https://mysterycatalog.com/2026/04/every-contact-leaves-a-trace-at-anthology-film-archives-may-3/
April 29, 2026
By Herbert Gambill

Brooklyn documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs is the recipient of the POV Award at the San Francisco Film Festival on April 29. The festival will be screening her latest film, “Every Contact Leaves a Trace.” Go here for more information. On May 3 the film will also be shown at NYC’s Anthology Film Archives.

Sachs has a collection of 600 business cards and decides to choose seven of them and attempt to reconnect with the persons who gave them to her. (Her ramblings while searching for candidates–”Oh, she won’t talk to me!”–is one of the most amusing parts of the film.) She says the premise is a foundation of forensic science invented by Edmond Locard, a forensic pioneer: any trace can link a person to a place, another person or an object. She even has a scientist analyze the cards for fingerprints and DNA. (This doesn’t reveal much.)

In her director’s statement, Sachs reports that “Chance meetings become distinct and revealing punctums, each physical interaction an encounter that pricks.” Punctum was a concept Roland Barthes created for his 1980 book on photography “Camera Lucida.” He distinguished between the “studium” of a photo (the obvious symbolic content of the photo) and its “punctum” (something, perhaps incidental, that “pierces” the viewer in a person way). In her usual technique of hybrid filmmaking, she comes up with a different way to model her interactions with the seven contacts.

One of the most unsettling contacts for her is Lawrence Brose, an experimental film artist whose films explored his gay sexuality, especially his feature-length film “De Profundis,” a hand-etched film inspired by Oscar Wilde’s 1887 letter to his lover from prison. Brose reveals to Sachs that he was charged with having child pornography and she wonders if she should cut him from the film only to learn later that he was innocent: a member of his art collective had downloaded the material and yet he was charged and his lawyer advised him to take a plea deal rather than to go to court.

Sachs met two of the contacts via her presence at various international film festivals over the years. Angela Haardt is a German avant-garde film artist who was born in 1940 and recalls her memories of Nazi Germany, including the continued popularity of 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine, whose work was banned by the Nazis. This prompts Lynne, who is Jewish, to think about the genocide in Gaza.  Jiang Juan, a champion of films by women in China, lives with the director for awhile; Sachs uses striking split screen footage of her to illustrate her perception of her in the past and the present.

Betty Leacraft is a textile artist who lives in Philadelphia. She gently tutors the filmmaker in needlepoint, demonstrating her own method of tying off thread. Actress Rae C. Wright is employed to play a former therapist of Sachs whose advice surprised her. Lynne interviews her niece and nephew (children of her brother, filmmaker Ira Sachs) about her project. They offer her whimsical takes from a younger generation.

Sachs created a way to diagram her interaction with her contacts with white markings on a black background. (It looks a bit like football play diagrams.) One wonders how the film would differ had she chosen other business cards, which makes “Every Contact Leaves a Trace” what Barthes called a “writerly” text, one that forces the viewer to engage actively with the work. You may even want to go to your own collection of business cards and create your own series of experiments. Featuring a great soundtrack by Stephen Vitiello and lovely animation, Lynne Sachs’ latest film is another wonderful addition to her long body of perceptive, funny and warm feminist-informed explorations of creativity, memory, seriality and politics.

Go here to listen to Adam Schartoff’s interview with Sachs about this film.

April 24th 2026
By Delaney Holton
https://www.screenslate.com/articles/every-contact-leaves-trace

Lynne Sachs’s new film Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2025) begins from a pun on Locard’s Exchange Principle: the forensic axiom that each encounter between people or objects deposits a material residue. Sachs turns the principle inward, toward the sedimented matter of a life lived among others: some 600 business cards accumulated over four decades, a paper archive indexing the chance encounters and professional exchanges of an illustrious career. The film appropriately screens on the occasion of Sachs’s Persistence of Vision Award from SFFILM, which recognizes her career in experimental documentary filmmaking.

As Sachs sifts through the stacks, narrating associations or confronting blank spots in her recollection, the cards’ standardized form gives way to the unruliness of relation. Sachs layers a restless flow of images, animations, and superimpositions over a diaristic voiceover, while frequent collaborator Stephen Vitiello’s omnipresent score hums beneath. She stages new encounters with select figures represented in her collection: a textile artist, a therapist, a refugee and mother who once cooked for her. Conversations always seem to turn toward days gone by, though the governing insight is less about recovering evidence of what “really” happened than observing how the past is continually remediated through its recounting and the subtle gravity people exert upon one another’s lives across space and time. At intervals, Sachs extends the interpersonal scale of her inquiry into a more expansive awareness. 

While speaking to the woman who cuts her hair or searching for someone to make her maqluba, she holds Ukraine and Gaza on her mind. As she thinks of previous mistakes, of her ambivalent German-Jewish heritage, or her complicity in historical and current violence while living within the imperial core, her on-screen interlocutors serve as mirrors into her own wandering mind, a gesture toward entanglement reminiscent of Chris Marker’s reflexive Sans Soleil (1983). The “trace,” the film suggests, marks both the fact of contact and the asymmetries that shape it. At the same time, these traces may falter in their own ways, as they fail to hold the fullness of what passes between people. What constitutes intimacy? What does it mean to know someone? Closeness doesn’t necessarily produce understanding or solidarity. It can generate hostility or leave damage. With Sachs, we learn that to be in relation is to come to terms with one’s capacity to do harm and to accept that we might leave imprints that elude our awareness entirely. If Sachs begins from the business cards as her archive of traces, then, by the end she relinquishes the thinness of their description to the irreducible complexity of the people and relationships they represent.

Every Contact Leaves a Trace screens Saturday, May 9, presented by Other Cinema at Artists’s Television Access, with Lynne Sachs in person.

Previously:

Every Contact Leaves a Trace screens Wednesday, April 29, at BAMPFA, with Lynne Sachs in person to receive SFFILM’s Persistence of Vision award.

San Francisco 2026 Review: EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE, Poignant, Thoughtful Cine-Essay

Mel Valentin, Lead Critic; San Francisco, California

https://screenanarchy.com/amp/2026/05/san-francisco-2026-review-every-contact-leaves-a-trace-poignant-thoughtful-cine-essay.html

May 14 2026, 11:02 AM

The latest project by filmmaker Lynne Sachs (Drift and Bough, The Washing Society, Film About a Father Who) opens with a quote from the French-born father of 20th-century forensic science, Dr. Edmond Locard: “Every contact leaves a trace.”

The basis for “Locard’s Exchange Principle,” it also doubles as the title of Sachs’ documentary, a deeply personal cine-essay.

With more time behind her than in front of her, a meditative Sachs uncovered a box of 600 business cards dating back to 1990 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a young woman and burgeoning filmmaker, Sachs met Angela Haardt, a Berlin resident, a founding member of the International Forum of the Film Avant-Garde, and the director of a shorts festival (1990-1997) where Sachs placed an early short film of hers. Her new film combines archival footage, reminiscences about post-war Germany, and its place in the Jewish-American imagination (more positive than negative for Sachs, the opposite understandably so for her mother)

Decades later, Haardt welcomes Sachs both as an equal and a long-lost friend. Looking back at their initial meeting, the intervening time, and the present, Haardt grapples with German history, identity, and culture, specifically how, when, and where Germans commemorate the Holocaust or deliberately forget it. It’s a tragedy that Sachs connects to her own conflicted, contradictory feelings about Israel, Gaza, and Israel’s initially defensive response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, including the reoccupation of Gaza and the disproportionate effect on the Palestinian population.

Before Every Contact Leaves a Trace ventures too far into Israel, Gaza, or the commingled future of its peoples and the region itself, however, Sachs deliberately pulls back, returning to the original focus of her project, tracking down a select handful from the business cards she acquired over the years. Few are as compelling as Haardt, but they’re still fascinating on their own, sometimes less because of who they are or what they’ve contributed to film and the film community than their relationship to Sachs and the latter’s attempts, sometimes successful, sometimes not, to reignite long-dormant friendships or relationships.

Among Every Contact Leaves a Trace’s subjects, Sachs’ most intriguing interviewees include the late Lawrence Brose (De Profundis), a pioneering queer filmmaker who found himself hounded by Homeland Security and ICE for the alleged possession of child pornography. Out of a combination of fear and prudence, Brose pled guilty to a lesser offense (obscenity), in exchange for two years of probation. During that period, Brose couldn’t own or access anything related to the LGBTQ community or risk his probation turning into imprisonment.

Brose’s persecution and subsequent plea deal could — and probably should — have been a documentary in its own right, but in Sachs’ cine-essay, it offers her another opportunity for self-examination, both as an individual and as a filmmaker bound by ethics. Given the seriousness of the accusations against Brose, she considered excising his segment altogether. It’s to her credit that she didn’t.

Even in a truncated form, Brose and his story needed to be heard and seen. Sachs’ ethical conundrum also serves as an opening for much-needed discussion and rumination on the other side of the screen.

Sachs’ other subjects include Juan Jiang, the director of the now-defunct Chinese Women’s Festival; textile artist Betty Leacraft, Sachs’ one-time student turned teacher; Felix and Viva Torres, Sachs’ nephew and niece, respectively (the children of Sachs’ filmmaker brother, Ira); and, in a meta-fictional twist, Rae C. Wright, a performer who serves as a stand-in for Sachs’ therapist. While Leacraft proves slightly prickly under Sachs’ performance-driven direction, Felix and Viva emerge as a charming duo, offering the occasional insight along with warmth of spirit and generosity toward their idiosyncratic aunt. 

For some, Every Contact Leaves a Trace will seem overly personal and thus, too slight or of marginal interest. For those willing to look — and just as importantly, listen — Every Contact Leaves a Trace will, like the title of Sachs’ documentary, leave an indelible mark, asking important, open-ended questions about life, art, and mortality. Few have answers, but as Sachs suggests more than once, they’re all the more worth asking. 

Every Contact Leaves a Trace premiered at the 2025 IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival) in Amsterdam. It played most recently at the 2026 San Francisco International Film Festival. 

Prismatic Ground 2026 Forges a Vibrant, Accessible Path for Film Festivals

Soham Gadre
April 28, 2026
https://thefilmstage.com/prismatic-ground-2026-forges-a-vibrant-accessible-path-for-film-festivals/

Prismatic Ground is a film festival I have been attending in-person for nearly three years, and while my streak of such attendance unfortunately ended this year, I have continued to watch and cover since its inaugural edition in 2021. Prismatic Ground remains so special because it maintains the tenets of its conception, which founder and director Inney Prakash explained as an attempt to fill the void of festivals dedicated to experimental cinema and a festival that doesn’t treat the COVID pandemic’s shift to online-accessible film-viewing as merely a “stopgap,” but an actual “effort to rethink the experience” of a festival.

The radical shift and change to the festival circuit for both cinema viewers and filmmakers—which includes actually paying the filmmakers for their work to be presented and removing geo-blocking so as many people as possible who can’t attend in-person screenings can still see some films online from anywhere—ties nicely to this year’s closing film, Isiah Medina’s Gangsterism. Always a self-assured and divisive artist, especially post-Inventing the Future, Medina, in his latest, is both his most combative and self-reflexive. Gangsterism is combative for how it seems to deconstruct the criticisms leveled at Medina’s previous films, such as their supposed obtuseness or the heavily academic framework for theorizing things like theft of art and liberation of technology that seems removed from material reality. Its self-reflection emerges from a major topic of discussion: that the central character, Clem, considers it insulting that potential financiers find his movies difficult to understand. Medina’s style is as distinct as ever. The patterns of repetition, sound, and image interrupting each other are contrasted through drawn-out sequences of characters forming arguments on the current economy of cinema, the financing of being a filmmaker, the social responsibilities and roles of academia, and, central to its plot, the proliferation of film via digital piracy.

The festival gives out only one prize per year: the Ground Glass prize, a career-achievement award. In its inaugural year, it went to Brooklyn-based artist Lynne Sachs, and this year it went to Japanese experimental artist Kohei Ando. Sachs also has a film this year, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, which pairs well with Ando’s work. Sachs’ film is a self-insert documentary where the filmmaker looks back to remember and re-encounter people with whom she shared and kept business cards. These encounters vary from friendly to awkward to uncomfortable, both in the memories they bring back and the inherent ideas that shoving a camera into someone’s face might elicit. Considerations of “performance,” “simulation,” and “vulnerability” seep into the forefront through the lens. Sachs considers aloud, while shuffling through the business cards, which of these people would be welcoming to meeting her again. A German festival director named Angela, whom Sachs met 30 years ago, recounts post-war Germany and the history of the Holocaust in people’s collective memory as another genocide in Gaza is unfolding today. Experimental filmmaker Lawrence Brose speaks about the persecution he faced as a gay artist while scenes from his film play in montage over conversation.

Like Sachs’ film, Kohei Ando’s cinema is very much tussling with ideas of time, memory, and connection to people. The most direct work that mirrors Sachs is the fun short My Friends in My Address Book, which goes through a montage of Ando’s friends smiling for the camera and holding up pieces of paper with their names. Other shorts, like his Passing Train series, exhibit time as something continuous and through multiple angles—intimate and unrelenting rather than something that creates distance. There is a sense of sentimentality that warmly lingers throughout these movies—especially On the Far Side of Twilight, which uses a saccharine piano score and cute narration that highlights his memories from childhood to old age. The image composition is immaculate, distinct in its bright coloration, and imaginative for how it breaks the fourth wall of the film plane, burning it, cutting it out, and transforming it into various shapes while moving it at different speeds.

It’s worth highlighting a number of shorts that bring forth examination and consideration for where experimental cinema is today. Rajee Samarasinghe’s A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth comprises excerpts and outtakes from the filmmaker’s remarkable feature documentary Your Touch Makes Others Invisible on missing children in Sri Lanka. The recontextualization of these outtakes from interviews—many of which feature the imperfections of sound, framing, and focus—confront us with how the difficult and traumatic experiences of real people cannot be decontextualized from the filmmaking process. Eislow Johnson’s Injured? is the most “action-packed” and funny of the shorts—a rapid-fire montage of a drive on a highway focusing on the litany of billboards for law firms for car accidents. It is ironic in its clear connection between America’s obsession with cars and suing people, but also fashioned as a sort of intense action film, mimicking the volume and ferocity of one of cinema’s great entertainments: the high-speed chase.

Yusuf Demiror’s Archura Leaves the City Forever is a beautiful, hypnotic fable. Its warm lighting and cold urban exteriors, mixed with fantastical costumes and lush natural highlights, make for a transportive work reminiscent of a mix between Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation and Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Emotion. Michael Barwise’s That Sanity Be Kept is a melancholy and nostalgic film, but also terrifyingly contemporary in its depiction of surveillance and the destruction of privacy as government agencies track the movements, faces, and clothing of various young people during a ceasefire amidst The Troubles.

Finally, three phenomenal and rare treasures by Iraqi filmmaker Parine Jaddo––Atash, Aisha, and Teyh––all highlight the artist’s conflicts (or false conflicts) of sexuality with religion, and modern discourses of fiction and the roles of men and women in Iraqi society in a rapidly westernizing world. All this occurs amid constant reminders of bombs and how post-war existence for the Middle East is always a pre-war state.

Primastic Ground 2026 takes place April 29-May 3 in venues across NYC.

Prismatic Ground 2026

Series Spotlight
https://www.screenslate.com/articles/prismatic-ground-2026
April 28th 2026
By Kathleen Langjahr

Tomorrow night at BAM Rose Cinemas, Ka Ki Wong’s I Heard That They Are Not Going to See Each Other Anymore (2026) will initiate the first wave of programming for the sixth edition of Prismatic Ground. Following the romantic misadventures of two couples across Taipei, the film’s dreamy sequences are punctuated by a vivid orange pincushion flower, which one of the protagonists, Melih, receives from his object of affection, the alcoholic Yu-Ping. Melih owns a noodle shop frequented by the eccentric Tao, whose infatuation with Shin drives her to physical antagonism, including stalking him and sending gangs to beat him up in cartoonish fight sequences. We intermittently view the lovers through the POV of Melih’s flower, which becomes a metaphor for longing and memory as both he and Tao grapple with their doomed romances in yearning monologues interspersed with listless wanderings across the city and its surrounding ruins.

Wong’s film will be followed by Nicolás Pereda’s Cobre (2025), an enigmatic portrait of Lázaro, a worker at a copper mine in a remote region of Mexico who stumbles upon a dead body on his way to work one day. Already on bad terms with the mine’s management for seeking sick leave for a respiratory illness contested by the mine’s on-staff doctor, Lázaro is closest to his aunt, who supports his recovery while he struggles to maintain his health and innocence. Conducive to suggestions of intrigue and desire, Cobre explores the limits of trust in the relationship between viewer, filmmaker, and protagonist.

Prismatic Ground is a film festival curated by Inney Prakash that showcases experimental works in short and feature formats. Grounded in a postcolonial perspective, the festival provides a space for a diverse range of filmmakers to exhibit their work, which ranges from technically innovative structuralist works, to dramatic features, to historically resonant documentarian efforts. This year’s selection includes a focus on avant-garde works from Asia and celebrations of queer life from across the globe. As with past iterations of the festival, a common invocation across films of wildly differing approaches and subjects is the fight for Palestinian liberation from the American-backed occupation by Israel. Further highlights include a celebration of June Givanni’s Pan-African Cinema Archive in conjunction with the launch of Onyeka Igwe’s book on Givanni at Anthology Film Archives, which will be followed by an evening of poetry and film curated by Shiv Kotecha and Courtney Stephens. Anthology will also host the festival’s presentation of the Ground Glass Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of experimental media, to Kohei Ando alongside a screening of six of his films.

“A mandala for opening the மனசு (manasu meaning heart and mind in Tamil) to the frequency of love in revolt” is the subtitle to Karthik Pandian’s Surrendur (2026), a vertiginous montage of footage documenting the political upheavals of 2020 in Minnesota, including the toppling of a Christopher Columbus statue orchestrated by American Indian Movement activist Mike Forcia (Bad River Anishinaabe). Forcia serves as a guide through the film’s interwoven networks of people and actions related to the George Floyd Uprising, the Anishinaabe Seven Fires Prophecy, and the Dakota 38+2 Memorial Ride. A recurring formal motif in Surrendur is a circle centered in the square of the frame, embodying the awakening to the colonial violence of American life experienced by so many in that period, including Ta Pe’juta Wičháȟpi Win (Hunkpati Dakota Oyate), whose political consciousness was sparked as she danced around the fallen statue of Columbus. At one point Forcia describes a fiber optic cable connected to our third eye, through which the light of a future free of the imperialist project in which we currently live may reach us, if only we can get on its wavelength.

The American Midwest is also the setting for Eislow Johnson’s short film Injured? (2026), which celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of attorney ads being legalized by looking to the future of American grift: manifestation influencers, numerology divinationists, and proprietors of the Marvel cinematic universe. The shorts in this year’s festival constitute some of the most powerful moments of its lineup, such as Anthony Banua-Simon’s WORLD ENTERPRISES (2026), a collage film composed of excerpts from the films available via mail-order from the distributor World Enterprises that were screened in 1940 for the workers of the Kekaha Sugar Company in O’ahu on their days off. Presented at an inflection point in the labor movement led by Filipino immigrant workers, the films depict the American settler project as an inevitable result of forward progress. Through Banua-Simon’s reconfiguration, the films reveal the cracks in the façade of capitalist omnipresence and the power of community-based political action.

Among the rich selection of films exploring queer life and history is the visually and audibly stunning Joy Boy: A Tribute to Julius Eastman (2026) by the Collectif Faire-Part. Divided into four distinct sequences, the film embodies the revolutionary nature of Eastman’s music in form and concept. Angelo Madsen’s My Structuralist Film (2026) is a smart reinvention of the genre suited to the exploration of the trials of trans visibility and disclosure within the body politic.

In the final wave of programming, Lynne Sach’s Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2025) presents a feature-length essay documentary structured by her investigation into seven people selected from the expansive collection of business cards she has accumulated over the last 40 years. What begins as an investigation into the impact of each encounter on the trajectory of both peoples’ lives eventually opens onto the legacies of broader geopolitical developments and the subjective nature of memory, both personal and collective. The festival concludes with a standout group of Chinese avant-garde shorts curated by Tone Glow, including Branches from Concrete (2026) by Zhou Zhenyu, a film shot in an abandoned shopping complex in the filmmaker’s hometown of Hengshui that has been taken over by nature and local residents who have repurposed certain spaces for community activities. Following the movement of gleaming humanoid metallic beings throughout the structure, the film’s juxtaposition of technology and ruin feels quite apt for our present age.

Prismatic Ground runs April 29-May 3 across BAM, DCTV, Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, Metrograph, and online with wave ∞, a virtual selection free to watch at prismaticground.com.

Written by: Christopher Llewellyn Reed | April 7th, 2026

https://filmfestivaltoday.com/fft-festival-coverage/5-films-to-see-at-the-2026-maryland-film-festival

It’s April and the Maryland Film Festival (MdFF) is back, just five months after its last iteration, running April 8-12. This is time of year when the fest has traditionally been held (more or less), so in a world of rapid change, some things are returning to normal. As always, the programming is strong, with shorts, features, and immersive art experiences on offer for a variety of tastes. All information about all screenings (and how to get tickets) is available on the MdFF website. Below, I offer my recommendations of five films to see.

Barbara Forever (Brydie O’Connor, 2026) [excerpted from my Hammer to Nail review out of Sundance]

The late, great experimental, queer filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) left behind a treasure trove of work worthy not only of exhibition but of preservation. This is exactly how Brydie O’Connor’s documentary Barbara Forever begins, in a museum—Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the films and other material now reside—as Hammer’s life partner, Florrie Burke, pays a visit to commune with old friends. From there, we proceed on a comprehensive journey through the life and career of a seminal artist.

Bouchra (Orian Yani Barki/Meriem Bennani)

An animated drama about a queer Moroccan woman living in Brooklyn, with flashbacks to the homeland interspersed throughout the present, Bouchra—the title character of which is portrayed as a canid and voiced by co-director Meriem Bennani—presents a colorful world full of vibrant characters. The semi-autobiographical story centers on self-actualization and combines real archival footage of Casablanca, phone conversations with an actress standing in for Bennani’s actual mother, and vivid images (where everyone is a different kind of animal) that propel the coming-out narrative forwards. If ultimately we have seen this kind of intricate personal piece before, we have not seen done in exactly this kind of way.

Every Contact Leaves a Trace (Lynne Sachs)

Continuing the personal and experimental theme of the festival, Lynne Sachs’ Every Contact Leaves a Tracefollows the director as she works her way through old business cards to explore the way that people’s lives intersect and then drift apart. She bases her ideas on Dr. Edmond Locard’s “exchange principle”—the foundation of all modern forensic science—which states: “Trace evidence can be used to link people or objects to places, other people, or other objects. It often serves as a starting point for a line of investigation.” And so this intriguing, sometimes oblique, movie goes, Sachs (Film About a Father Who) acting as our guide through an exploration of the resonance of meetings, no matter how fleeting.

House (Nobuhiko Obayashi)

Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 experimental horror film was apparently originally inspired by the 1975 American film Jaws, though you would never guess that just by watching it. A group of young women travel for what they think is a weekend getaway to the home of one friend’s aunt … except that the aunt is actually a malevolent spirit bent on eating all of them. Filled with wild and giddy images and music, the movie is a must-see for genre fans and anyone looking to have their mind blown. The MdFF always screens a few revivals, and if you haven’t yet watched this one, be sure to check it out Friday night.

Ugly Cry (Emily Robinson) [excerpted from my Hammer to Nail review out of SXSW]

In her first feature, Ugly Cry, writer/director/star Emily Robinson delivers a compelling meditation on how the harsh gaze—male, female, and even one’s own—within cinematic systems built on exploitation inevitably leads to terrible outcomes. A young actress who should be focusing on performance instead becomes obsessed with making her face show as little actual emotion as possible. You wouldn’t want to scare people with the ugliness of real pain, now, would you?