Available on DAFilms: https://americas.dafilms.com/director/7984-lynne-sachs Drawn and Quartered The House of Science: a museum of false facts Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam States of UnBelonging Same Stream Twice Your Day is My Night And Then We Marched Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor The Washing Society A Month of Single Frames Film About a Father Who
Available on Fandor:https://www.fandor.com/category-movie/297/lynne-sachs/ Still Life With Woman and Four Objects Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning The Washing Society The House of Science: a museum of false facts Investigation of a Flame Noa, Noa The Small Ones Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam Atalanta: 32 Years Later States of UnBelonging A Biography of Lilith The Task of the Translator Sound of a Shadow The Last Happy Day Georgic for a Forgotten Planet Wind in Our Hair Drawn and Quartered Your Day is My Night Widow Work Tornado Same Stream Twice
Available on Ovid:https://www.ovid.tv/lynne-sachs A Biography of Lillith Investigation of a Flame The Last Happy Day Sermons and Sacred Pictures Starfish Aorta Colossus States of Unbelonging Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam Your Day is My Night Tip of My Tongue And Then We Marched A Year of Notes and Numbers
Cinema Garage with Lynne Sachs – Sphere spherefestival.com July 18, 2021
In focus: Film About a Father Who Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.
With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a
face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes
contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the
uninhibited centre of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process,
Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the
skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter
discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.
Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created
cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and
cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film,
collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her highly self-reflexive films
explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader
historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit
connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.
The Artist : Lynne Sachs From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing directly the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany—sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.
Over her career, Sachs has been awarded
support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts,
the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened
at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the
Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, the
Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives
of her work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield
Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival
International Nuevo Cine in Havana, and China Women’s Film Festival. Her 2019
film “A Month of Single Frames” won the Grand Prize at Oberhausen Festival of
Short Films in 2020.
Lynne Sachs’s catalogue is
represented in North America by Canyon Cinema and
the Filmmaker’s
Cooperative with selected features at Cinema
Guild and Icarus Films.
Her work is distributed internationally by Kino Rebelde. In tandem with making
films, Lynne is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press
published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems.
In 2021, both the Edison Film Festival and
the Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center awarded
Lynne for her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields.
The Task of the Translator By Lynne Sachs 10 min. 2010 Premiere: Migrating Forms Film Festival, New York, NY May 2010
Lynne Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s
essay “The Task of the Translator” through three studies of the human body.
First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task
of a kind of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of
Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of
translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And
finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.
In “The Task of the Translator,” Lynne Sachs turns her original, probing eye to the ways in which we struggle to put words to the horrifying realities of War. In her subtle, trademark shifting between the intimate, personal space of a few individuals and the cavernous, echoing ambiguity of larger, moral questions, Sachs stakes out unsettling territory concerning what it means–what it feels like–to be made into unwitting voyeurs of Mankind’s most grotesque doings. At the same time we find she is also talking, with startling deftness, about the way that all artists are, in the end, engaged in the task of the translator: stuck with the impossible task of rendering imponderables, unutterable, and unsayables, into neat representations to be consumed, digested, perhaps discarded. We are not, however, left despairing; a pair of hands, caught again and again in the beautiful motion of gesticulation, is far from helpless or mute. This image captures, rather, the supreme eloquence of the effort to translate, and the poignant hope represented by this pungent, memorable film itself.”Shira Nayman author of The Listener and Awake in the Dark, both of which “ explore the havoc historical trauma plays with the psyche.
The Small Ones By Lynne Sachs 3 min. colour sound 2007 (from 16mm and video) Screenings: Tribeca Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Black Maria FilmFest (Award), Dallas Video Festival, Pacific Film Archive, MadCatFilm Fest
During WWII, the US Army Graves Registration
Service hired the filmmaker’s Hungarian cousin, Dr Sandor Lenard, to
reconstruct the bones–small and large–of dead American soldiers. This
elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of
excerpts of Sandor’s letters to Sachs’ family, highly abstracted war imagery
and home movies of children at a birthday party.
“Profound. The soundtrack is amazing. The image at the end of the girl with the avocado seed is so hopeful. Good work.” – Barbara Hammer, filmmaker
“Photograph of Wind” by Lynne Sachs 16mm, b&w and colour, 4 min. 2001 SCREENINGS: San Francisco Film Festival, Onion City Film Festival
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been
told that the word Maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her
growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not
something I can grasp but rather–like the wind–something I feel tenderly
brushing across my cheek.
“Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” – Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
We strive to identify the problems of multidisciplinary objects and find a concrete and practical panacea with the extensive and experiential applications across the streams of science, art and social philosophy to construct an alternative culture in earth.
The most important question for us in a post-pandemic period was:
Do we really need a film festival?
Even when we haven’t return to a total recover, we still need
vaccination the total of our population, people are now suffering so many
losts, and the virus is still out there.
But the answer to all of this is questions is yes! we need to make
reality, the festival again here in Banja Luka. If we believe in images as a
language of encounter, in the role of the independent voices and the power of
the community, then a film festival is not a distraction or a non-essential
activity. It’s actually a necessary coming together.
We want to make sense of our moment, and to try to re-imagine how
important is the art in our past time of isolation, in our daily life and in
our dreams of a common future.
See you in the cinema soon, and please:
Don’t forget your mask!
About selection
The selection of this year proposes a fluid cartography that
explore our current situation as humans. It is more than evident that the
pandemic changed the whole society and these dramatic changes and new scenarios
also affect films, cinemas and the way “we see”. The current situation with
Covid-19, will also be reflected in this year’s festival program, not only in
terms of safety measures and limited audience, but also in the form we propose
the narrative of this edition that we name it: Re-imagine audio-visions: The
present as our future.
For the image of this edition (the poster) we selected the
portrait the now famous cover of the Italian magazine La Domenica del Corrier
(16, December of 1962), by Walter Molino, where we can see a saturated street
of New York, with people in their individual transportation, in a kind of an
“individual-personal bubble”, that is actually a “singoletta” (personal
bicycle), imagined by Molino as a solution for traffic, but with the pandemic
and the social isolation in context, we cannot avoided to connected his
retro-futuristic creative projection of our surreal present, here is why we
re-call the edition; The present as our future. With this premise in mind, our
selection departs precisely from the future. The first day of Cinema Parallels,
we will open with: Space Dogs režija: Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter, followed by
Lúa vermella režija: Lois Patiño, both films projecting contexts in resemble
mirror format, we will see realities from an equidistant visualities.
With this premise in mind, our selection departs precisely from
the future. The first day of Cinema Parallels, we will open with: Space Dogs
režija: Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter, followed by Lúa vermella režija: Lois
Patiño, both films projecting contexts in resemble mirror format, we will see
realities from an equidistant visualities.
The second day of the festival we will have Srećan Božić, Yiwu
(Merry Christmas, Yiwu) režija: Mladen Kovačević, followed by LYNNE SACHS
TRIBUTE with the Washing Society, Tornado, The Small Ones and E•pis•to•lar•y:
Letter to Jean Vigo. The second day we are focused on a retro-visor mirror,
about our social and geo-political contexts, and the last day of festival is
dedicated to the personal, to our bodies, to our house and intimate spaces,
this day we take “our dressing mirror”, we will project Things We Dare Not Do,
režija: Bruno Santamaría.
We will close with a regional documentary selection of shorts that
we name PARALLELS JOY: Sunce, vrati se (Sunshine, Come Back) režija: Milica
Jokić, Korijeni režija: Stefan Tomić, Osamdeset dinara (Eighty Serbian Dinars)
režija: Inma de Reyes, University of Disaster and Dreaming of Prey to Grasp
Shadow režija: Radenko Milak and Zašto mama vazda plače? (Why is Mom Always
Crying?) režija: Karmen Obrdalj.
The pandemic has severely hit the entire audiovisual sector and
the situation remains critical in many places, therefore, it is important to
organize a film festival, but also, is important to support international and
local filmmakers and films. We think in the cinema as a place of resistance; we
believe that seeing a movie with other people in a theatre is a powerful and
irreplaceable experience, and also is a key place for the encounter with other
visions and expand our points of view, at the end, is all about to be exposed
to different contexts, realities and images, and from there try to understand
us more and more as society, as humans.
See you at the cinema!
Adriana Trujillo
Program
Thursday, June 10
18.00 Festival
Opening
18.15Space
Dogs / Dir. Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter / 91 min. / 2019
/Austria – Germany
(Q&A:
with Simon Peter, Sound Designer of the film)
20.30 Red Moon Tide Dir.
Lois Patiño / 84 min. / 2020 / Spain
Friday, June 11
18.00 Merry Christmas, Yiwu / Dir.
Mladen Kovacevic / 94 min. / Serbia
(panel discussion with representatives of the Confucius Institute, University
of Banja Luka) 20.30 FOCUS ON LYNNE SACHS The Washing Society / 44
min. / 2018 / United States Tornado / 4
min. / 2002 / United States The Small Ones / 3
min. / 2006 / United States E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to
Jean Vigo / 5 min. / 2021 / United States
Saturday, June 12
18.00 Things We Dare Not Do / Dir. Bruno Santamaría / 75 min. / 2020 / México 20.00 PARALLELS
JOY: DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM SELECTION
Sunshine, Come Back/ Dir. Milica
Jokic / 12:23 / 2017 / Serbia The Roots / Dir. Stefan Tomic
/ 15:40 / 2020 / Bosnia and Herzegovina Eighty Serbian Dinars / Dir.
Inma de Reyes / 10 min. / 2019 / Serbia University
of Disaster / Dir. Radenko Milak / 13:21 / 2017 /
Bosnia and Herzegovina Dreaming of Prey to Grasp Shadow / Dir. Radenko Milak / 6:45 / Bosnia and Herzegovina Why is Mom Always Crying? /
Dir. Karmen Obrdalj / 15:38 / 2019 / Bosnia and Herzegovina
(Q&A: Panel with short film directors, producers, artist and filmmakers)
About
Cinema Parallels
Cinema
Parallels is devoted to supporting independent and innovative films, screening
cinema of the real in all it’s forms and diversity, through a special
curatorial selection of international and regional contemporary films in the
heart of the Balkans.
Cinema Parallels will celebrate its second edition during spring in Banja.
Cinema Parallels is organized by Video Kabinet developed with the support of
the Ministry of Culture of the Srpska Republic and in partnership with Gradsko
Pozorište Jazavac.
Background
The art
should ask questions, for which there are often no answers, that it is the
basis for the exchange of ideas. Films encourages critical thinking, freedom of
expression and creativity, and only then ceases to be goods and entertainment
and become culture and art. A culture makes the identity of a city, state, or
country. In this context, a festival of contemporary cinema is absolutely
necessary for Banja Luka as a epicenter of the Republic of Srpska.
Cinema
Parallels born in 2019, with the main idea to develop a place to share, an
encounter of unique points of views that are been able to question our world.
We are dedicated to program and support moving-image works with singular voices
in productions from all around the world in different formats, capturing
reality from a different perfective and a wide range of contemporary
non-fiction, and bring this productions to the city.
Last year,
our festival, like all other cultural projects was postpone.
We explored
the possibility of a virtual encounter, buy finally we decide to continue in
2021. We wait until now to recover experiences, audience and images, with the
firm and original purpose to keep confronting our world. Believing that films
are a point of encounter and a universal language, keeping the idea that in our
unprecedent time, conversations and encounters are now act of resistance.
http://www.kinorebelde.com/lynne-sachs-complete-filmography/ Kino Rebelde has created a retrospective that traces a delicate line connecting intimacy, power relations, violence, memory, migration, desire, love, and war in Lynne’s films. By looking at each of these works, we can see a director facing her own fears and contradictions, as well as her sense of friendship and motherhood. Moving from idea to emotion and back again, our retrospective takes us on a journey through Sachs’ life as a filmmaker, beginning in 1986 and moving all the way to the present.
With the intention of allowing her work to cross boundaries, to interpret and to inquire into her distinctive mode of engaging with the camera as an apparatus for expression, we are delighted to present 37 films that comprise the complete filmmography, so far, of Lynne Sachs as visual artist and filmmaker. Regardless of the passage of time, these works continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent and radical in their artistic conception.
About Kino Rebelde
Kino Rebelde is a Sales and Festival Distribution Agency created by María Vera in early 2017. Its exclusively dedicated to promotion of non-fiction cinema, hybrid narratives and experimental.
Based on the creative distribution of few titles by year, Kino Rebelde established itself as a “boutique agency”, working on a specialized strategy for each film, within its own characteristics, market potential, niches and formal and alternative windows.
This company supports short, medium and long feature films, from any country, with linear or non-linear narratives. They can be in development or WIP, preferably in the editing stage.
The focus: author point of view, pulse of stories, chaos, risk, more questions, less answers, aesthetic and politic transgression, empathy, identities, desires and memory.
Kino Rebelde was born in Madrid, but as its films, this is a nomadic project. In the last years María has been living in Lisbon, Belgrade and Hanoi and she’ll keep moving around.
About María Vera
Festival Distributor and Sales Agent born in Argentina. Founder of Kino Rebelde, a company focused on creative distribution of non-fiction, experimental and hybrid narratives.
Her films have been selected and awarded in festivals as Berlinale, IFFR Rotterdam, IDFA, Visions Du Réel, New York FF, Hot Docs, Jeonju IFF, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Sarajevo FF, Doclisboa and Viennale, among others.
María has a background as producer of socio-political and human rights contents as well as a film curator.Envelope
Lynne Sachs (1961) is an American filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances.
Working from a feminist perspective, Lynne weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with renowned musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project.
Between 1994 and 2009, Lynne directed five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany – sites affected by international war – where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own perception.
Over the course of her career, she has worked closely with film artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Min-ha.
“For more than thirty years, artist Lynne Sachs has constructed short, bold mid-length, and feature films incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, and observational documentary. Her highly self-reflexive films have variously explored the relations between the body, camera, and the materiality of film itself; histories of personal, social, and political trauma; marginalized communities and their labor; and her own family life, slipping seamlessly between modes, from documentary essays to diaristic shorts.” (Edo Choi, Assistant Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image)
Note: The following programs can be rented individually or as a package. A new video interview and between Lynne Sachs and series curator Edo Choi is also available as part of the rental fee.
For rental and pricing information, please contact: info@canyoncinema.com
All films are directed by Lynne Sachs. Program notes by Edo Choi.
Lynne Sachs in Conversation with Edo Choi, Assistant Curator at the Museum of the Moving Image
Program 1: Early Dissections In her first three films, Sachs performs an exuberant autopsy of the medium itself, reveling in the investigation of its formal possibilities and cultural implications: the disjunctive layering of visual and verbal phrases in Still Life with Woman and Four Objects; un-split regular 8mm film as a metaphorical body and site of intercourse in the optically printed Drawn and Quartered; the scopophilic and gendered intentions of the camera’s gaze in Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning. These experiments anticipate the range of the artist’s mature work, beginning with her first essayistic collage The House of Science: a museum of false facts. Itself an autopsy, this mid-length film exposes the anatomy of western rationalism as a framework for sexual subjugation via a finely stitched patchwork of sounds and images from artistic renderings to archival films, home movies to staged performances.
Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986, 4 mins.) –New HD transfer Drawn and Quartered (1987, 4 mins.) – new HD transfer Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987, 9 mins.) The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991, 30 mins.) – new HD transfer
Program 2: Family Travels One of Lynne Sachs’s most sheerly beautiful films, Which Way Is East is a simultaneously intoxicating and politically sobering diary of encounters with the sights, sounds, and people of Vietnam, as Sachs pays a visit to her sister Dana and the two set off north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. The film is paired here with a very different kind of family journey The Last Happy Day, recounting the life of Sachs’s distant cousin Sandor Lenard, a Jewish Hungarian doctor who survived the Second World War and was ultimately hired to reassemble the bones of dead American soldiers. Here Sachs journeys through time as opposed to space, as she assembles a typically colorful array of documentary and performative elements, including Sandor’s letters, a children’s performance, and highly abstracted war footage, to bring us closer to a man who bore witness to terrible things. This program also features The Last Happy Day’s brief predecessor, The Small Ones. Program running time: 73 mins.
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994, 33 mins.) – new HD transfer The Small Ones (2007, 3 mins.) The Last Happy Day (2009, 37 mins.)
Program 3: Time Passes Twenty years unspool over nine short films: portraits of Lynne Sachs’s children; visits with her mother, brother, niece and nephew; a tribute to the city where she lives; and scenes of sociopolitical trauma and protest. Nearly all shot on super 8mm or 16mm, and often silent, each work is at once a preservation of a moment and a record of change, seamlessly weaving together the candid and the performed gesture, the public and the private memory, in a simultaneously objective and subjective posture toward the passing of time. Program running time: 51 mins.
Photograph of Wind (2001, 4 mins.) Tornado (2002, 4 mins.) Noa, Noa (2006, 8 mins.) Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008, 11 mins.) Same Stream Twice (2012, 4 mins.) Viva and Felix Growing Up (2015, 10 mins.) Day Residue (2016, 3 mins.) And Then We Marched (2017, 3 mins.) Maya at 24 (2021, 4 mins.)
Program 4: Your Day Is My Night 2013, 64 mins. “This bed doesn’t necessarily belong to any one person,” someone says early in Your Day Is My Night. It could be the metaphorical thesis of this film, perhaps Lynne Sachs’s most self-effacing and meditative work. A seamless blend of closely observed verité footage, interpretive performance, and confessional monologues and interviews, the film doesn’t document so much as create a space to accommodate the stories and experiences of seven Chinese immigrants from ages 58 to 78 who live together in a “shift-bed” apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Sachs’s quilted sense of form achieves a new level of refinement and delicacy in collaboration with her cameraman Sean Hanley and her editor Amanda Katz, as she works with the participants to exhume a collective history of migration and struggle.
Program 5: Tip of My Tongue 2017, 80 mins. Sachs’s richly generative Tip of My Tongue finds the filmmaker responding to her 50th birthday by gathering twelve members of her generational cohort—friends and peers all born between 1958 and 1964, and originating as far as Cuba, Iran, and Australia—to participate in the creation of a choral work about the convergent and divergent effects history leaves upon those who live it. From the Kennedy assassination to Occupy Wall Street, the participants reveal their memories of, and reflections upon, the transformative experiences of their lives. Set to an ecstatic, pulsing score by Stephen Vitiello, the film interweaves these personal confessions with impressionistic images of contemporary New York, obscured glimpses of archival footage, and graphically rendered fragments of text to create a radiant prism of collective memory. Preceded by Sachs’s frantic record of accumulated daily to-do lists, A Year in Notes and Numbers (2018, 4 mins.).
During World War II, the United States Army hired Lynne Sachs’ cousin, Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones – small and large – of dead American soldiers. This short anti-war cine-poem is composed of highly abstracted battle imagery and children at a birthday party.
“Profound. The soundtrack is amazing. The image at the end of the girl with the avocado seed so hopeful. Good work.” Barbara Hammer
Black Maria Film Festival Director’s Choice Award; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Tribeca Film Festival; MadCat Film and Video Festival; Harvard Film Archive; Pacific Film Archive; Dallas Film Fest; Cinema Project, Portland.
