Discovering Chantal Akerman’s films was such a vital part of my becoming a filmmaker. While I did not know her personally, I feel that I grew up with her as my guide for how to be in the world, as a woman filmmaker trying to articulate some aspect of my life and other women’s lives in the medium of film. I first saw Chantal’s films, along with those of Agnès Varda and Marguerite Duras, as a student in Paris in the 1980s.
When it was a reading series staged in laundromats around the country, The New Yorker described “Every Fold Matters” as a “collaborative, site-specific performance exploring the strange intimacy of the everyday ritual.” The series used performers to act out themes of gendered work, gentrification, and the intermittent weirdness of city life. Playwright and director Lizzie Olesker and filmmaker Lynne Sachs are reuniting to turn the live performance into a film. For Polarr, Emily von Hoffmann spoke with them to find out more.
NYU’s Cinema Studies Department and Undergraduate Film & TV Department present the 6th Annual Experimental Lecture.
‘We really did not want to say goodbye to this brilliant, imaginative and totally committed group of actors and media artists.’
A new film/performance spotlights the often-invisible workers who fold the clothes, maintain the machines and know your secrets.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lynne Sachs and Nina Menkes are American independent, experimental filmmakers who have been making movies for three decades. Their films have been showcased at international festivals, and they’ve won numerous awards.
EVERY FOLD MATTERS is a collaborative, site-specific performance with film about the work of doing laundry by playwright/director Lizzie Olesker and experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs.
the CHSA Museum screens “Your Day Is My Night” on February 28th, 2015.
The piece, created by the playwright and director Lizzie Olesker and the filmmaker Lynne Sachs, highlights the perspective of laundry workers. It’s playing for three nights at a Brooklyn laundromat, performed by the singer and actress Jasmine Holloway, the actress and dancer Veraalba Santa, and the actors Ching Valdes-Aran and Tony Torn.
The legacy of domestic work, the issues surrounding power, and the exchange of money for services are all potent themes which rise to the surface and bubble over in dramatic, thrilling escalations of the everyday. A laundromat is a public space where something private occurs; it is the opposite of a typical theater, a private space in which a public event occurs. Nearly every element of Every Fold Matters pushes the boundaries of what is private and what is public, what is real and what is fiction, and where we find narrative fulfillment in any of the above.