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.
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 Tracescreens 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.
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 (DeProfundis), 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 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.
Trying to capture reality in my work means dealing with other people’s lives. Sometimes I yearn for something else, less interpersonal. I have a dear friend who’s been making films almost as long as I have. A few weeks ago, I started to vent (or dare I say hyperventilate?) with him about all the complex relationships that have emerged from my particular filmmaking practice. He said he understood completely, and that he’d decided to now only make archival films, no living people involved. The emotional toll was just too much.
Perhaps it would be better to bring people into my films through a more contractual or transparent arrangement where everything was laid out clearly. Then the people in front of my camera would have clear-cut roles. They could anticipate what I would be saying and how they were going to respond. This way, there might be fewer regrets, less instances of someone saying something they wished they hadn’t.
About 10 years ago, I started to ask people to sign film releases that would ostensibly clarify all of the potential problems that might arise. I try to convince myself that I am doing my professional best to acknowledge the rights of the person who signed on the proverbial dotted line, and theoretically, such documents also protect me. Unfortunately, their existence does nothing to relieve my anxiety, as asking people to “perform their lives” in front of my camera necessitates creating a fraught, sometimes unresolved arrangement that I find deeply intimidating.
Facing these haunting dynamics was fundamental to my impulse to make my latest feature, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, an essay film that examines the nature of all sorts of fleeting relationships I’ve had over the course of life. For the past 40 years, I’ve collected business cards given to me by strangers. Now in this digital era, these names, numbers and addresses, stored in a box in my house, have taken on an uncanny resonance. The first step in this 10-year filmmaking journey involved choosing seven cards out of the hundreds. I needed to find out why meeting the people who gave them to me had left such an imprint on my consciousness.
Before I committed to using this cache of cards, I grappled with their legacy as material objects. I learned that the standard size for a business card is 3.5 inches by 2 inches; almost every card is the same, in this way. It’s the people “behind” the cards who are so distinct. I also learned as much as I could about the social provenance of the cards themselves. In Japan, for example, the manner by which a recipient (me!) treats the presenter’s card is indicative of how the recipient will treat the presenter. Actions such as folding the card, or placing the card in one’s back pocket are considered disrespectful. Perhaps how I “treated” the card could tell me something about my relationship to its original owner.
For me, the cards were simply a jumping off point for thinking about what French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari envisioned as “the body without organs,” a swirling storm of psychic energy that creates an affect that I could not ignore. What I wanted to explore was how these cards illuminated and obscured the essence of a human being – semiotically and interpersonally. I was deeply interested in working with the trajectories that transpired between us, both in our initial meetings and later, far later, as I restaged our interactions in my memory.
Each of the cards presented something challenging – an awkwardness or ambivalence that forced me to think more deeply about documentary subjects, participants, informants … or whatever term you might use to refer to the people in front of the camera. The messier the production of the film became, the more I learned about the process.
Here are a few of the people who “made the cut”:
A retired German film festival programmer. While I am filming with her, this woman – born in the early 1940s – recounts the war she experienced and somehow misunderstood as a child. In our recorded conversation, she remembers, “The Jewish girls one day weren’t there any longer. You didn’t see the action, but you saw the results. How is that possible?” Now more than three quarters of a century after the end of World War II, our conversation opens up my own thinking, as an American Jew, about the genocide in Gaza today. Reckoning with these issues in my own life as I make public my own criticisms of the Israeli government adds another layer to my professional interactions with German film organizations. I worry for almost a year about how my friend will feel about being in a film that makes clear my own politics.
A gay artist who faced censorship and persecution from Homeland Security during and after a specious and controversial conviction for having child pornography in his computer. I ask myself if I should reach out to someone I met more than 30 years ago who was involved in such a fraught situation. In making documentary films, does establishing a commitment to a subject necessarily announce our positionality? I wonder if I need to know the truth about what actually happened. I wonder if it matters. After an extensive period of indecision, my own internal confusion forces me to seek him out for a conversation and perhaps a filmmaking relationship. What happens is beyond what I could ever have imagined. We spend more than a year in constant conversation, developing an interwoven series of scenes that articulate his painful story. Through my work with my editor Emily Packer, we develop a story that parallels Oscar Wilde’s 1895 conviction for sodomy, his banishment to a work camp, and his early death. All of this comes through in my voiceover, uncomfortably and, I hope, with transparence.
A Syrian chef and mother I met on a documentary film set. I make a date to shoot with her, but she cancels just hours before our appointment. She tells me that there was an emergency and that she needed to go to Michigan right away. I am not interested in the truth, but rather the fact that she has taken control. Something tells me that she is not scared of me per se, but of what I would extract from her through the apparatus of the camera. Extraction has become the geological trope for something we all do in documentary films. Her refusal to engage with my camera forces me to think about the inherent power imbalance between a director and her subject. Ultimately, her only presence in the film comes through when I cook a traditional Syrian dinner and “think out loud,” through voice-over narration, about her absence. Her existence is only articulated in the minds of my audience, never before their eyes.
A former therapist whose advice changed my life. For two years, I look for her and fail. Luckily, my enthusiasm for hybrid cinematic inventions provides the opportunity to create a kind of speculative staging of what could have happened but never did. Once I realize that the search for my subject is not as intriguing to me as the staging of it in my imagination, I release myself to an extraordinarily generative interaction with a New York City actress who takes on the challenge of becoming my long-lost therapist. We spend a summer role-playing and filming our evolving discoveries of each other. I am working with an actress, and there is no need for her to reveal anything real about herself. Our interactions are closer to those of a narrative film. The social contract is clear
In her book Suite for Barbara Loden, author Nathalie Léger wonders if she really wants to learn anything about Loden, the beloved and complicated actor-director of Wanda: “I find myself wavering between wanting to know nothing and wanting to know everything, writing only on condition that I know nothing, or writing only on condition that I omit nothing.” Reading these words from one of the most introspective and uncanny film writers I have ever encountered supports my desire to be released from the rigidity of the documentary paradigm. I take a fluid, hybrid approach to the making of my films and allow myself to confront the two extremes of my practice as an artist. I embrace the uncompromising strictures of the real and the unformed, ever-expanding space of the imagined.
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 Groundruns 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.
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.
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?
“The official cinema all over the world is running out of breath,” declared the New American Cinema Group in 1962. “It is morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring.” Cofounded the previous year by twenty-two New York artists and filmmakers, including Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Ken and Flo Jacobs, and Jack Smith, the NACG had decided to create their own distribution arm, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
According to Mekas, “the signal that something had to be done” came when Cinema 16—“at that time the most advanced avant-garde/independent film distribution organization”—rejected Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night (1958), a groundbreaking work that heralded “a totally new, subjective cinema.” Currently distributing work from a collection of nearly six thousand films, videos, and media artworks, all of them non-exclusively owned by their makers, the Coop will celebrate its sixty-fifth anniversary with a benefit gala on Friday at the Judson Memorial Church in New York.
Curator David Schwartz—who wrote a lovely tribute to artists and filmmakers Ken and Flo Jacobs last November, not long after both had passed away—notes that when Ken Jacobs was asked what the Coop meant to him, he said, “It’s like asking how do you feel about oxygen. It’s a connection with the world. Fortunately there are other outlets now, but this is the pioneer.” And there will be another tribute to the Jacobses at the gala.
There will also be awards as well as screenings. Nan Goldin, whose perpetually evolving project The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is currently on view at Gagosian in London through March 21, will receive the Jerome Hill Award.
For decades, Goldin was known primarily for her photography, but in 2022, Laura Poitras shifted the spotlight to her activism—specifically, her battle against the Sackler family over their role in the opioid crisis—with the documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which won the Golden Lion in Venice. Goldin’s support of Palestinians has drawn fire in Berlin and led to infighting and resignations at the Art Gallery of Ontario after the institution canceled the acquisition of Goldin’s moving-image work Stendhal Syndrome (2024), which is now on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery through April 6.
The Coop’s Marie Menken Award will go to Joan Jonas. “Few artists can claim to have initiated a new form of art,” writes Mitchell Herrmann for the Museum of Modern Art. “Joan Jonas, however, was crucial to the formation of two—video and performance. Beginning in the late 1960s, Jonas melded diverse influences (ranging from silent film to magic shows) and new technologies (such as portable video cameras and TV monitors) to explore the entanglement of the human body and its recorded image.” The exhibition Joan Jonas: The More-Than-Human World is on view at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, South Korea, through March 29.
The Maya Deren Award will be presented to Lynne Sachs. “At the center of Sachs’s work,” wrote Kat Sachs (no relation) for Notebook in 2021, “is often Sachs herself: her body, her voice, her words. And with those come the subjects that preoccupy her: family, feminism, language, place, and being. Over thirty years of making films, collage and installation art, writing prose and poetry, and orchestrating performances, often in conjunction with her moving-image work, Sachs has centered herself insomuch as she’s looking out at the world that encircles her, viewing it thoughtfully yet from a studied distance.”
Filmmaker M. M. Serra, the recipient of the Shirley Clarke Award, had been the Coop’s executive director for thirty years when she was succeeded by Tom Day in 2023. Serra oversaw the Coop’s certification as a nonprofit organization in 1993, steered it into the digital era, and, as the Coop notes, “was instrumental in the restoration of countless films, including the works of Edward Owens, Maya Deren, Storm De Hirsch, Cathy Cook, and multiple collaborations with the Stan VanDerBeek Estate. She successfully guided the Cooperative through four relocations and countless changes over the years.”
The Jack Smith Award will be presented to filmmaker, novelist, art collector, and raconteur John Waters. “Starting from breathtakingly smart-ass stunts,” writes Howard Hampton, “like staging a home-movie reenactment of the John F. Kennedy assassination in the short Eat Your Makeup (1968, with Divine, of course, as Jackie Kennedy), Waters assembled a photogenic stock company of dropouts, delinquents, and weirdos. Building on the anarchic playpen wallow of his first feature, Mondo Trasho (1969), and the more cultivated acid-trip finishing school that was Multiple Maniacs (1970), by Pink Flamingos [1972] Waters had developed a viable aesthetic: rattling, spasmodic, and expressively incongruous.”
The Jonas Mekas Award will honor the Jack Smith Archive, which was saved by artist Penny Arcade and critic J. Hoberman before it was sold to Gladstone Gallery in 2008. Writing for Artforum in 2011 about Thanks for Explaining Me, the Gladstone exhibition of Smith’s work, Hoberman noted that the “terminally underground, wildly uncommercial photographer, filmmaker, performance artist, and all-around difficult personality’s resistance to a show such as this was . . . part of the show.”
Before the evening gala, the Coop will present a series of screenings on Friday from eleven in the morning to three in the afternoon. The program: Serra’s NYC/Turner/Nightfall/PPII/Framed (1984–1987), Sachs’s House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991), Jonas’s Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), Goldin’s You Never Did Anything Wrong (Part 1) (2024), Ken Jacobs’s Little Stabs at Happiness (1960), Smith’s Hot Air Specialists (1980), and Waters’s Multiple Maniacs.
Some filmmakers are known for their documentary works. Others for their narrative films. Still others—the better filmmakers (for me), generally—do not fit comfortably into either category. Or any category whatsoever.
Poet / artist / filmmaker Lynne Sachs is one of the later. During a brief tour of Northern California for a variety of events (partially illustrated below), Jonathan Marlow, SV Archive [Scarecrow Video] Executive Director, took an opportunity to meet at a small café in the East Bay (recommended by former Pacific Film Archive programmer Kathy Geritz and former Views from the Avant-Garde programmer Mark McElhatten, a short stroll from their home).
[Individuals referenced (in order-of-appearance): Lynne Sachs. Jonathan Marlow. Kathy Geritz. Mark McElhatten. Kathleen Quillian. Gilbert Guerrero. Betty Leacraft. Meryl Streep. Bradley Eros. Robert Beck. Brian Frye. Jeanne Liotta. Mark Street. Dan Rowan. Dick Martin. Hansel. Gretel. Jerome Fandor. Fernando Pessoa. Ira Sachs. Peter Hujar. Bette Davis. Dana Sachs. Marguerite Duras. Chantal Akerman. Louis Massiah. Angela Haardt. Heinrich Heine. Walter Benjamin. Lawrence Brose. Oscar Wilde. Matt Wolf. Paul Reubens. G. Anthony Svatek. Maya Street-Sachs. Noa Street-Sachs. Boris Torres. Kirsten Johnson. Viva. Felix. Rae Wright. Lori Felker. Werner Herzog. Heddy Honigmann. Adam Curtis. Stephen Vitiello. Emily Packer. Ana Siqueira. Claire Lasolle. Gunvor Nelson. Carolee Schneemann. Barbara Hammer. Dorothy Wiley. Robert Nelson. William Wiley. Lonzie Odie Taylor.] [conversation already in progress in Oakland, California, 2025 November]
Hammer to Nail: Do go on about Shapeshifters, a very wonderful place! A very wonderful family enterprise.
Lynne Sachs: It is also a really good place for a performance (which is basically what Kathleen [Quillian]* and I were doing). She even was in costume! The whole conceit was built around lint. I’ve done a few book readings like this, always tailored to the space. This was probably the eighth. I discovered that she was into lint. I love the idea of lint because it comes from the hair on our bodies, little bits of skin, some fabric. She collects it because she is a sewist. *[ed. Proprietor of Shapeshifters with Gilbert Guerrero, a remarkable microcinema / microbrewery in Oakland.]
HTN: You both have that in common. At the conclusion of EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE, you’re in the midst of needlework renderings of your drawings. There must be a show at some point of those pieces?
LS: I didn’t really go very far with the sewing. As a kind of trope or a connection—when we’re pulling the thread out—it creates a tactile trajectory, from her back to me and me back to her. But Betty [Leacraft, in the film and in life]…
HTN: …she is a captivating character!
LS: She is. She is a force of nature! She really, really, really wanted to come to Amsterdam [for the premiere of EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam/IDFA]. It would be difficult for her to get around there. Whenever I find out where the U.S. premiere will be, she’ll be there for that.
HTN: What is evident—from not just this film but all of your work—is that you’re very interested in making the seams of filmmaking fairly apparent. In this instance, you’re directing her actions (and those direction remain in the documentary). “You need to put your hand in the frame.” She was resisting every part of it.
LS: She even says, “I’m not Meryl Streep!” Streep is mentioned twice in the film. When she says her name, that actually led me to think about all of the different things that a documentary expects of a subject. To be as charismatic as an actor. Performing as a character. There is a paradigm in documentary—which I don’t follow at all, really—that says you have to build your narrative. That is not a word I use often. You build [a narrative] around a character people can identify with or people feel appalled by.
HTN: That goes back to a whole formula of literature. I love literature but I don’t believe that literature needs to impose itself on us or our work. You definitely hold elements of literature throughout your films. The written word comes through consistently [and, occasionally, literally]. Not traditional storytelling, with a notion of a conflict and then a resolution. There is prose and then there is poetry. Poetry seems to be a stronger influence in your work.
LS: Totally. Yes.
HTN: Clearly, within the structure of EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE, you introduce a whole array of possibilities and then you narrow those possibilities. I have to admit, if I could ever be as effortlessly charming as Bradley Eros [another interviewee in the film], I would aspire to be that sort of person.
LS: I am so happy you said that. Absolutely.
HTN: Anytime I go to Anthology [Film Archives], he is there. He is a welcoming presence.
LS: Does he take your ticket?
HTN: The last time that I was there, he did! He was there. Jeanne Liotta was there that evening as well. A pleasant surprise.
LS: The thing about Bradley is that he breaks the mold! The idea that a [business] card is a distillation of who you are… A card doesn’t epitomize “who you are” but it is “how you want to present yourself.” Everything is represented. The way that you dress. The way that you act. It is all a performance of some sort.
HTN: The card is the piece that you take away. Everything leaving a trace, part of you is still there within the card. The process of handing the card to someone else, you’re basically giving a piece of yourself to that person.
LS: Exactly. I get that energy when I hold a card. It brings all that back. I remember this person. I believe they work as mnemonic devices. The thing about Bradley, I’d said, “I’d like to talk to you about this film.” The way that these pieces of paper can become the essence of a person. I didn’t even know if he had a card! I just thought he might have some ideas around them. I get to his house and he has a lifetime of cards from other people. Then he disrupts them in collages. He shoots holes through them. He becomes them! He breaks up everything about the model of a card. That was exciting to me. It was far beyond what I would’ve expected.
HTN: We initially met at the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema [which wasn’t a cinema but a series at Collective Unconscious], along with his then co-conspirator / co-host / co-programmer Brian Frye. I could certainly relate to their impulse to exhibit otherwise nearly-impossible-to-see work and share that work with other people. [ed. Both Sachs and Marlow are on the Board of the Canyon Cinema Foundation with Frye.]
LS: I didn’t even live in New York at that time. We [Sachs and filmmaker Mark Street, one of the cinematographers on EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE] lived in Baltimore. We would come up and go to the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema. It was like going to see [Dan] Rowan and [Dick] Martin.
HTN: Eros and Frye, in their introductions, were opposites.
LS: One was very tall, the other not. They were kind of foils for each other in a way. They were sweetly glib and charming.
HTN: It wasn’t an affectation. They weren’t trying to be different. They just were different. Similar things were happening in San Francisco and Brooklyn and Vancouver and Seattle and Chicago and elsewhere with ambitious individuals creating nontraditional spaces to screen work. I’ve exhibited films in all of those cities (and others), as have you. This way of talking about time and space(s) has much to do with your documentary.
LS: You don’t know that you’re in an era until it is actually ends.
HTN: You hardly know that it was even a phase of your life.
LS: A turning point. A chapter, until you can finally look back at it. The cards gave me that chance to think about the passages of time in which I was doing something consistently. Or maybe a period of time in which health issues were overwhelming. Or another period of time where I was traveling a lot or when I had young children. The cards are like little punctuation marks for all of that. The thing is that they are only punctuation marks for the most part. They’re not whole personal epochs. They’re little moments in time. People talk about Hansel and Gretel and their little crumbs. The thing is that I didn’t leave them behind. I brought them with me.
HTN: I should admit at this point that I was very nervous watching the film because I knew that I was included in those stacks of cards. I have given you various cards over the years—for Fandor and San Francisco Cinematheque, in particular—at some point. The moments that were particularly enlightening for me was seeing assorted cards in there for individuals whom I know or once knew. That brought up extension within the film and memories of folks I haven’t thought about in quite a while.
LS: I am glad that happened to you because I’m really intrigued by a film that can do that. Films that take you to another space. It takes you along my trajectory but, in the end, you walk out thinking about your own.
HTN: Not everyone wants that from a film. Although I don’t know how else you would move beyond a project that is theoretically about one person to a film that is ultimately about all people.
LS: Characters could have various different personas and identities. It reminds me of The Book of Disquiet where Fernando Pessoa says, “Everything that surrounds us is part of us.” That was very meaningful to me.
HTN: To me as well.
LS: Both experientially and, in this case, what it is to have a shared consciousness with another person, even in a fleeting way. That was very important for me to understand.
HTN: Why do you think it is? I had felt it was a strange synchronicity that your brother [Ira Sachs] was visiting the Bay Area at the same time.
LS: Actually, he is not here. He was supposed to be here yesterday.
HTN: At the Roxie screening [of PETER HUJAR’S DAY].
LS: I think he did the discussion on Zoom because of COVID. He was here spiritually even though he should’ve been here in body. We didn’t know of the overlap until [mutual friend] Kathy Geritz told us!
HTN: Two different threads! Simultaneously. Why do you think it is that you and your brother both became filmmakers?
LS: I will tell you that I’m the older one, by four years. When we were growing up, we didn’t both think, “I want to be a filmmaker!” Definitely not the term “filmmaker” or even to make movies. He was really involved in the theater world. He was also the kind of kid who watched Bette Davis movies and things like that. I was a kid who liked to write poetry and I did that for years. I was probably more into photography and drawing and things like that.
HTN: You’re both very artistic. That doesn’t come from your parents, necessarily.
LS: Definitely not. Not at all. My mother said that she gave us a pretty nice box of crayons.
HTN: There is a sister in-between.
LS: Dana [Sachs]. She is a writer. We’re all drawn to the arts! We are. Our parents were not. My mother would say, “Well, I would take the kids to museums!” She wasn’t obsessive about that. I love art history and I can talk a lot about different artistic periods. When I took art history classes, people were memorizing dates and looking at slides. I thought that was oppressive. I think Ira probably feels the same way. But we drank it up.
HTN: Were you exhibiting your photographs before you started making films? Or was this happening in parallel?
LS: I was very involved with painting. In college, I did a lot of painting and then I was in the more academic world. Then I went to live in France for my junior year abroad. I saw a few films by Marguerite Duras and [Chantal] Akerman. It was a total switch! I found that you could bring in photography, you could work with people, you could write poems and they can all go in the same vessel. That was incomprehensible to me before that.
HTN: What did you see, specifically?
LS: GOLDEN EIGHTIES!
HTN: Appropriate.
LS: I never finished with the Streep story! She is mentioned in two places. There is the one with [shape-shifter of textiles] Betty Leacraft. Louis Massiah asked me to teach a class on film and performance in Philadelphia. Only two people took it and she was one of them! I got to know her. It was meant to be. Years later, I wanted to find her. I actually had to hire a kind of make-believe detective that Louis helped me find because none of the phone numbers or emails on her card worked. You know, when you’re in this field, the more obstacles that come your way, the more that you say, “I’m meant to do this.” Because I make hybrid films, if I didn’t find her, I was going to invent her! Then I did find her with the help of the faux-detective. I went down to Philadelphia to talk to her about the first time that we’d met and about this notion of teachers and students. Yet I felt I’d learned more from her than she had learned from me.
HTN: The framing is fairly tight on her.
LS: We’re sitting there together and I said, “Could you use your hands this way?” The way you might direct an actor. Then she says, “I’m not Meryl Streep!”
HTN: You’re asking her to do things that probably felt unnatural for her.
LS: She said, “I’m not going to be anybody but myself.” She invokes Meryl Streep because she is the epitome of someone who can transform herself. But she comes up again in the film in a totally different place. There is a woman in the film named Angela Haardt. You might know her.
HTN: She used to run [Internationalen Kurzfilmtage] Oberhausen. When her voice is first heard in the film, I thought, “I know this voice!” She is a wonderful person.
LS: She is a really, really, really special person. They all are! Angela and I talk about the Holocaust. She was a child during the Holocaust in Germany and we talked about the fact that she didn’t really understand what was happening around her when she was growing up. I’m using the word “Holocaust” here but—when I was growing up—we didn’t use the word. We talked about World War II and we talked about concentration camps. But there wasn’t one word that invoked everything. I was wondering why that word came to me later in life—as a teenager—but my parents and grandparents were not using that word. Where did it come from? I did some research and there was a television miniseries called THE HOLOCAUST and Meryl Streep was the star! The series popularized it. Then it became the Shoah.
HTN: This goes back to what you were saying before about the notion that the era you’re in gets defined later.
LS: That is exactly right. Exactly. One way to think of it is in terms of copyright. We wait for the copyright to lapse in order to reinterpret work. In poetry, that idea that something can’t be touched until some period after it has been in the world for a while [doesn’t really exist]. We can engage with it now. It is what was happening with Heinrich Heine and other poets of that era. Folks were immediately inspired to take these ideas and adapt them and use them in different ways. Angela Haardt reads THE SILESIAN WEAVERS [in the film, about the Weavers’ Revolt in 1844, the same year that the poem was written].
Angela is a very erudite person. A person who knows about cinema and many, many more things. She is someone who enlarges my worldview. That is one of the reasons that we enjoy reading and meeting new people. They make you think about things in new ways. The next afternoon, after we filmed, I am on the subway underneath Berlin and I am going with her through Heinrich-Heine-Platz. Seeing it with an audience [in Amsterdam], I will be very interested to see their reaction to this section about the Holocaust. Like Walter Benjamin’s idea of the “angel of history” where you’re moving forward but you’re always looking back. I am thinking about Gaza and my own culpability. What is it to be a Jewish person today? All those things went through my mind [during this scene].
HTN: You decided to include an individual where you’re conflicted about things you have discovered about them. Those decisions are part of the running narration of the film, to decide whether to remove their story and potentially leave them and their story on the cutting-room floor.
LS: If I decided to remove them, then why am I even doing this? Whether it is misinformation, am I then not allowing this person to speak for themselves? If I’d engaged in removing it, I’d be preventing them from telling their side of a story. A story that other people are using anecdotally or for whatever ends they might have.
HTN: In the context of your references to the Holocaust, some who died in the concentration camps are often excluded from the conversation.
LS: That is my own personal connection to what is happening in Gaza. These are the ways in which a huge Palestinian population within Israel are not included in this larger dialogue.
HTN: It is a very good question and there is a less-than-good answer for it. It is all terrible. Disproportionately terrible. Terrible in proportions difficult to fully comprehend.
LS: One of the things that I came to terms within this film is that when you’re working with reality—or you’re working in a documentary practice—sometimes things become difficult. They’re difficult logistically or they’re difficult emotionally. You’re traumatized by something and you say, “You know what? I’m just going to take that part out because I haven’t resolved that.” There is a man—Lawrence Brose—in the film who had been through an extremely traumatic legal case involving Homeland Security, accusing him of possessing child pornography. I had his card from thirty years earlier.
HTN: When you initially reached-out to Lawrence, were you fully aware of the case?
LS: I reached out to him because of this. I reached out to him because I couldn’t resolve how I felt. We make these conclusions based on impressions or facts. We also realize that the facts we thought we’d collected might be misinformed. Did he have child pornography or not? Why was it that his legal situation catapulted him into the public arena? Many people knew about the case. I had friends who said, “Well, he didn’t make the pornography.” Others immediately avoided him over these accusations. Then other people said he was accused of something that he didn’t even do at all. I kept wondering if it was my job as an acquaintance of his to resolve that. I decided that the harder it was for me to understand his life, the more I had to insist to include him in this film. I reached out to him during the early days of the pandemic and we did a series of Zoom conversations. Interviews for hours and hours, over several years.
HTN: Was it his choice initially to be in silhouette?
LS: I wanted to give him that option. Then he could just talk [without concern]. I said, “We’ll just use the audio.” He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to be visible. The more that I talked to him, the more I realized that he had been a victim of a state system that that was targeting people who were different. People who were gay. People who were artists. Then he also explained that it wasn’t even material he had downloaded. Nevertheless, I still was bewildered by my own ambivalence.
Then he started to articulate the parallels between his life and the life of Oscar Wilde. He had been targeted by the system and sent to prison. It essentially destroyed him. In Larry’s case, he was sent to Attica. He was punished for who he was rather than what he had [supposedly] done. We worked together on getting the story correct. Then, about eight months ago, I called him and I said, “I’ve finished the film. I’d love for you to see it before I show it anywhere.” He said, “You better bring it soon because I am going to die in a month.”
HTN: I noticed that acknowledgement at the end of the film.
LS: That was on a Friday. On Sunday, I flew to Buffalo and I showed him the film and he gave me his blessing, which was relief. We both had a cathartic moment. It was very profound to talk to him about the film. He was the first person to see it completed! He did die a month later.
HTN: Have you seen the documentary by Matt Wolf about Paul Reubens?
LS: Not yet.
HTN: A section of the film deals with similar issues of being railroaded for having child pornography. In his case, these were primarily artworks that he had purchased. The authorities came in and accused him of having naked photographs of young boys. They confiscated it all. Granted, this is a bit of an oversimplification.
LS: With Lawrence Brose, he knew how media works and the hierarchies of a filmmaker and their subject. He was constantly apologizing to me. He was saying, “Did you get what you want?” Whereas Betty Leacraft had a clear idea about who she is [and how she should appear in the film]. If you are going to be photographing her, she needs to define the terms. Different forms. Different grammars.
HTN: How do you feel about being a subject? Because you are often a parallel subject within your own film.
LS: You have more control over how you appear in your own work. It is interesting that you say that. I mean, I definitely grow older! There is an image of me in Germany in the late-1980s. The Berlin Wall is still up. Then there is an image of me in my sixties.
HTN: There was never any question that you would be the narrator? You were never concerned about distancing yourself from the telling?
LS: I could have. I could have distanced myself a little more by using the voice of someone else. I actually thought about writing in the third-person at times.
HTN: Or having your daughter(s) [Maya Street-Sachs and Noa Street-Sachs] as surrogate(s)?
LS: Maybe that’ll be my next film.
HTN: I was thinking more in terms of the ways in which you have a kind of “rogues gallery” of collaborators these days. Consistent individuals involved in the shooting and editing. You keep pulling a reliable group on individuals together to collaborate. Does that then make you recent films variations on a theme?
LS: You noticed, for example, G. Anthony Svatek.
HTN: Indeed.
LS: You know him very well.
HTN: I adore Anthony!
LS: Do you want to know what footage he shot? It is very beautiful. He shot the footage at the end with the thread, the sewing.
HTN: That sequence is remarkable. Truly beautiful. The ways in which you’ve inserted the drawings throughout and then how these drawings are animated. The crafting of those drawings with the needlework is astounding.
LS: Like trajectories. I called them vectors. I was reading about what you’d call affect theory. I wish something on you and you create an emotional response in me. All of those come from this whole conversation.
HTN: Every relationship is some form of compromise. Friendships, couplings. Ideally, those compromises are equal. Sometimes they’re greatly out of balance. I either open up to you or I build a wall.
LS: I feel punctured by you or I feel enthralled by you. I think about all of those things. I wanted to say that and many of those things at the same time. I think the stand-ins for me—at another point in my life—were my niece and nephew.
HTN: Who are in the film, like a Greek chorus. They’re very charming.
LS: Those are Ira’s kids. Ira and [painter / artist] Boris [Torres]. […and cinematographer / filmmaker Kirsten Johnson]
HTN: I was wondering. I presumed that they were relations but I didn’t know how they were related!
LS: They grow-up in the film because we started when they were around eight. They’re twins [Viva and Felix] and they’re very perceptive. But they challenge me.
HTN: They keep asking you questions about the purpose of your work.
LS: They’re absolutely the Greek chorus! They’re just these kids sitting on a bed, asking, “Why are you doing this? What are you thinking about this?”
HTN: Wise beyond their years, seemingly.
LS: They’re also silly about these interactions. They come up with these ideas for the cards that I never would’ve imagined. “Why don’t you put them in a bottle and throw it out to the ocean?” Felix says, “Why don’t you put them on the wall of your house and then open it up?” That is basically what I did! He understands time. There were things that came to my mind from watching a lot of movies with Ira [as a kid]. Putting cards in a bottle and throwing them out to sea. The message in a bottle. The idea of a house containing your whole history. Or putting the cards in balloons and then letting them float away. Then they become someone else’s property.
HTN: They propose the ending. [spoiler] The box goes back on the shelf.
LS: Thank you for noticing.
HTN: There is an element of you on that shelf. You and an assortment of folks that you’ve met.
LS: I’ve told people about this film and many have said, “Oh, I used to have a box of cards, too, but I threw them all out.” They don’t take up a lot of space! But you’re actually throwing out these stories.
HTN: It is difficult for me to let go of them primarily because there are so many people who are now gone. Either physically gone or they’re merely not a part of my life anymore.
LS: It constantly brings you back to that moment [of meeting].
HTN: What was the dialogue with that person where they felt that they wanted to continue this conversation? “Please stay in touch.” Many of them I remember completely. I remember the circumstances of our meeting. Others, I do not recall at all. The actor playing the therapist addresses this directly. She persists in interpreting the limited information you’ve given her.
LS: She says these things but very quietly. You could miss it! I wouldn’t have taken [what she said] literally. We’re always acting on camera [and off]. We are.
HTN: Did you prompt her to ask these questions?
LS: I told her a little bit about what had happened in my life when a therapist or maybe a nurse—I’ve conflated these two together—had said to me, “If you want to have a baby, just make it happen.” I was literal about it and that is not what she [Rae Wright, the actor playing the therapist] thought about that. She and I had a series of conversations about it and she really moved into a very reflective, therapeutic mode while we were making the film. She challenged me in really tough ways. I didn’t expect her to do that.
HTN: I could see that you were unprepared with how to respond to these questions. Which is why it doesn’t seem like she is acting [and she isn’t identified as an actor until the end-credits]. You have seen Lori Felker’s PATIENT?
LS: I have seen it.
HTN: It operates in a similar space where you don’t recognize that the people you’re watching are actors.
LS: Exactly.
HTN: They’re not what they appear to be. Your relationship with what you’re seeing changes the moment you realize that what you’ve just seen is not what you believed you were seeing. When I saw that in the end-credits [of EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE], I’d re-thought through your conversations with her. It was clear on first-viewing that your reaction was genuine. You weren’t complying but she was performing. Those interactions were extremely interesting.
LS: It changed everything. I wanted to include it [at the end] because I did not want to ruin that experience for the viewers. I sorted through all of that while making this film. I have come to see every narrative film as a documentary. A documentary of a bunch of people getting together, playing make-believe. Unless it is Candid Camera, most documentaries are forms of performance. There is a certain kind of contrived intention to it. There is a bit of a theater-game going on. We were playing a theater-game but she [the actor playing the therapist] was considerably more clever than I was.
HTN: Well… She is a professional actor!
LS: True. Not every actor likes to improvise.
HTN: Also true.
LS: Many do not. She had been recommended to me by a friend. She took a lot of risks and we spent months and months working together. She really becomes a therapist for the surgery. She transformed from being an actor to being the actual thing!
HTN: For the premiere [at IDFA, mid-November], it seems as if audiences there are more accommodating of films which intersect at the margins of nonfiction and quasi-documentary. [Perhaps even venturing into the “ecstatic truth” realms of Werner Herzog, Heddy Honigmann, Adam Curtis and others.]
LS: I am excited for these screenings!
HTN: Will there be others associated with the film in-attendance?
LS: [Composer] Stephen Vitiello will be there as well as [editor] Emily Packer. She is coming with her mother! The three of us will be together [to speak about the film]. You know who else is going to be there? Someone we both know: Ana Siqueira [of the Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival].
HTN: I am immensely fond of Ana and the work she has done in Brazil! I was introduced to Ana at the same festival where I met Claire Lasolle [of FID Marseille]. Claire is among the cards pictured in your film! Connections! One of the catalysts for your visit to the Bay Area is a screening at BAMPFA of the work of [Swedish filmmaker and San Francisco Art Institute teacher] Gunvor Nelson which [Program III] includes your short CAROLEE, BARBARA & GUNVOR, along with RED SHIFT, TIME BEING and BEFORE NEED REDRESSED, her collaboration with Dorothy Wiley. Have you ever seen BLEU SHUT, their film with Robert Nelson and William Wiley?
LS: That is one of Bob’s films I’ve never seen.
HTN: It is one of my favourite shorts of all time!
LS: I will try to find it. I will be introducing the program and I have this fantastic document that she created for her students called “Notes on Editing.” I’ll send it to you when I get back [to Brooklyn]!
HTN: What was she like as a teacher [at SFAI]?
LS: I was looking at the notes from her and her handouts (which she hand-wrote in pencil along with other suggestions). In re-reading them, I realized how much of an effect she had on me. She did not like transparent cuts. She wanted you to notice negative space and she wanted these edits to be fierce. She wanted you to be in the world of the film, which definitely reflects the notion of “every content leaves a trace.” Each is a world for me. It is a period of time. I remember working on SERMONS AND SACRED PICTURES [about the life and work of Reverend L.O. Taylor], the final film for my degree, which I finished in 1989. I said [to Gunvor Nelson], “I have been working on this for two years. I really want to finish it!” She said to me, “You’re going to miss it!” It is interesting that projects like these are gifts of immersion. Gifts of totality.
HTN: All of them—each person, each project—leaves a trace.
