more forgiving mood now. These are the stories everyone should’ve been telling after surviving the worst collective year of modern existence. We should be celebrating the people in our lives and do our best to preserve their memory for others to understand their significance.
I say this as someone who has had a rough two year span regarding death. Last year, my friend from high school died from a drug overdose, causing me to dig deep into those years to understand what he meant to me and realized how much joy and regret was found there. The loss became more tragic as I humanized the moment, painting in the details and discovering a moment of time I hadn’t thought much about. For as dour as life was then, there is something profound about recognizing that life wasn’t always like that. Better yet, it makes you realize the power of being alive at all.
I say that as I spent the time since having to think about my grandparents. Christmas 2021 included a doctor’s phone call determining whether my grandfather should be allowed to have a surgery that would prolong his life at most another few months. While I watched my father deal with the grief of losing him, I had this strange sense of acceptance. He was in his 90s, had spent the final years of his life in and out of the hospital. I applaud the nursing care who risked their lives in 2020 with hospice care. I was more concerned that at a point life ceased to have meaning because of how immobile he was, co-dependent on doctors to take care of him. It was also an awkward day when the family cleaned out grandmother’s nursing home, accepting that her social life with us was over. At most, I would await the phone game approach to how we shared news.
I’m sure the loss impacts everyone differently. For me, it was as much a moment of painfully waiting for the suffering to end as it was figuring out how to summarize their lives. I was the obituary writer. I knew how to capture their lives in these snapshots and have them resonate with readers. I can’t speak for how my father has taken these losses, though he has become more willing to share stories, doing what he can to keep their memory alive. Given my insecurity around them both being health risks for most of the past few years, it felt like we all should be relieved. The suffering was over. They were at peace.
But as the funeral was being prepared, the memorabilia came out. Along with the stories were these boxes of photographs spanning decades. Their youth suddenly appeared in my hands as I flipped the pages of photographs slipped into their respective slots. My grandfather was the photographer in the family, so he was often hidden. What we were seeing was the world usually through his perspective. Along with trying to figure out what was going on, there was something to trying to understand what he saw in that moment. Why did he want to capture this group of people holding a conversation? What spoke to him about this mountain range? In some respect, it’s the same fascination I have with Kirsten Johnson’s phenomenal Cameraperson (2016) documentary where she captures unrelated moments and the viewer tries to make sense of why Johnson included it. Given that she also made the excellent Dick Johnson is Dead (2020) about her father’s years with dementia, I’m willing to believe she and I share a reverence for life and achievement, doing what we can to preserve our existence.
With all of this said, there was one piece of media that I felt captured and understood the grieving process best. When the dust settles and all that’s left are the memories that live in our mind, how do we recognize their lives? The Criterion Channel is home to an amazing, seemingly endless, resource of shorts, and one of the filmmakers I have grown to love the most is Sophy Romvari. By some luck, I stumbled across a collection of her work that included Still Processing (2020), described as Romvari looking through a box of photographs and trying to make sense of her relative’s passing. She needed permission from her parents to share them, and the results are incredible.
Based on what work I’ve seen, she is a filmmaker who uses art to grapple with complicated themes. Most of her best work can be called a fusion of documentary and fiction, finding these connections that we have to each other. In this case, she uses an approach that embraces the silence, allowing the viewer to understand what it’s like to truly grieve. While it ends with a slideshow that ties together moments, the audio is largely non-verbal. There’s no suggestion of what these pictures are supposed to mean. As the opening suggests, these are just photographs that were taken without any greater purpose. Their intention is forgotten or not ever expressed. The only indication of how we’re supposed to feel are various cuts to Romvari looking at them whose blank stare suggests what the title promises. She’s still processing. No emotion has fully formed, and it makes the sense of discovery all the more sublime.
As the images flash over the screen, there is one technique that could read as a gimmick but actually elevates the piece into one of the best things I’ve seen in 2022. Save for a momentary score of sentimental strings, she leaves things largely silent, allowing for the sensory details of her environment to speak for her. We grieve alone, never given the chance to break out into song or have that essential consoling that puts it into context. All we have are our thoughts on the subject, and Romvari puts them exactly where they should be.
Much like Jennifer Reeder, Romvari’s use of subtitles helps to create a subconsciousness in her work. These lines are never spoken and yet they are essential to understanding what is being communicated. She shouldn’t say them out loud. They should be there to be read, an expression of our interiority as we determine something more metaphysical. In the case of Still Processing, the subtitles communicate an array of emotions that everyone likely has experienced at some point. With death representing a finality, the context of a messy ending of a family relationship. When the subtitles read a wish of not having been so mean to him throughout his life, there’s a gut punch that comes with the accompanying innocence. It’s just a picture of someone smiling, youthful in appearance. With this move, she’s pushing aside the pettiness that we all face to those we spend our lives around, finding them at our best and worst moments. When grieving, regret tends to be richer because there’s satisfaction with the joy. Maybe you’ll wish it lasted longer, but the pain stings because of how it lingers, can change the good into something cruel and unintentional. Was Romvari really that mean to him or is this just a projection of how limiting time is?
The execution is simple, going on to feature actual footage of them as kids. For one of the first times, Romvari is discussing her past. She asks “what were we listening to?” as children dance around a chair. It’s goofy, nonsensical, and very disorganized. In more innocent times it would be considered embarrassing, but now Romvari notices that looking at the past brings a certain pain. Why does joy hurt so much? Over the course of 17 minutes, Romvari has perfectly captured what it’s like to look into the archives, especially of a fairly fresh loss. Unlike my grandparents, I’m sure her loss was more abrupt and the sense of peace came at a more difficult climb. With that said, losing a friend in their early 30s, when so much of their life laid ahead of them, is something that connected me to this piece more. I attended his funeral and saw pictures of the years I missed and the few I was there for. In that moment, I had no choice but to contemplate what those moments meant to me, finding this sad affair full of pictures of him eating Mexican food with his sister and visiting the beach. In a moment of loss, it’s hard to forget that he lived and for as cornball as the funeral director usually makes those moments, the pictures work best by themselves.
I also think of Romvari’s Nine Behind (2016) which also is intended to be a self-reflective piece. I should note that unlike Still Processing, I’m unsure if that qualifies as autobiographical. Even then, the intention of her silence conveys a point that I don’t think even subtitles could capture. During a phone call with her elderly relative, she begins to ask questions about his life. Over the few minutes, we see one side of the conversation, but it’s clear that so much is missing in the questions Romvari is asking. There’s a disconnection of language, history, and even emotional connection. They are family, and yet something is missing. All of these years together, there’s the sense that she didn’t think to ask questions that would preserve their memory, give them a preservation that would make him endearing to future generations. Whether it’s true or not, this too feels like it’s full of regret. The only difference is that it’s implied instead of comfortably mentioned.
It’s something that I also see in the emotional silence of Lynne Sach’s Maya at 24 (2021). With nothing more than a clockwise twirl, Sachs captures Maya’s life at 6, 16, and 24. Without commentary, the sense of growth happens and soon she’s an adult. While I remain convinced that it doesn’t quite resonate as emotionally as it would to The Sach Family, I still have come back to it over the past year, noticing how time has evolved and changed all of us. Soon all we’re left with are questions about the years gone by, the things we’ve missed, and the ones we wish would’ve lasted a little longer. It’s the beauty of shorts like this. They don’t need two hours to give us insight. All Sach needs is four minutes to make an art piece that has driven me back to it over and over.
I suppose that the only way to properly end this journey through Criterion Channel’s amazing content is with An Evening (2013). While a lot of Romvari and Sach’s work reminds me more of my friend and the younger people whose lives were cut too short, An Evening is something that feels reminiscent of something I’ve actually experienced this year. Following the passing of my grandparents, there was the reality of having to deal with their home. It still has this uncanny quality of feeling like someone had lived there, where their belongings are still scattered in just the ways they wanted. Like the pictures, all I can do is look at the bed and wonder what they thought about at night.
An Evening is a short by Sofia Bohdanowicz that pushes the concept of loss to new levels. I’m not even sure that it’s necessarily a funereal story, but it’s tough to not read it as such. Over 19 minutes, she films a vacant home as a day turns to night. We see the notes left on a fridge and the disheveled rooms. Even the way that kitchen machines have lights go off in the dark begins to inspire chills. Like my grandparents’ house, there was a life here and to a stranger our only choice is to guess what they mean. Even the use of dusk is powerful, as if the closure of a life, where the visuals become more difficult to see. What’s left is a memory of what we saw. There’s no score to tell us how to feel, just the wind blowing through the night air and any creaks an old home would have.
It’s what I think about as I went into my grandparents’ home after their deaths. I was especially drawn to his bookshelf in a room that I rarely went into. There were whole collections of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and a few John Steinbeck among others. I wondered what those books meant to him and if there were any clues left in those pages. Given that he loved to open a book to the point it broke the spine, I imagined each one was personally molded to his style of reading. Something about his personality was hidden even in the organization of that wall. Why were these the ones he displayed? I picked up his copy of Steinbeck’s “The Wayward Bus.” It was a great read, but I remain perplexed by a hand-written chart in the back where someone wrote out various prices for things relevant to the plot. Why was this here? What did he hope to discover?
Again, that’s a mystery that is left for us to only speculate about. There’s no way to ask him now, and it’s haunting to be alone with those details and have to determine how much we want to look into it. For those who mean a lot to you, there’s hope that you’ll learn something new in that chart. Even if it’s indirect, something will come of navigating the memories. A new connection could be made and their lives molded into a greater texture. It’s one full of regret, but it’s important to remember the hope and optimism. Amid the emptiness is something that provokes thought. It’s only if I keep looking that I stand to find a greater substance.
I imagine that there will be more deaths in the years ahead. It’s an inevitable part of life and I imagine the journey will not be unlike what I went through in 2022. Sure, it’s more convenient to turn to films like Petite Maman (2021) or Personal Shopper (2017) and recognize some more abstract truth in there. Even making a film akin to The Fabelmans might seek to cement their legacy for generations to come. With that said, I find Romvari, Sach, Bohdanowicz, and even Johnson’s view of life much more fulfilling. There are things we’ll never know. We’re still processing something that is unique to everyone. For me, coming to terms with that void is the most satisfying way, and hopefully, with that I can hope to make a greater context start to take shape.
Lynne Sachs: A Poet’s Perspective Gene Siskel Film Center, School of the Art Institute of Chicago December 23, 2022 Screenings on February 20 & 23, 2023 https://www.siskelfilmcenter.org/lynnesachs
LYNNE SACHS: A POET’S PERSPECTIVE
Committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Embracing archives, letters, portraits, confessions, poetry, and music, her films take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Regardless of the passage of time, these films continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent, and radical in their artistic conception.
Lynne has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations, and web projects. Over the course of her career, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Sachs’ films have screened at MoMA, Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, the New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale, and Doclisboa, among others. In 2021, Sachs received awards from both Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center for her achievements in the experimental and documentary fields.
The Film Center, in collaboration with Conversations at the Edge and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation program, is honored to welcome Sachs to the Film Center in person for two evenings of her work, followed by in-depth conversations. Photo credit: Inés Espinosa López.
2020, dir. Lynne Sachs USA, 74 min. In English / Format: Digital
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8mm and 16mm film, videotape, and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame, yet privately ensconced in secrets. With this meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, Sachs allows herself and her audience to see beneath the surface of the skin, beyond the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal. (Cinema Guild)Post-screening conversation with Lynne Sachs.
2018-2022, dir. Lynne Sachs USA, 64 min., In English / Format: Digital
This program of four short and medium-length pieces highlights Sachs’ filmography from a poetic, personal perspective, as she uses her camera to capture the essence of people, places, and moments in time. The scope of this work includes DRIFT AND BOUGH (2014, USA, 6 min., No dialogue / Format: 8mm on digital), an assemblage of 8mm footage from a winter morning in Central Park. Set to sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s delicate and assured score, the contrasting darkness – of skyscrapers, fences, trees, and people – against bright snow, gives way to a meditative living picture. In MAYA AT 24 (2021, USA, 4 min., No dialogue / Format: 16mm on digital), Sachs presents a spinning, swirling cinematic record of her daughter Maya, chronicled at ages 6, 16, and 24. As Maya runs, she glances – furtively, lovingly, distractedly – through the lens and at her mother, conveying a wordless bond between parent and child, and capturing the breathtakingly quick nature of time. Presented for the first time publicly, in VISIT TO BERNADETTE MAYER’S CHILDHOOD HOME (2020, USA, 3 min., In English / Format: 16mm on digital), Sachs visits poet Bernadette Mayer’s childhood home in Queens to celebrate Mayer’s work, through a reverent, flowing collage. Queens, New York is also the backdrop for the poetry of Paolo Javier in SWERVE (2022, USA, 7 min., in various languages with English subtitles / Format: Digital), a “COVID film” that documents people emerging – cautiously, distanced, masked – from the global pandemic, finding their way in the liminal space between “before” and “after,” and connected by language and verse. In collaboration with playwright Lizzie Olesker, THE WASHING SOCIETY (2018, USA, 44 min., In English / Format: Digital) explores the once ubiquitous but now endangered public laundromat. Inspired by “To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War” by Tera W. Hunter, THE WASHING SOCIETY is an observational study of lather and labor, a document of the lives of working class women who – largely overlooked and underappreciated – load, dry, fold, and repeat. Post-screening conversation with Lynne Sachs.
They’ve got catfish on the table They’ve got Ghostwatch in the air
Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
This week’s quick rec is “Freedom Flight”, the closing track from the 1971 LP of the same name by the American musician Shuggie Otis. Otis, who is of African American, Filipino, and Greek descent, is probably best known for his song “Strawberry Letter 23” which, as recorded by The Brothers Johnson and produced by Quincy Jones, was a big chart hit in 1977, and later featured on the score for Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997).
Anyway, “Freedom Flight” is wonderful: a near 13 minute instrumental soundscape of pealing horns, chiming guitars, and delicate, melodic bass noodling (my favorite kind.) I must confess I have no idea whether the songs’s title is inspired by the real-life so-called Freedom Flights (Los vuelos de la libertad) that transported Cubans to Miami in large numbers between 1965 to 1973, but either way, it’s a monumentally transporting and relaxing piece of music, and I’ve been listening to it a lot.
I had a very nice time at last week’s Indie Memphis film festival, which was celebrating its 25th edition. Highlights of my visit included a screening of Benjamin Christensen’s berserk witchcraft horror/essay film/comedy Häxan (1922) featuring a live, theremin-fueled, and curiously (but somehow appropriately) smooth-jazzy score; the good vibes/sounds/eats of the Black Creators Forum brunch; and the privilege of serving on the Departures (experimental/avant-garde film) jury alongside two people I greatly admire: writer/scholar Yasmina Price; and critic/filmmaker Blair McClendon. We handed out three awards: short film to Maya at 24by Lynne Sachs, mid-length film to Civicby Dwayne LeBlanc, and feature film to Cette Maison (This House)by Miryam Charles. We loved all three, and I would suggest keeping an eye out to catch any of them when and where you can.
If I’m being honest, though, my real high point of Indie Memphis was attending a rather unexpected late night screening of the television special Ghostwatch, a true oddity which was broadcast once on BBC1, on Halloween night of 1992… and never again.
Indie Memphis managing director Joseph Carr told me before the screening that he stumbled across Ghostwatch on streaming service Shudder a few years back, and was so shaken that he felt the need to share it with a wider audience. It also didn’t hurt that this year marked the thirtieth anniversary of its first and only broadcast. I’d read about the show in the past, and vaguely recall it airing at the time, but I hadn’t actually seen it until last week. I found it to be a staggeringly effective piece of television: intelligent, technically astonishing, and genuinely haunting. I’ve been turning it over in my mind since.
Now, there’s a reason why I’ve been so absurdly vague about what Ghostwatch actually is, and that’s because I think this is one of those rare occasions where, even thirty years after the fact, a spoiler alert is justified, and coming to it completely cold—opening yourself up to the world it creates, and imagining that you had tuned into that initial broadcast moments after the BBC announcer had cued up the show with some context—could be beneficial to your viewing experience.
That said, there’s plenty of information about the backstory, intent and legacy of Ghostwatch freely available online, and you’re welcome to look it up if you’re someone who prefers to have a little bit of foreknowledge. I assume my British readers are likely to be much more familiar with the show and its milieu than my American and other international readers. After you’ve watched, you may wish to check out this entertaining and informative episode of the “Criminal” podcast about the show (thank you to artist Onyeka Igwe for flagging that one for me!) And it’s also out on Blu-ray soon, too.
If you do check out Ghostwatch, let me know what you think, and if you saw it at the time it was first broadcast, I’d love to know what the experience was like. Until next week!
The annual film festival honors the best of their 25th anniversary year.
The 25th Indie Memphis Film Festival concluded last Monday with a film that made a case for the importance of the 1970 Blaxploitation wave, and a film that proved its point. Is That Black Enough For You? is the first movie by Elvis Mitchell, a former New York Times film critic and cinema scholar turned documentary director. Mitchell traced the history of Black representation in film from the era of silent “race” pictures and D.W. Griffith’s pro-KKK, proto-blockbuster Birth of a Nation through the foreshortened careers of Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge to the wave of low-budget, Black-led gangster, adventure, and fantasy films which started in the late 1960s and crested with The Wiz. Films like Superfly and Coffy, Mitchell argues in his voluminous voice-over narration, presented the kinds of rousing heroes that attracted film-goers while the New Hollywood movement presented visions of angst-filled antiheroes.
Blaxploitation films also introduced a new kind of music to films and the concept of the soundtrack album, which was often released before the movie itself in order to drum up interest. The prime example was Shaft, which featured an Academy Award-winning soundtrack by Isaac Hayes. Mitchell introduced the classic with Willie Hall, the Memphis drummer who recorded the immortal hi-hat rhythm that kicks off Hayes’ theme song. Mitchell revealed in Is That Black Enough For You? that Hayes had been inspired by Sergio Leone’s score for Once Upon a Time in the West, and the score he penned for Shaft still holds up, providing much of the detective film’s throbbing propulsion.
The winners of the competitive portion of the 2022 film festival were announced at a hilariously irreverent awards ceremony Saturday evening at Playhouse on the Square. After a two-year hiatus, Savannah Bearden returned to produce the awards, which were “hosted” by Birdy, the tiny red metal mockingbird which has served as the film festival’s mascot for years. But amidst the nonstop jokes and spoof videos, there were genuinely touching moments, such as when Craig Brewer surprised art director and cameraperson Sallie Sabbatini with the Indie Award, which is given to outstanding Memphis film artisans, and when former Executive Director Ryan Watt was ambushed with the Vision Award.
The Best Narrative Feature award went to Our Father, the Devil, an African immigrant story directed by Ellie Foumbi. Kit Zauhar’s Actual People won the Duncan Williams Best Screenplay Award. The Documentary Feature award went to Reed Harkness for Sam Now, a portrait of the director’s brother that has been in production for the entire 25 years that Indie Memphis has been in existence.
The Best Hometowner Feature award, which honors films made in Memphis, went to Jack Lofton’s The ’Vous, a moving portrait of the people who make The Rendezvous a world-famous icon of Memphis barbecue. (“We voted with our stomachs,” said jury member Larry Karaszewski.) The Best Hometowner Narrative Short went to “Nordo” by Kyle Taubken, about a wife anxiously waiting for her husband to return from Afghanistan. Lauren Ready earned her second Indie Memphis Hometowner Documentary award for her short film “What We’ll Never Know.”
In the Departures category, which includes experimental, genre, and out-of-the-box creations, This House by Miryam Charles won Best Feature. (This House also won the poster design contest.) “Maya at 24” by legendary Memphis doc director Lynne Sachs won the Shorts competition, and “Civic” by Dwayne LeBlanc took home the first trophy in a new Mid-Length subcategory.
Sounds, the festival’s long-running music film series, awarded Best Feature to Kumina Queen by Nyasha Laing. The music video awards were won by the stop-motion animated “Vacant Spaces” by Joe Baughman; “Don’t Come Home” by Emily Rooker triumphed in the crowded Hometowner category.
Best Narrative Short went to “Sugar Glass Bottle” by Neo Sora, and Best Documentary Short went to “The Body Is a House of Familiar Rooms” by Eloise Sherrid and Lauryn Welch.
Some of the Special Awards date back to the origin of the festival in 1998, such as the Soul of Southern Film Award, which was taken by Ira McKinley and Bhawin Suchak’s documentary Outta The Muck. The Ron Tibbett Excellence in Filmmaking Award went to Me Little Me by Elizabeth Ayiku. The Craig Brewer Emerging Filmmaker Award went to Eric Younger’s Very Rare.
The IndieGrants program, which awards $15,000 in cash and donations to create short films, picked Anna Cai’s “Bluff City Chinese” and A.D. Smith’s “R.E.G.G.I.N.” out of 46 proposals submitted by Memphis filmmakers.
The 25th Annual Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2022 Award-Winners, Including Ellie Foumbi’s Best Narrative Feature OUR FATHER, THE DEVIL and Reed Harkness’ Best Documentary Feature SAM NOW
Indie Memphis Film Festival, presented by Duncan-Williams, Inc. and Duncan Williams Asset Management, is pleased to announce this year’s award-winners. The awards show, sponsored by Eventive, was held in-person in Memphis, as well as online, on the evening of October 22th. The awards were presented by festival staff, as well as members of the awards juries. The 2022 festival screened over 184 feature films, shorts, and music videos, with most screenings followed by in-person filmmaker Q&As.
Jury Award highlights include Best Narrative Feature for OUR FATHER, THE DEVIL (Dir. Ellie Foumbi, $1K cash prize), Best Documentary Feature for SAM NOW (Dir. Reed Harkness, $1K cash prize), Best Hometowner Feature for THE ‘VOUS (Dir. Jack Lofton’s, $1K cash prize – World Premiere), Best Departures Feature for THIS HOUSE (CETTE MAISON) (Dir. Miryam Charles, $500 cash prize), and Best Sounds Feature for KUMINA QUEEN (Dir. Nyasha Laing, $500 cash prize), among others.
The festival also awarded two yet-to-be-produced short films with Indie Grant prizes: “Bluff City Chinese” (Dir. Anna Cai) and “R.E.G.G.I.N.” (Dir. A.D. Smith). These films from Memphis-based filmmakers were chosen by a jury and were each awarded with $39K; grant support comprised of $15K cash provided by sponsor Mark Jones and $24K of cash-equivalent rentals and donations provided by sponsors Firefly Grip & Electric, LensRentals, Music + Arts Studio, and VIA. Three winners will each receive grant packages worth $13K.
The Festival Awards, decided by Indie Memphis Festival staff, include the Ron Tibbett Excellence in Filmmaking Award for ME LITTLE ME (Dir. Elizabeth Ayiku) and the Craig Brewer Emerging Filmmaker Award for VERY RARE (Dir. Eric Younger – World Premiere), among others.
Audience Awards will be announced following the festival.
2022 Indie Memphis Film Festival Jury & Festival Award-Winners
Winners by Category
JURY AWARDS
Narrative Features Awarded by Jury Members Marlowe Granados, Doreen St. Félix
Best Narrative Feature, OUR FATHER, THE DEVIL (Dir. Ellie Foumbi) – $1K Cash Prize
Duncan Williams Best Screenplay Award, ACTUAL PEOPLE (Dir. Kit Zauhar) – $1K Cash Prize, sponsored by Duncan Williams, Inc.
Documentary Features Awarded by Jury Members Brooke Marine, Tara Violet Niami, Tchaiko Omawale; Sponsored by Classic American Hardwoods
Best Documentary Feature, SAM NOW (Dir. Reed Harkness) – $1K Cash Prize
Special Jury Mention for Revolutionary Cinema, SILENT BEAUTY (Dir. Jasmin Mara López)
Special Jury Mention for Transcendent Cinema, OUTTA THE MUCK (Dir. Ira McKinley, Bhawin Suchak)
Hometowner Awarded by Jury Members Jessica Chriesman, Brandon Harris, Larry Karaszewski; Sponsored by Tennessee Entertainment Commission
Best Hometowner Feature, THE ‘VOUS (Dir. Jack Lofton) – $1K Cash Prize
Best Documentary Short, “The Body is a House of Familiar Rooms” by Eloise Sherrid + Lauryn Welch – $500 Cash Prize
IndieGrants Awarded by Jury Members Mandy Marcus, Soraya McDonald, Maria Santos; Sponsored by Mark Jones with rentals and donations provided by Firefly Grip & Electric, LensRentals, Music + Arts Studio, and VIA.
“Bluff City Chinese” (Dir. Anna Cai)- $15K Grant ($7.5K cash, $7.5K In-Kind Filmmaking Services)
“R.E.G.G.I.N.” (Dir. A.D. Smith) – $15K Grant ($7.5K cash, $7.5K In-Kind Filmmaking Services)
Poster Design Awarded by Jury Members Brittney Boyd Bullock, Coe Lapossy, Mia Saine
THIS HOUSE (CETTE MAISON) (Dir. Miryam Charles)
FESTIVAL AWARDS
Ron Tibbett Excellence in Filmmaking
ME LITTLE ME (Dir. Elizabeth Ayiku)
Craig Brewer Emerging Filmmaker
VERY RARE (Dir. Eric Younger)
Soul of Southern Film Award
OUTTA THE MUCK by (Dir. Ira McKinley, Bhawin Suchak)
Diovanna, a dancer realizes her transfemme identity through a choreographic journey of self-discovery, celebration, and the poetic metaphor of a flower coming to bloom.
Producer:Susan O’Brien, Elizabeth Raia, Giselle Byrd, Margaret Montavon
FREE NOIR PAPILLON
A short dance film about a mother’s relationship to her pregnancy, as she deals with fear and hope about bringing a black baby boy into the world in 2020.
Pandrog is an exploration of the subversiveness of the gender binary within the confines of Blackness. It is about Black people escaping the terms and identities created by western imperialism.
May We Know Our Own Strength’ is an abstract and expressionistic narrative document centered around artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya’s similarly-titled piece exploring collective healing after sexual assault within AAPI communities, created tragically in the wake of the Atlanta spa shootings. In the spirit of the installation itself, ‘May We Know Our Own Strength’ recreates the process of trauma, the hurdles of healing, and the strength that can be found in sharing and community.
A voice creates a meditative portrait of two tropical landscapes-separated by 100 miles of ocean-and two men dancing at twilight; the distance of their bodies both measured and infinite.
Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya at 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle – clockwise – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward.
Ad meliora, or “towards better things” combines hundreds of separate images that create a deep meditation on being, creativity and nature; a mandala of forms that becomes highly symbolic of life, death, yesterday, now, and the next moment. Flowers, plants and textures were photographed in places such as nature conservatories, cultivated gardens, vacant properties and parking lots. The familiar landscape appears molten, luminous and renewed. Ad meliora is suggestive of adaptation, resilience and transformation.
