Curated by Yasaman Baghban
Friday April 26, 2024 at 6pm
Inaugural event in collaboration with the Screen Society at Duke University https://cinematicarts.duke.edu/screensociety/screenings/iranian-essay-experimental-and-documentary-films
https://ambulante.org/blog/invocaciones-retrospectiva-lynne-sachs
Frames and Stanzas: a master class on film and poetry
Lynne Sachs
Centro de cultura digital and Ambulante
La Cineteca Nacional, Mexico City
April 11, 2024 – 5 to 6:30 PM / 17 h to 18:30 h
Filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs will share insights she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. Lynne will share excerpts from her own films that explore the activation of archival images, visualization of poetic texts, overlaying text on image, expanded cinema performance, oral history, and the film essay. This master class will include excerpts from Lynne’s films includingStarfish Aorta Colossus, Tip of My Tongue, The Washing Society, Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home, and Swerve. As part of the class experience, participants will write a poem.
See more on the retrospective here.
———
Opening the Family Album / “Abrir el álbum familiar”
Lynne Sachs
Ambulante Festival and Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City
Sesiones virtuales: Jueves 14 de marzo, de 19 a 20 horas (9 to 10 PM NYC) y viernes 5 de abril de 17 a 18 horas (7 to 8 PM NYC)
Sábado presenciales: Sábado 13 y domingo 14 de abril, de 11 a 14 horas, final performance April 14 at 6 PM
Opening the Family Album is a workshop in which we will explore the ways in which images of our mother, father, sister, brother, child, cousin, grand-parent, aunt or uncle might become material for the making of a personal film. We will meet virtually twice for one hour: March 14 and April 5. Then we will meet in-person with Lynne for two days (April 13 & 14, 11 am to 14 pm and for a final, public showing later that day at 6 pm), all at Centro Cultural Digital. Please join Lynne between our workshop and our final performance for her 16mm film program
Each participant will come to the workshop with a single photograph (both in hand and digital) they want to examine. During the workshop, you will write text in response to this image by incorporating storytelling and performance. In the process, we will discuss and challenge notions of truth-telling and language. Your final work will then be a completed film with sound or a film with live narration. Previous filmmaking and editing experience is appreciated but not required. Participants may use their own digital cameras or cell phones to make images and sounds. Please register early so that you can be part of our first meeting which will be in March and will be virtual.
This workshop is inspired by the work of Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg, whose writing explores family relationships during the Fascist years and World War II. Ginzburg was a prescient artist who enjoyed mixing up conventional distinctions between fiction and non-fiction: “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt compelled at once to destroy it. The places, events, and people are all real.” We will also read texts from Roland Barthes and Clarise Lispector.
Participants are encouraged to have their own cameras, but cell phone cameras are FINE. Also, if you know how to edit digitally that is helpful but not critical.
United Journalists. Mexico City, March 20, 2024.- On April 10, the nineteenth edition of the Ambulante Documentary Tour will begin with a program of more than 90 films, in which activities and meeting spaces are resumed to strengthen the collective experience that it unfolds from documentary cinema.
The Tour will visit four states of the Mexican Republic between April 10 and May 26, 2024: Mexico City (April 10 to 21); Veracruz (May 2 to 12); Michoacán (from May 8 to 19); and Querétaro (from May 15 to 26). In parallel with the territorial tour of the Tour, part of the programming will also be available online for users throughout the national territory through www.nuestrocine.mx , on the following days of May 2024: from the 2nd to the 5th , 9 to 12 and from 16 to 19.
The programming is made up of more than 90 titles, from more than 23 countries, in 27 languages - of which 7 are indigenous languages -, with 1 world premiere and 14 national premieres. The programming is divided into nine sections:
The special program Ecologies of Cinema (works that promote transformations for the defense of the territory), will present the documentary The White Guard , by Julien Elie, in Veracruz, Michoacán and Querétaro.
In addition to an extraordinary and diverse selection of titles, during the Tour there are workshops, conversations, master classes, Q&A, video installation, documentary theater, activations with childhood, projections interpreted in Mexican Sign Language and various mediation processes that seek to provoke changes in the perception of our audiences. Screenings and events will be mostly free.
The nineteenth edition of the Documentary Tour will begin its journey in Mexico City with a program of 78 activities spread across twenty venues . From April 10 to 21, screenings, talks, master classes, a video installation, workshops and conferences will be held, two of them dedicated to childhood. Admission will be free to 65% of events.
As part of the special activities of the Tour in Mexico City, the presence of special guests stands out: the American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who will teach the master class “Marcos y stanzas. Lynne Sachs on cinema and poetry” and the practical film workshop “Open the family album”, presented by Ambulante in collaboration with the Experimental Film Laboratory, Kino Rebelde and the Digital Culture Center within the “Cinema Beyond” program »; Also, artist Nikki Schuster will carry out the video installation uprooted , which weaves a collective narrative from testimonies and analysis of voices along the tracks of the Mayan Train: destruction, social division and the loss of Mayan identity. This activity has the support of the Cultural Forum of the Austrian Embassy in Mexico, among other accompanied activities.
The Documentary Tour will present a program of short films by Marie Losier and the installation of her loop boxes , small boxes designed and decorated by herself, which contain three audiovisual works in infinite loop, in collaboration with the French Institute of Latin America (IFAL) , Trampoline Association and Casa del Lago UNAM.
In collaboration with Makesense Americas and TikTok México, we will present “Crisis Cruzadas”, a campaign in which we will bring together ten TikTok content creators to expand the conversation about the climate crisis from an intersectional perspective. Within the framework of this campaign, we will screen a documentary capsule at various functions and some creators will participate in an in-person activity at IFAL.
The inaugural screening of the Documentary Tour will take place on Wednesday, April 10 at 7:30 p.m. at the Esperanza Iris City Theater. The film Three Promises will be screened , where director Yousef Srouji takes up the filming made by his mother during the Israeli army’s reprisals against the second intifada in the West Bank, Palestine. The function will be attended by Marielle Olentine, producer of the documentary. Admission is free and space is limited.
From April 12 to 14, the Documentary Tour will offer a selection of feature films that will be screened at Cinépolis Diana and Cinépolis Universidad, through the Cinépolis® Art Room. For followers of the Documentary Tour , Cinépolis will have the traditional Cinebono, with a cost of $180 pesos for four tickets, as well as a special cost of $60 per individual ticket.
At the Cinépolis Diana venue, during the Ambulante period, the following will be presented: Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin (2023) by Katia deVidas, Copa 71 (2023) by Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine, Nocturnas (2024) by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, Patrullaje (2023) by Camilo de Castro Belli and Brad Allgood, Sr (2024) by Lea Hartlaub, and Ch’ul be, Senda Sagrada (2023) by Humberto Gómez. At Cinépolis Universidad, titles such as El Eco (2023) by Tatiana Huezo, Favoriten (2024) by Ruth Beckermann, Inside of me I am dancing (2023) by Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann, Queendom (2023) by Agniia Galdanova, and Malqueridas (2023) will be presented. ) by Tana Gilbert.
There will be performances accompanied by the presence of filmmakers and protagonists of the documentaries. Among the guests are Emiliano Ruprah de Fina, director of The Guardian of the Monarchs ; Lynne Sachs, director of Film About a Father Who ; Johan Grimonprez, director of Soundtrack for a coup d’état ; Marielle Olentine, producer of Tres Promesas ; Humberto Gómez, director of Ch’ul be, sacred path ; and Claudia Ignacio Álvarez, protagonist of Patrol. Activists, academics, researchers and artists from various disciplines will also join us.
The venues where activities will take place are: House of the First Printing Press of America UAM, Casa del Lago UNAM, Cultural Center of Spain in Mexico (CCEMx), José Martí Cultural Center, UNAM University Cultural Center, Digital Culture Center, Center National Arts Center (Cenart), Cinépolis Diana, Cinépolis Universidad, Cineteca Nacional, Cineteca Nacional de las Artes, Cine Tonalá, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences UNAM, Faro Aragón, Faro Cosmos, La Cine-Fonda, Le Cinéma IFAL, La Cave, Casa de la Paz Theater UAM, Esperanza Iris City Theater, Underground Paradise.
Ambulante appreciates the support of the Ministry of Culture, the Mexican Institute of Cinematography (Imcine), Ford Foundation, Sigrid Rausing Trust, Ben & Frank, Cinépolis, LCI Seguros, Labodigital, R7D, Cerveza Monstruo de Agua and Fundación Heinrich Böll who contribute to making Tour possible. Likewise, we extend our gratitude to the Secretariats of Culture of the states we visited and to all the sponsors who join their efforts with us, as well as to the different embassies, foundations, headquarters, universities, restaurants, media and all collaborators and collaborators without whom this festival would not take place. Thanks to the volunteers whose invaluable support and dedication have made it possible for the Documentary Tour to reach its 19th edition.
The Cine más allá (CCD) in collaboration with Ambulante and the curatorship of the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine, dedicates a retrospective to the American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, an obligatory reference of avant-garde cinema in recent years, whose work, as personal – sometimes even intimate – as it is political, is characterized by an uncompromising aesthetic search and experimentation, through documentary, essay, collage and a myriad of formal and technical explorations.
This retrospective is grouped in Ambulante’s Invocations section. The section is made up of two programs of short films, one on film and the other on digital, and two feature films.
Short film program 1:
Window Work, 9 min. 2000
Atalanta 32 Years Later, 5 min. 2006
A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer). 14 min. 2019
Wind in Our Hair/ Con viento en el pelo, 40 min. 2010
And Then We Marched, 4 min. 2017
Maya at 24, 4 min. 2021
A Year of Notes and Numbers, 4 min. 2018
Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor, 8 min. 2018
About:
Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, collages, performances and web projects that explore the intrinsic relationship between personal observation and broader historical experiences by interweaving poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design.
Strongly committed to the dialogue between art theory and practice, in her films she pursues a rigorous interplay between image and sound, pushing visual and aural textures further with each new project. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco, where she collaborated with artists such as Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Gunvor Nelson, Barbara Hammer and Trin T. Min-ha. Lynne’s recent work combines fiction, non-fiction and experimental modes. She has made over 25 films that have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Images Festival in Toronto, among others. They have also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts and other national and international institutions. The Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI), the New International Film Festival in Havana and the Women’s Film Festival in China have presented retrospectives of her films. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and is a part-time lecturer in the Art Department at Princeton University.
Program:
Laboratorio Experimental de Cine is a non-profit civil association dedicated to the training, production, curatorship and dissemination of experimental and peripheral cinema. Through collaboration, they promote the moving image and its relationship with other artistic formats to create a cinema that expands and challenges the limits of conventional audiovisual language.
https://marvin.com.mx/el-cine-mas-alla-del-lec-y-ccd-en-la-cineteca/
Encounter with other cinematographies: in a huge proposal of movies that will take you out of your comfort zone.
The Cinema Beyond program of the Experimental Cinema Laboratory , LEC and the Digital Culture Center, CCD expands and reaches the National Cinematheque. Cinema Beyond is a project that presents films that go beyond the traditional formats of film projection and exhibition, seeking exploration and encounter with other cinematographies that are marginal, singular, reckless, committed and experimental.
This April the program begins with a retrospective of Ricardo Nicolayevsky. The program is made up of portraits and personal works of the artist. Nicolayevsky is a reference for avant-garde cinema in Mexico. Most of his works were made in the early eighties in Super8 and 16mm formats.
The Ambulante Festival also adds Cinema Beyond to its programming and presents a Lynne Sachs retrospective, which includes a master class, talks, the screening of two of her feature films at the Cineteca Nacional, as well as two short film programs and the results of the workshop ongoing “Open the family album” at the Digital Culture Center.
The Cinema Beyond program brings you artists such as Masha Godovannaya (Russia), Luis Macías (Spain), Mariana Botey (Mexico), Narcisa Hirsch (Argentina), Craig Baldwin (United States), Peter B. Hutton (United States), Saul Levine (United States) and Yevgeny Yufit (Soviet Union-Russia), led by programmers such as Manuel Trujillo, Salvador Amores, Itzel Martínez and Tomás Rautenstrauch.
Discover the complete Cinema Beyond programming on the networks of the CCD @ccdmx and those of the Cineteca Nacional @cinetecanacionalmx , on their website centroculturadigital.mx and cinetecanacional.net .
https://moreliafilmfest.com/ambulante-anuncia-los-titulos-que-completan-su-edicion-2024
The Ambulante 2024 documentary tour will take place from April 10 to May 26, 2024 and will visit Mexico City from April 10 to 21, Veracruz from May 2 to 12, Michoacán from May 8 to 19 and Querétaro from the 15 to May 26.
Previously, Ambulante announced the programming of its Pulses and Coordenadas sections . Now, two more spaces are revealed in the four: Ambulantito, Rearview Mirror, Intersections and Invocations. Here we tell you everything about them.
This section of the festival is designed for children and this year’s program is titled “From outer space to the inner world.” For this reason, this edition there will be a live cinema proposal with the interactive kaleidoscopic Observatory, which will function as a celestial vault.
This space will seek to mix cinema from the past with the future to “contemplate the infinitely small and the majestically large.” Mixing sky and earth will invite the discovery of new ways of navigating the world.
The programming will include:
We are not prepared to be superheroes, by Lia Bertels (Belgium, Portugal, Spain, 2019)
This section aims to present on screen works from the past that have been publicly or privately archived. The program that will follow this edition is “Look to inhabit”, whose three short films are pioneers of community cinema.
Community cinema has always been of great interest to Ambulante for exemplifying the social power of documentary by being an alternative to “inhabit and face the complex reality.”
The programming will include:
It is the section in which the great diversity of documentary film forms is revealed, in dialogue with a variety of geographies, contexts and perspectives that cross and redefine the stories of the world.
The section is made up of the following titles:
This section brings together retrospectives of the tour. This edition, Ambulante, in collaboration with the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine and Cine Más Allá, dedicates a retrospective to the American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, an obligatory reference in avant-garde cinema in recent years, whose work, so personal—sometimes even intimate — as a policy, it is characterized by an aesthetic search and a less than accommodating experimentation, through documentary, essay, collage and endless formal and technical explorations. The section will be made up of two short film programs, one film and the other digital:
Ambulante is a non-profit organization that seeks to promote documentary film so that people realize its power as a cultural and social tool in Mexico and Central America. It was founded in 2005 by Gael García Bernal, Diego Lunes and Elena Fortes. Its current director is Itzel Martínez del Cañizo.
Jorge Carrasco | April 16th, 2024
https://plazajuarez.mx/conociendo-a-lynne-sachs/
This time we are going to talk about the North American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who presented a master class in English at the Cineteca Nacional.
One of the special guests at the XIX Ambulante Festival, which has just opened and will continue until May, is the North American poet and filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who presented in English a master class at the Cineteca Nacional, entitled Marcos y estrofas, where They also presented their two feature films.
The writer, born in Memphis on August 10, 1961, spoke about her work that began in 1986 with the short “Still life with woman and four objects.”
She explained that in “Starfish aorta colossus” she illustrates a poem by Paolo Javier with which she would later collaborate and then experiments with translations and subtitles.
In her feature film “Your Day is My Night,” made in 2013, she films a group of Chinese and Latino workers, who live in a small room and long for the family they left many years ago.
The film marked a watershed in Sachs’s career, who stopped traveling to look for subjects and filmed near her home in New York, something that became more acute during the pandemic.
Although she mentions written poetry a lot, this is far from the images presented in her short films, which are limited to illustrating the poems in various ways.
Her cinema is rather experimental, with some short documentaries and essays.
Her other feature film is dedicated to his father Ira.
Fact: In her feature film “Your day is my night”, made in 2013, she films a group of Chinese and Latino workers, who live in a small room and long for the family they left many years ago.
By Nicole Cheah, Digital Journalism Undergraduate | April 18, 2024
https://www.drsrivi.com/post/code-shift-welcomes-filmmaker-lynne-sachs-for-contractions-film-screening-workshop
On March 28, acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs visited the CODE^SHIFT lab to host a workshop and screening of her latest film, “Contractions“. During the session, Sachs presented the 12-minute short film and engaged with participants, sharing tips for conducting oral history research and documentary filmmaking.
Sachs, who is based in Brooklyn, has had a 30-year career as an experimental filmmaker and poet. Born in Tennessee, she completed her undergraduate studies at Brown University, studying History with a focus on studio art. Sachs has produced over 40 films in addition to live performances, installations, and web projects. She has tackled a myriad of topics, often confronting social and political issues. According to Sachs’ website, her films have screened at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, as well as festivals worldwide.
“The workshop was so amazing! I appreciate being able to discuss the film with the director. You could tell she was passionate about health and reproductive rights for women. As an audience member, the film held my attention and left me feeling inspired and moved. Lynne was able to give her audience a glimpse into the new challenges women and healthcare professionals are facing after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. I am thankful that Dr. Srivi provided a space to discuss such an important issue.” – Minnie McMillian, PhD Student (Psychology), College of Arts & Sciences
It was Sachs’ latest residential commission that brought her to Syracuse. In 2023, she received the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Support for Artists grant, and she is in the city to create commissioned work for the Urban Video Project (UVP), a media art program which projects the work of filmmakers and video artists onto the facade of the Everson Museum of Art in downtown Syracuse. During the workshop, Sachs was joined by Anneka Herre, faculty member in Syracuse’s College of Visual and Performing Arts and UVP Program Director.
To create her ongoing project, titled “Citizen Second Class” , Sachs plans to work with local artists, reproductive care providers, and activists to explore issues of reproductive justice and bodily autonomy. She is particularly interested in doing so through the lens of Central New York’s history with womens’ rights. This project is part of a larger effort in which Sachs is involved, called “The Abortion Clinic Film Collective”, a group of artists from around the country who came together in the wake of the landmark 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade.
“This is such a timely moment for a film like Contractions, which discusses the discontinuation of abortion services in Memphis. I felt privileged to see the screening with the director Lynne Sachs, along with other women concerned with the state of women’s health and reproductive rights in the country. Lynne’s film transported us to the testimonies of health workers who have experienced firsthand the effects of the overturn of Roe v Wade in such a sensitive, touching, and poetic way that makes it hard to describe. I’m still thinking about her film, and I feel incredibly moved to have been a part of the screening of her film here at Newhouse.” – Raiana de Carvalho, PhD Student (Mass Communications), Newhouse School
After the session, Lynne sat down for a video interview for CODE^SHIFT’s ongoing “Chai with Srivi” series. Speaking to undergraduate RA Nicole Cheah, Sachs detailed how she came to be the storyteller she is today, what feminist filmmaking meant to her, her ongoing project in Syracuse, and more. Once edited, the interview will be published on the CODE^SHIFT YouTube page.
UNEXPOSED Microcinema presents the third annual Single Frame, a showcase of experimental documentaries, pizza and beer.
Jeremy & Brendan Smyth will be presenting the lost 2020 program that was cancelled 4 years ago due to a cataclysmic world event of some kind. Come on out!
Screenings 5:30pm and 7:30pm April 7, 2024 with pizza eatin’ time in between. And it’s all free in Durham, NC.
https://ambulante.org/blog/invocaciones-retrospectiva-lynne-sachs
April 11-14, 2024
Invocations | Lynne Sachs Retrospective
The 19th edition of Ambulante Documentary Tour dedicates this year a retrospective to American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, in collaboration with the Cineteca Nacional México, the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine, the Centro de Cultura Digital and Kino Rebelde. For the first time a selection of Sachs’ work is brought to Mexico, a must-see reference in avant-garde cinema in recent years. His work, as personal -sometimes even intimate- as it is political, is characterized by an uncompromising aesthetic search and experimentation that resorts to documentary, essay, collage and an endless number of formal and technical explorations.
A pioneer of experimental documentary in New York, Sachs’ work takes cinema into the realm of the poetic and beyond reflection. She introduces us to a personal and tireless search; she questions concepts so deeply rooted in the personal, the affective and the political. The border between work and life blurs, disappears and is molded into vital events where the body, death, war and feminism become vivid concepts that the sensitive and critical gaze of the artist questions.
There are many ways to approach Lynne Sachs’ poetics. On the one hand, her contemplation and respect for life allow things to be as they are; on the other hand, she is driven by a radical political action where her voice merges with other voices, where her gaze generates a collective rhythm: the poetic cry that cries out for kinder political places for all. In making the selection of films for the programs, we decided to focus on the theme of the family, as the tension between the biographical and the non-biographical brings us closer to the two main veins in Sachs’ work.
The section is comprised of two feature films: Your Day is My Night, a film that explores the collective history of the Chinese community in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues and theatrical pieces; and Film About a Father Who, in which Sachs films his father over 35 years to better understand her bond with him and her siblings.
In addition, two programs of short films are presented: the first is composed of endearing works about people intimately linked to Sachs’ own life, such as Work at the Window, Atlanta Thirty-two Years Later, A Month of Stills, With Wind in My Hair, And Then We Marched, Maya at Twenty-four, A Year in Notes and Numbers, and Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor.
The second program has a filmic character, as it is composed of films that will be screened in 16 mm: Attracted and Divided, The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, Which Side is East: Vietnam Notebooks, A Biography of Lilit, Photograph of the Wind and The Nerves.
In these programs the political is transformed into a cinema of formal exploration, with no limits to perception. The materiality, which is detonated from the intimate, carries out dislocations from experimentation and critical thinking generates ruptures from the formal. The world is seen through the rhythm of a body moving in circles, as in Maya at twenty-four where the filmmaker films her daughter Maya at six, sixteen and twenty-four years old running in circles around her mother, as if she were propelling herself in time towards the future. Lynne reacts poetically and politically with movement to the systematic and violent territorialization that acts on our own bodies.
Manuel Trujillo “Morris
Experimental Film Laboratory
The retrospective is made up of two programs of short films -one screened in film and the other in digital format-, and the following feature films:
Your Day is My Night | Your Day is My Night | Lynne Sachs | United States | 2013 | Chinese, English and Spanish | Color | 64′.
Several immigrants living in a small apartment nestled in the heart of New York’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval.
Film About a Father Who | Lynne Sachs | United States | 2020 | English | Color | 74′.
For 35 years, Lynne Sachs recorded her father to understand the ties that connected her to him and her sisters. She discovered much more than she imagined.
The Filmic Invocations Program consists of the following titles:
Drawn and Quartered
The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts
Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam
A biography of Lilith
Photograph of the wind
The Jitters
And the Digital Invocations Program is made up of the following titles:
Window Work
Atalanta: 32 years later
A month of single frames
With the wind in my hair
And Then We March
Maya at twenty-four
A year in notes and numbers
Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor
Program of activities in Mexico City:
Thursday, April 11
Cineteca Nacional Mexico
17:00 h : Master class : Frames and stanzas. Lynne Sachs on film and poetry.
Lecturer: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
19:00 h | Function + Q&A | Your Day Is My Night
Lecturer: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
Friday, April 12
Cineteca Nacional Mexico
7:00 p.m. : Screening + Q&A : Film about a father who is a father.
Featuring: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
Saturday, April 13
Centro de Cultura Digital
11:00 h | Workshop: Opening the family album*.
By: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
*Only for registered and accepted participants.
16:00 h | Function + Q&A | Digital Invocations Program
Participant: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
Sunday, April 14th
Digital Culture Center
Day | Invocations
11:00 h | Workshop: Opening the Family Album*.
By: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
*Only for registered and accepted participants.
4:00 p.m.: Filmic Invocations Program.
18:00 h | Screening of the results of the workshop “Opening the family album”.
Participants: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
Saturday, April 6 2024 | 5:00 PM | 73 Mins | Chicago Filmmakers
https://www.onioncityfilmfest.org/2024competition/fromwomen
Otherhood* | Deborah Stratman | USA, Jordan, Brazil | 2023 | 3 Mins
Mother and child confront the other. Meanwhile, some ladies are thinking.
*In-Person Screening Only
Contractions* | Lynne Sachs | USA | 2024 | 12 Mins
What happens when those who gestate no longer have control of their bodies? In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion in the United States. CONTRACTIONS takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic.
*In-Person Screening Only
I Am a Horse | Chaerin Im | Republic of Korea, Denmark | 2022 | 8 Mins
Unable to find girls in the diverse artwork of the Korean artist Lee Jung-seob, filmmaker Chaerin Im unravels an imaginative tale of women born with half of their bodies as a horse and a tiger. The tale is inspired by her mother’s Korean birth dreams (Tae-mong) while pregnant with her twin sister and herself.
Grandmamauntsistercat* | Zuza Banasinska | The Netherlands, Poland | 2024 | 23 Mins
Created from the Polish Educational Archive materials, this film tells the story of a matriarchal family through the eyes of a child grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems.
*In-Person Screening Only
Hemorrhage | Ruth Hayes | USA | 2023 | 4 Mins
Animated agitprop against the end of Roe and the evisceration of women’s rights to choose.
legs | Jennifer Still, Christine Fellows, Chantel Mierau | Canada | 2023 | 15 Mins
Three artists work in stride to translate, in sound and motion, the heart of a poem. They collaborate with life’s unexpecteds – snapped clotheslines, drained swimming pools, terminal diagnoses – and learn what falls away is not necessarily gone.
First Aid – Test Series 1 | Maria Anna Dewes, Myriam Thyes | Germany | 2022 | 9 Mins
Care and violence, acknowledgement and reprehension, to give or withdraw support: the video finds performative, sculptural, bizarre and poetic images for this range of diverse gestures and actions. They line up like a series of tests reflecting interpersonal relationships and current social conditions.
https://brooklynrail.org/2024/03/film/Dispatches-from-TrueFalse
“What is the responsibility for a film festival during the oppression of Palestinians in Israeli-controlled Gaza and the efforts of various liberation movements in countries like Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Senegal? Should film festivals even occur? There are ever-evolving questions that cause me to be skeptical about the politics and rationale to cover influential fests like IDFA, Sundance, and Berlinale when they play both sides in their statements: remaining damn near silent or criminalizing artists stating their solidarity with Palestine and not abiding by the inimical IHRA definition of anti-semitism (meaning any critiques of Zionism) respectfully. On February 23, the True/False Film Festival in liberal Columbia, Missouri, demanded an immediate ceasefire with a pro-Palestinian stance and recognized Palestinians’s multi-generational fight for their emancipation. The demand offered many first time and veteran attendees a haven to form a political alliance with the fest’s ideology and use their playfulness in creative nonfiction as social activism, as the six-thousand-plus signatory coalition—Film Workers for Palestine—held the banner “Ceasefire Now” at the fest’s annual March March.
True/False puts their money in their mouth with their words as they amplified Yousef Srouji’s Three Promises (2023) as the True/Life Fund recipient. His hour-long documentary is an extension of his eponymous 2022 short. The director’s mother, Suha, captures home videos of her family life, her spouse Ramzi, Yousef, and his sibling Dima in Palestine during the early 2000s. The Second Intifada emerges at this time to combat the Nakba dispossession of Palestinians, and Suha’s intimate cinematography grounds us with the family at their several homes as we hear bombs and gunshots miles away. Yousef spreads his family’s archival catalog in non-chronological order, as the trauma caused by the violence prevents him from thinking linearly. Yet, the narrative choice evokes the ever-lasting feeling of belonging among his Christian family as they celebrate Christmas and he lives out his childhood. Three Promises is a cathartic, healful endurance against the ongoing genocide in Palestine. With True/Life’s attentive lens in recognizing the vividness of Suha’s DV footage, they will send the proceeds to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and towards Yousef’s efforts in manufacturing a sustainable digital archive for home videos made in Palestine, thus preserving the country’s history, as the Israeli military has already destroyed many of Al Jazeera’s archives to date.
Deracination is a common theme that permeates this year’s six world premiere features (nearly all directorial debuts) at True/False, such as what it means to be an artist in gentrified NYC in Elizabeth Nichols’s lyrically punk Flying Lessons (2024), as well as filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed finding her matriarchal lineage through her mothers’ images in her riveting A Photographic Memory (2024). The one that holds me dearly is Emily Mkrtichian’s There Was, There Was Not (2024). Named after an Armenian aphorism, it analyzes the makeup of the Republic of Artsakh through Judo champion Sose, minesweeper Sveta, politician Siranush, and women’s center owner Gayane. In 2018, the territory celebrated thirty years of peace following a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but the homelands were demolished in 2023. To honor the characters’ joy and resistance, Mkrtichian negotiates how much outsiders should know about violence in the little-known Artsakh through text. However, the context felt out of place as most of the text happens in the second half with little room for character growth. Though she could have condensed some of the history, Mkritichian’s intimate compositions on holding onto her protagonists during griefful moments redirect the structure of There Was, There Was Not. Therefore, the film is an observational heart pounder that explores the acts of preservation, mourning, and displacement.
Another True/False selection that mirrors its philosophy of finding new visual grammar with political sensibilities is João Pedro Bim’s Behind Closed Doors (2023). The all-archival doc follows a revelation of a 1968 previously-obscured audio recording of Brazil’s National Security Council enacting the Institutional Act. No. 5. The act suspended many civil rights, including habeas corpus, and was written after the 1964 Brazil coup d’état. His tethering of archival, nationalist images, and sounds (predominantly a record scratch) elicits outrage, revolt, and power to the people. His overlay of clips theorizes the normality of propaganda and shows how media mediates the spread of totalitarianism to the public. The strength of the people is what feared the council and unspooled regression to ensure hierarchical control in today’s Brazil. It is a Godardian essay on the banality of evil and a catastrophic shutdown of democracy. The film’s structure also speaks to the daring spirit of its next festival appearance in NYC’s First Look Film Festival (along with the aforementioned Flying Lessons) at the Museum of the Moving Image for conveying a contemporary message from past media sources.
Shorts at True/False are never to be underestimated for their ingenious experimentations. They are provocations instead of proof of concepts for potential feature-length adaptations. The Pope of Trash, John Waters, will likely perceive Evan Gareth Hoffman as a disciple of garbage cinema with his archival short Nortel (2024). Hoffman shared with the crowd that he agglomerates the “trashiest options” available (silly promotional materials, reality TV clips, “shoplifting TikToks,” skincare social media enthusiasts, reverb voiceover, etc.) to examine the eponymous corporation and its CEO Frank Dunn’s rise and decimation after they constructed literal flying cars in the 1960s. Hoffman undercuts them with a hilarious soundtrack (consisting of songs like Black Eyed Peas’s “I Gotta Feeling” and Taylor Swift’s “You’re On Your Own, Kid”) juxtaposing with Dunn’s doom. In what one might consider a narrative Rick and Morty “Interdimensional Cable” episode, Hoffman goes outside the box with the concept of sponsored content by finding the incongruity and the goad in publicity campaigns. Commercials aren’t just documents in Hoffman’s palms but also a radicalization and a search for truth in the digitalized age.
Filmic poet Lynne Sachs cranks in a new short with Contractions (2024), surprisingly her first work at the twenty-one-year-old fest after her heavy output of films like the poetic short Swerve (2022) and personal feature Film About a Father Who (2020). Shot on the first anniversary of the reversal of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2023, in Sachs’s hometown, Memphis, a driver named Jane and gynecologist Dr. Kimberly Looney narrate the intense experiences of getting people abortions in states with legal facilities (Illinois, for example). We see opaque pairs of pregnant people and their escorts (all actors) line up and slowly enter the building. The cast’s gestures enact trauma, nerves, and capriciousness in doing something once legally acceptable that is now the opposite. They carry a history where their reproduction rights are currently in paralysis.
Motifs of open and closed spaces once liberating for pregnant people are refined into barriers that prevent them from fulfilling their wishes. Due to the fact they made the film in Tennessee, a place where they could get arrested, Sachs and her producers, Emily Berisso and Laura Goodman, said in their Q&A that they enlisted security to protect them from prosecution, which elevates Sach’s heedful balance of spreading enough sobbing information and protecting her sources simultaneously. Unbeknownst to the rest of the team, Berisso assembled thirteen additional volunteer marshals and a medic in this labor of love. Recalling the ending of BlacKKKlansman (2018), snippets of the blue sky become black and white as we head into the upside down.”
https://agxfilm.org/events/2024/4/20/abortionclinicfilmcollective
Saturday, April 20, 2024
7:30 PM 9:00 PM
AgX Film Collective
144 Moody Street, Building 18, 2nd Floor
Waltham, MA, 02453 United States (map)
In the Abortion Clinic Film Collective series, we hear from medical directors and staff, mothers and daughters, criminal defense attorneys and advocates, about how their personal and professional lives have been affected post-Dobbs. Each portal provides a window into the broad and life-threatening ramifications of that Supreme Court decision and its devastating legacy for the health and well-being of our country.
Doors open at 7pm. Program begins at 7:30pm.
Screening will be followed by a discussion led by participating filmmaker and AgX member Raymond Rea.
Program Details (approximately 50 min total runtime):
A Mile and a Half, Ray Rea, 5.5 min
The border between North Dakota and Minnesota is physically only a narrow river but legislatively a canyon. In the sister city straddling that border a move of a mile and a half saved lives.
Contractions, Lynne Sachs, 12 min
In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, we listen to an OB-GYN who can no longer perform abortions and a “Jane” who drives patients across state lines while a group of activists perform outside a women’s health clinic.
As Long as We Can, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, 10.5 min
As the Arizona state supreme court hears arguments on whether to reinstate an abortion ban that originated in 1864, we glimpse into the day-to-day activities of this for-now still functioning clinic, one of just two left in the state that provides surgical abortions.
Retracing Our Steps, Kelly Gallagher, 8.5 min
A woman reflects back on her time spent assisting abortion seekers when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land.
The Longest Walk, Đoan Hoàng Curtis, 9 min
A filmmaker returns to Kentucky in the wake of its total abortion ban, to revisit the clinic – now closed – where she terminated a pregnancy that resulted from her assault at age 13. She reaches out to the male classmate who witnessed the aftermath of her assault decades earlier.
We Are About to Commit a Felony, Sasha Waters, 4 min
Arson at a Planned Parenthood and the closing of a community clinic endanger the lives of women in Knoxville, TN. A teaching doctor reflects on what the post-Dobbs world means for her patients and her students, who are the next generation of reproductive care workers.
PLEASE NOTE:
Masks are strongly encouraged at this event to help protect the most vulnerable among our community. If you are hoping to attend but feel that you need a specific accommodation of any sort, please do not hesitate to reach out to hi[at]agxfilm.org.
https://www.aafilmfest.org/62-schedule-page
The 62nd Ann Arbor Film Festival will take place March 26–31, 2024 (online March 26–April 7). Each program is different. Films are not rated. All programs are intended for mature audiences except for Saturday’s Almost All Ages (6+) program. Some films have imagery of a stroboscopic nature.
Michigan Theater Main Auditoirum | 7:30pm | $
SPONSOR
Destination Ann Arbor
EDUCATION PARTNER
U-M Department of Afroamerican and African Studies
COMMUNITY PARTNERS
U-M Black Film Society
African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County
DONOR
Jackie & John Farah
Contractions
Lynne Sachs
Brooklyn, NY | 2024 | DCP
WORLD PREMIERE (online unavailable)
In 2022, the US Supreme Court ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion in the United States. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, a group of activist performers “speak” with the full force of their collective presence.
