Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam and Celaje (Cloudscape) at MoMA
Museum of Modern Art
https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/8846
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam. 1994.
Directed by Lynne Sachs in collaboration with Dana Sachs
Celaje (Cloudscape). 2020.
Directed by Sofía Gallisá Muriente
Next on Wed, Aug 16, 8:00 p.m.
MoMA
Here and There: Journeying through Film
Organized by Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator, Department of Film
What is summer other than a time of becoming? This wide-ranging selection of contemporary films from around the world, all drawn from MoMA’s collection, chronicles states of transformation and transit. Whether exploring the relationship between a person and their surroundings, revealing how bonds are tested or can deepen far from home, or seizing on the poetic potential of coming into one’s own, these works expand on storylines quintessential to the summer film. Encompassing fiction, documentary, and experimental forms, this series brings critical engagement and imagination to journeys both emotional and physical, offering new favorites to delight and inspire before the first cool nights settle in.
Wed, Aug 16, 2023 – Opening Night
8:00 p.m.
MoMA, Floor 1
The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
Sculpture Garden
Lynne and Dana Sachs present to introduce their film.
Tue, Aug 22, 2023
5:00 p.m.
Titus 2 Theater
In this intergenerational double bill, physical and metaphorical journeys intertwine, revealing intimate excavations of history and place. Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam chronicles a voyage sisters Lynne and Dana Sachs—one a filmmaker, the other a writer—made from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi in 1994. Reveling in the kaleidoscopic sounds and images of Vietnamese daily life, their road trip morphs into a reckoning with untold histories as the pair openly juxtapose travelogue with their own childhood memories of America’s first televised war.
A different family bond frames Celaje, in which Sofía Gallisá Muriente combines old, new, and found Super8 and 16mm footage to tell her grandmother’s life story and the history of Puerto Rico as twinned narratives. Hand-developing film reels to expose them to the salt, heat, humidity, and wind that whipped around the family home in Levittown, Toa Baja, Gallisá Muriente poignantly gestures to the impermanence of archives both personal and collective on the island. Frequently connecting climate and memory, she has written about the film, “Memories move around like clouds, images rot and age, and the traces of the process are visible on the film and in the country, like ghosts.”
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam. 1994. USA. Directed by Lynne Sachs in collaboration with Dana Sachs. In English, Vietnamese; English subtitles. 33 min.
Celaje (Cloudscape). 2020. Puerto Rico. Directed by Sofía Gallisá Muriente. In Spanish; English subtitles. 41 min.
This film accompanies Here and There: Journeying through Film
This film is part of Film in the Sculpture Garden.
