Invocaciones / Lynne Sachs Retrospective at Ambulante, Mexico City | Lynne Sachs: experimental documentary filmmaker

𝗔𝗠𝗕𝗨𝗟𝗔𝗡𝗧𝗘 • the 𝗖𝗜𝗡𝗘𝗧𝗘𝗖𝗔 𝗡𝗔𝗖𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗔𝗟 𝗠É𝗫𝗜𝗖𝗢 • the 𝗟𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗥𝗔𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗜𝗢 𝗘𝗫𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗟 𝗗𝗘 𝗖𝗜𝗡𝗘 (𝗟𝗘𝗖) • and the 𝗖𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗥𝗢 𝗗𝗘 𝗖𝗨𝗟𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗔 𝗗𝗜𝗚𝗜𝗧𝗔𝗟

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