DC/DOX 2026: EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE’s Director, Lynne Sachs chats with KUYA P! A NRW Interview! EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE. A Film by Lynne Sachs.
Celebrating pop culture in all of its forms providing content for every Fan! THE NRW SHOW, is a weekly show that highlights the latest entertainment releases in Film, TV & Streaming with our top picks!
https://theburgnews.com/news/moviate-underground-film-festival-to-return-to-harrisburg-this-weekend
Get your popcorn ready.
The 27th Annual Moviate Film Festival will take place on May 28 to 31 at Midtown Cinema and feature more than 60 films from 15 countries, with 13% of the movies being screened on real film.
Many of the selected films are new and classic documentaries. Caleb Smith, co-founder of Moviate highlighted several of the weekend’s showings as can’t miss events.
“You’re going to see someone’s personal creativity along with their vision, whether it’s a five-minute animation or a 90-minute documentary,” Smith said.
On Thursday, May 28, musicians Glenn Jones and Liam Grant will perform live original scores to two of their films, “The River” and “The Plow that Broke the Plains,” at 7 p.m. As they’ve been touring around the east coast, they will not be performing the original score to these films anywhere else but in here in Harrisburg, Smith noted.
The weekend continues Friday, May 29 with a 40th anniversary screening of the 1986 documentary “Heavy Metal Parking Lot,” featuring director Jeff Krulik in attendance. The screening is co-presented by local business Tattoo Punks.
“Jeff will present previously unseen footage, including interviews with the band Judas Priest related to the film,” Smith said.
On Saturday, May 30, Colombian filmmaker Chris Gude’s “Morichales” will screen in partnership with Harrisburg-based Elementary Coffee Co., whose coffee is largely sourced from Colombia.
“The film is a stunning portrait of the workers in Venezuela who are trying to mine for gold. It’s a really beautiful film,” Smith said.
The festival concludes Sunday, May 31, with a screening of “Barbara Forever,” accompanied by New York City filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Mark Street in partnership with the LGBT Center of Central PA.
“Lynne and Mark worked with Barbara for many years and were close friends with her,” Smith said. “She was very enigmatic and creative and had documented a lot of her life as she was making films. This film just came out this year, so I’m excited that Lynne and Mark will introduce it.”
In addition to spotlighting unique indie films, Smith also sees the festival as an avenue for connection.
“With the emergence of artificial intelligence and the silo effect of people being on their phones, there’s a feeling of isolation. When you go to Midtown Cinema, you can meet other people, chat and experience the film together,” he said.
DC/DOX To Host World Premieres Of Rory Kennedy’s Boeing Expose Follow Up, Marilyn Ness Documentary And More
https://deadline.com/2026/05/2026-dc-dox-lineup-1236882581/
Features
AANIKOOBIJIGAN [ANCESTOR/GREAT-GRANDPARENT/GREAT-GRANDCHILD]: DIRS Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil. PRODS Steve Holmgren, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Grace Remington, and Jacque Clark. USA.
Trapped in museum archives, Ancestors bend time and space to find their way home. History, spirituality, and the law collide as tribal repatriation specialists fight to return and rebury Indigenous human remains, revealing the still-pervasive worldviews that justified their collection in the first place.
ADAM’S APPLE: DIR Amy Jenkins. PRODS Brit Fryer and Amy Jenkins. USA.
A transgender teen and his mother chronicle their lives, weaving an intimate portrait of a family in transition. Two decades of footage trace a boy’s path to manhood and his parents’ vulnerability as they reckon with change.
AI: PROBABLY NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT: DIR Nick Holt. PRODS David Glover, Mark Raphael, David Dugan, and Zara Powell. United Kingdom.
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As artificial intelligence accelerates a new technological arms race, the scientist whose breakthrough made it possible begins to question what he has unleashed. AI: PROBABLY NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT is a gripping look at the race to build thinking machines — and the growing fear that they may outpace us all.
AMAZING LIVE SEA MONKEYS: DIRS Mark Becker and Aaron Schock. PRODS Mark Becker and Aaron Schock. USA.
From her crumbling estate on the Potomac River, Yolanda Signorelli battles to wrest control of her late husband Harold’s iconic toy, AMAZING LIVE SEA-MONKEYS!, from the corporate men she insists stole it from her — and to rescue it from the stain of her husband’s dark legacy.
AMAZOMANIA: DIR Nathan Grossman. Sweden, Denmark, France.
When the footage from a celebrated 1996 first-contact expedition in the Amazon resurfaces decades later, a triumphant story of discovery unravels into a reckoning with colonialism, documentary ethics, and the lasting impact on the Korubo people.
North American Premiere.
AMERICAN DOCTOR: DIR Poh Si Teng. PRODS Poh Si Teng, Kirstine Barfod, and Reem Haddad. USA, Palestine State, Malaysia, Denmark, Qatar.
When three American doctors—Palestinian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian—enter Gaza to save lives, they find themselves caught between medicine and politics, risking everything to expose the truth.
AMERICAN PACHUCO: THE LEGEND OF LUIS VALDEZ: DIR David Alvarado. PRODS David Alvarado, Lauren DeFilippo, Everett Katigbak, and Amanda Pollak. USA.
Against political resistance and industry skepticism, Luis Valdez pushes Chicano storytelling from the fields to the film screen with Zoot Suit and La Bamba, crafting iconic works that challenge, celebrate, and expand America’s story.
BABY/GIRLS: DIRS Jackie Jesko and Alyse Walsh. PRODS Melissa Leardi, Alex Waterfield, and Kelly Rohrbach Walton. USA.
Set in post-Dobbs Arkansas, BABY/GIRLS follows three teens living in a Christian maternity home as they navigate pregnancy and early motherhood—an intimate, unfiltered look at girlhood and motherhood colliding in the American South.
BARBARA FOREVER: DIR Brydie O’Connor. PRODS Elijah Stevens, Brydie O’Connor, and Claire Edelman. USA.
A dreamlike portrait of the life, work, and legacy of a pioneering feminist experimental filmmaker whose work helped shape early lesbian cinema. Tracing her prolific canon alongside rarely seen documentation of her life and body, the film reveals her unconventional attempts to live on—most notably through the extensive archiving of her films.
THE BEND IN THE RIVER: DIR Robb Moss. PRODS Lisa Remington and Kristin Feeley. USA.
Following a group of friends for nearly fifty years, THE BEND IN THE RIVER explores the inexorable flow of aging and the unfinished project of living.
BIRDS OF WAR: DIRS Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak. PROD Sonja Henrici. United Kingdom.
From besieged Aleppo to the confines of a London newsroom, Lebanese journalist Janay Boulos and Syrian activist/cameraman Abd Alkader Habak retrace their love story through a vast personal archive spanning 13 years of revolution, war, and exile. Can their love survive distance, danger, and difference?
BLACK ZOMBIE: DIR Maya Annik Bedward. PRODS Kate Fraser and Hannah Donegan. Canada.
From the flickering screens of Hollywood horror to the haunted cane fields of colonial Haiti, BLACK ZOMBIE unearths the buried origins of the zombie, reclaiming it as a symbol of survival and spiritual resistance.
BUCKS HARBOR: DIR Pete Muller. PRODS Nathan Golon, Noel Paul, and Pete Muller. USA.
In Downeast Maine, boys are shaped by brutal winters, the harvesting of the ocean’s bounty, and the rigid codes of their fathers. BUCKS HARBOR explores what it means to grow up in a community where a man’s worth is measured by the strength of his back.
A CHILD OF MY OWN: DIR Maite Alberdi. PRODS Sandra Godínez, Carla González Vargas, Maximiliano Sanguine. Mexico.
Alejandra’s profound desire to become a mother—and the heartbreak and pressure that engulf her after multiple miscarriages—drive her to fake a pregnancy, unleashing a media scandal and a moral reckoning.
Courtesy of Netflix.
CLOSURE: DIR Michaƚ Marczak. PRODS Monika Braid, Michał Marczak, Rémi Grellety, Katarzyna Szczerba, and Karolina Marczak. Poland, France.
After his teenage son goes missing, Daniel combs the depths of the Vistula River day and night, caught in a grueling, endless routine and torn between the dread of a fatal leap and the fragile hope that his son may still be alive.
COOKIE QUEENS: DIR Alysa Nahmias. PRODS Gregory Kershaw, Michael Dweck, Alysa Nahmias, and Jennifer Sims. USA.
It’s Girl Scout Cookie season, and four tenacious girls strive to become top-selling “Cookie Queens,” navigating an $800 million business where innocence and ambition collide.
THE CYCLE OF LOVE: DIR Orlando von Einsiedel. PRODS Harri Grace, Chloe Leland, Karl von Schedvin, and Emelie von Schedvin. United Kingdom, Sweden.
An epic true-life journey of self-discovery, tracing the romantic odyssey of PK Mahanandia, a Delhi street artist who bicycled 6,000 miles across continents in 1977 to reunite with the woman he loved—risking everything for belief, connection, and what the heart demands.
DAUGHTERS OF THE FOREST: DIR Otilia Portillo Padua. PRODS Paula Arroio, Elena Fortes, and Otilia Portillo Padua. Mexico.
Deep in Mexico’s forests, two Indigenous mycologists seek to reconcile the past and present while reimagining the future for themselves and a changing world.
DO YOU LOVE ME: DIR Lana Daher. PRODS Films de Force Majeure and My Little Films. Lebanon, France, Qatar, Germany.
An exhilarating journey through 70 years of images and sounds from Lebanon, exploring Beirut’s collective psyche—marked by beauty, trauma, joy, and forgetting.
EARTH TO MICHAEL: DIRS Nico López-Alegría and ZZ. PRODS ZZ, Steffie van Rhee, Dustin Nakao-Haider, and Nico López-Alegría. USA.
Before an astronaut leaves Earth to usher in a new era of spaceflight, his son asks him to confront the unresolved space between them—revisiting a past shaped by distance in the hope of a more connected future.
THE ENDLESS FRONTIER: DIR Marilyn Ness. PRODS Beth Westrate and Ted Richane. USA.
An urgent portrait of three scientists confronting some of the most pressing challenges of our time, revealing the growing threat to the American research ecosystem—and what is at stake if it begins to falter.
World Premiere.
EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE: DIR Lynne Sachs. USA.
In the digital era, when real-life connections are increasingly rare, even fleeting encounters can leave a lasting trace. Over a lifetime, filmmaker Lynne Sachs has collected business cards—mementos of brief exchanges with strangers—and selects seven to uncover why these moments have lingered so vividly in her memory.
FIRST THEY CAME FOR MY COLLEGE: DIR Patrick Bresnan. PRODS Holly Herrick, Harry W. Hanbury, Patrick X. Bresnan, and Zackary Drucker. USA.
When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stages a coup at New College, students and professors confront a new reality: their campus becomes ground zero in an unprecedented nationwide assault on academic freedom and diversity.
FREEFALL: A RECKONING FOR BOEING: DIR Rory Kennedy. PRODS Rory Kennedy, Mark Bailey, Viva Van Loock, Sara Bernstein, Justin Wilkes, and Alexandra Korba. USA.
Following the highly publicized death of Boeing whistleblower John Barnett, Rory Kennedy’s FREEFALL: A RECKONING FOR BOEING continues the investigation into the once-iconic aviation giant, uncovering startling new revelations and insider accounts in the wake of a deepening corporate crisis.
World Premiere.
Courtesy of Netflix.
THE GREAT EXPERIMENT: DIRS Stephen Maing and Eric Daniel Metzgar. PRODS Stephen Maing, Eric Daniel Metzgar, and Farihah Zaman. USA.
An epic poem in documentary form—a mirror held to an American nation at war with itself, asking not who is right, but whether the experiment can survive.
HARVEST: DIRS Natalie Baszile and Hyacinth Parker. PROD Trevite Willis. USA.
The Nelson brothers are on a mission to become the largest farmers in the U.S., but after two years of poor harvests, a new season brings as much opportunity as uncertainty. Farming more land than ever before, the brothers must work together to navigate the mounting pressures of climate change, equipment failures, and family tensions.
HELL’S ARMY: DIR Richard Rowley. PRODS Richard Rowley, Richard Butler, Atanas Georgiev, and Caitlin McNally. Norway, United Kingdom, USA.
A dissident Russian journalist faces death threats and the murder of her colleagues as she races across the globe to unmask one of the world’s most feared mercenary armies.
US Premiere.
JARIPEO: DIRS Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig. PROD Sarah Strunin. Mexico, USA, France.
In Michoacán’s hypermasculine rodeos, what begins as a celebration of tradition descends into a subconscious terrain of memory, queer desire, and longing—a reckoning with the wounds and beauty of a home left behind.
JOYBUBBLES: DIR Rachael J. Morrison. PRODS Sarah Winshall, Will Butler, and Annie Marr. USA.
A boy discovers he can control the global telephone system by whistling a magic tone. Born blind and yearning for connection, his obsession sparks a subculture that helps shape the future of hacking and technology.
KIDS LIKE ME: DIRS Cynthia Lowen and Jon Cohrs. PRODS Cynthia Lowen and Jon Cohrs. USA.
Meet Oliver, a 12-year-old murder-mystery buff with a boundless imagination who is growing up with a rare genetic condition. Together with his family, he helps reframe what it means to live with disability as they embark on an imaginative adventure to create a murder-mystery caper.
THE LAKE: DIR Abby Ellis. PROD Fletcher Keyes. USA.
An environmental nuclear bomb looms in Utah. Two intrepid scientists and a political insider race against the clock to save their home from unprecedented catastrophe.
LANDSCAPES OF MEMORY: DIR Leah Galant. PRODS Elijah Stevens and Leah Galant. USA.
As she journeys through Germany, Leah Galant confronts family trauma and the legacy of Holocaust memory, weaving together the lives of a survivor’s descendant, a Nazi-descendant historian, exiled Palestinian artists, and her father’s ALS to examine the uses and abuses of memory culture.
THE LAST CRITIC: DIR Matty Wishnow. PRODS Joe Levy, Paul Lovelace, and Ben Wu. USA.
Robert Christgau, the “Dean of American Rock Critics,” whose work has inspired and infuriated readers for sixty years, is still at it in his eighties—grading records, interrogating commas, and listening to nearly everything (except metal and prog).
THE LAST FIRST: WINTER K2: DIR Amir Bar-Lev. USA.
A complex, harrowing, and deeply moving portrait of the evolving world of extreme mountain climbing, following a 2021 expedition in which Icelandic mountaineer John Snorri Sigurjónsson and Pakistani father-son team Ali and Sajid Sadpara attempt the first winter summit of K2, when the mountain is at its most unforgiving.
Courtesy of Apple Original Films.
LOS LOBOS NATIVE SONS: DIRS Doug Blush and Piero F. Giunti. PRODS Rafael Agustín, Doug Blush, Robert Corsini, Piero F. Giunti, Patricia Harris DiLeva, and Flavio Morales. USA.
Drawing on rare archival material and intimate access, LOS LOBOS NATIVE SONS chronicles the extraordinary 50-year journey of Los Lobos, revealing the music, roots, and legacy of one of America’s most enduring bands.
LOVE APPTUALLY: DIR Shalini Kantayya. PROD Elizabeth Woodward. USA, Australia.
Following a French journalist’s journey from an early fascination with Tinder to an investigation of the deeper truths embedded in its algorithm, LOVE APPTUALLY explores how a multibillion-dollar tech industry is quietly reshaping desire, intimacy, and the most fundamental of human pursuits: love.
US Premiere.
MAKING THEIR POINTE: DIR Kamilah Thurmon. USA.
During segregation, African American ballet teachers in Washington, D.C. opened doors for children in underserved communities to enter and excel in the world of classical ballet, creating a legacy that continues across generations.
Screening as part of DC/FRAME.
MISS REPRESENTATION: RISE UP: DIR Jennifer Siebel Newsom. PRODS Camille Servan-Schreiber, Gretchen Miller, and Jennifer Siebel Newsom. USA.
In this timely follow-up to the lauded MISS REPRESENTATION, Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s RISE UP explores the ongoing cultural backlash against women’s mental health, agency, and political power, revealing how technology amplifies sexism and misogyny.
NEWPORT & THE GREAT FOLK DREAM: DIR Robert Gordon. PRODS Joe Lauro, Robert Gordon, and Laura Jean Hocking. USA.
Through performances at the Newport Folk Festival from 1963 to 1966, NEWPORT & THE GREAT FOLK DREAM captures a generation finding its voice through the revival of American folk traditions and protest song.
THE OLDEST PERSON IN THE WORLD: DIR Sam Green. PRODS Alison Byrne Fields and Josh Penn. USA.
A decade-long global odyssey chronicles the ever-shifting record holders of the title, evolving into a poignant meditation on time, chance, and the experience of being alive.
ONE IN A MILLION: DIRS Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes. PRODS Itab Azzam, Jack MacInnes, Will Anderson, James Bluemel, Andrew Palmer, and Raney Aronson-Rath. USA, United Kingdom.
Filmed over ten years, one girl’s epic journey unfolds from Syria to Germany and back again as she navigates war, exile, and heartbreak, illuminating the complexities of the refugee experience.
Courtesy of PBS Distribution.
PHENOMENA: DIR Josef Gatti. PRODS Rob Innes, Jessica Harrop, Caitlin Mae Burke, Jad Abumrad, and Josef Gatti. Australia.
A psychedelic odyssey into the fabric of the universe, where immersive practical experiments yield striking, otherworldly imagery that unfolds into a hypnotic audiovisual experience of awe and human connection to the natural world.
THE SALISBURY POISONINGS: A SPY NEXT DOOR: DIR Dan Vernon. PROD Alex Brisland. United Kingdom, USA.
A botched assassination in a small English city contaminated by a chemical weapon unfolds into one of the most extraordinary true spy stories of the modern era—a portrait of loyalty and betrayal with urgent relevance today.
North American Premiere.
Courtesy of CNN Films.
THE SANDBOX: DIR Kenya-Jade Pinto. PROD Shasha Nakhai. Canada.
Through meditative, cinematic landscapes, THE SANDBOX explores global borders where surveillance and AI shape who lives and who dies. From the Arizona desert to the Mediterranean Sea, suffering is clinically managed while control is packaged as security. If there is no opting out, who is The Sandbox really protecting?
US Premiere.
SCHOOL FOR DEFECTORS: DIR Jeremy Workman. PROD Sona Jo. USA.
In an industrial area of Busan, South Korea, the tiny Jangdaehyun School serves just 20 students—all North Korean defectors—offering a joyful story of youth, inspiration, and our shared humanity.
SEIZED: DIR Sharon Liese. PRODS Sharon Liese, Sasha Alpert, and Paul Matyasovsky. USA.
When the small town of Marion, Kansas, is thrust into the international spotlight after a police raid on the Marion County Record and the death of its 98-year-old co-owner, a fierce debate ignites over abuse of power, journalistic ethics, the future of local journalism, and the United States Constitution.
THE SIEGE OF PARADISE: DIR Gar O’Rourke. Ireland, Switzerland.
Every summer, nearly four million tourists—TikTokers, Instagrammers, and selfie-seekers among them—descend on Cinque Terre and its 3,000 residents. THE SIEGE OF PARADISE follows one chaotic season in a sharply funny and surprisingly tender portrait of paradise under pressure.
SOUL PATROL: DIR J.M. Harper. PRODS Sam Bisbee, J.M. Harper, Danielle Massie, Nasir Jones, and Peter Bittenbender. USA.
From deep behind enemy lines, a hidden chapter of American military history emerges, prompting the question of whether reckoning with the past can bring peace to those who lived it. The Vietnam War’s first Black special operations team reunites to tell their story.
STEALING MAGIC: DIR Matthew Testa. PRODS Ethan Smith, Melanie Miller, Diane Becker, and Randy Pitchford. USA.
Magician Andi Gladwin becomes an unlikely citizen detective, joining a team of illusionists to track down internet pirates who steal their secrets and resell them online.
SUPER NATURE: DIR Ed Sayers. PRODS Rebecca Wolff, Ed Sayers, and Beth Allan. United Kingdom.
A global love letter to nature, filmed entirely on Super 8, invites us into a spellbinding journey of togetherness with our fellow dwellers on Earth—human and nonhuman—as people embrace beauty, abundance, and loss.
US Premiere.
THEYDREAM: DIR William D. Caballero. PRODS William D. Caballero, Brad Jones, Erin Ploss-Campoamor, and Elaine Del Valle. USA.
After 20 years of chronicling his Puerto Rican family, a director and his mother face devastating losses. Through tears and laughter, they craft animations that bring their loved ones back to life, discovering that every act of creation is also an act of letting go.
TIME AND WATER: DIR Sara Dosa. PRODS Shane Boris, Elijah Stevens, Jameka Autry, and Sara Dosa. USA, Iceland.
Facing the loss of his country’s glaciers and the impending death of his beloved grandparents, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his archives into a time capsule to hold what is slipping away—family, memory, time, and water.
Courtesy of National Geographic Documentary Films.
TIME WARP: DIR Allison Berg. USA.
Fifty years after THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW electrified the world, a fearless dreamer sets out to bring its message of personal expression and sexual freedom to a small town in Wyoming.
TO HOLD A MOUNTAIN: DIRS Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić. PRODS Biljana Tutorov, Petar Glomazić, Quentin Laurent, and Rok Biček. Serbia, France, Montenegro, Slovenia.
In the highlands of Montenegro, a shepherd mother and daughter defend their ancestral land from becoming a NATO military training ground, stirring memories of past violence.
TRUE NORTH: DIR Michèle Stephenson. PROD Leslie Norville. USA, Canada.
A riveting portrait of 1960s Montréal, where luminous archival footage and firsthand accounts bring a city in upheaval to life, revealing a defining moment in the global movement for Black liberation.
TWO MOUNTAINS WEIGHING DOWN MY CHEST: DIR Viv Li. PRODS Daniela Dietrich, Erik Winker, and Olivia Sophie van Leeuwen. Germany.
A Chinese misfit ricochets between Berlin’s alternative scene and Beijing’s family expectations, transforming cultural whiplash into an offbeat search for identity and belonging.
WHEN A WITNESS RECANTS: DIR Dawn Porter. PRODS Dawn Porter, Jennifer Oko, and Miriam Weintraub. USA.
In 1983, author Ta-Nehisi Coates recalls learning that a 14-year-old boy was murdered in the corridor of his Baltimore middle school. Revisiting the case as an adult, he uncovers the truth about three teenagers who were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life. After 36 years in prison, false testimony is revealed to have led to their imprisonment. WHEN A WITNESS RECANTS explores the lasting impact of the case on the community, the wrongfully accused, and the young witnesses pressured to testify against them.
Courtesy of HBO Documentary Films.
WHO KILLED ALEX ODEH?: DIRS Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans. PRODS Dawne Langford, Daniel J. Chalfen, Jason Osder, and William Lafi Youmans. USA.
In 1985, the assassination of Palestinian American leader Alex Odeh remains unsolved. Reopening the case as a gripping cold-case investigation, the film follows new leads as the search for accountability intensifies.
THE WHOLE WORLD IS A LIE: DIR Charlie Birns. PRODS Charlie Birns. USA.
A New York method acting class unravels when its students and teacher revolt against the filmmaker, forcing him into a reckoning with truth, trauma, and power in an age when reality itself feels like performance.
YO (LOVE IS A REBELLIOUS BIRD): DIRS Anna Fitch and Banker White. PRODS Anna Fitch, Banker White, Sara Dosa, and Hannah Roodman. USA.
After losing her friend Yo, Anna spends a decade obsessively building a detailed one-third-scale replica of her house — just large enough to crawl inside — where a puppet version of Yo still lives.
Shorts
9,192,631,770 HZ: DIR Todd Chandler. PRODS Heidi Fleisher, Mike Paterson, and Nora Wilkinson. USA.
In conversation with his young son, a filmmaker reflects on time — our attempts to control it, and the ways it shapes human experience.
AND AGAIN I DREAM: DIRS Catherine Gund and Mariah Norman. PROD Catherine Gund. USA.
As Ivy Young nears the end of her life, her lifelong friend Catherine and her young protégé Mariah come together to preserve the story of a beloved journalist and organizer whose legacy bridges queer generations through memory, activism, and love.
AT THE STAGE WHEN: DIR Hao Zhou. PRODS Tyler Hill and Hao Zhou. USA, China.
In a Chinese megacity, a young laborer navigates her marriage to a well-off man and finds herself bound to an unintended future.
THE BADDEST SPEECHWRITER OF ALL: DIRS Ben Proudfoot and Stephen Curry. PRODS Stephen Curry, Erick Peyton, and Ben Proudfoot. USA.
Now 95, Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawyer and speechwriter reflects on the personal cost and surprising truths of making history, offering an intimate insider’s view of the Civil Rights Movement.
Courtesy of Netflix.
BIG BASS: DIR Drew Dickler. PRODS Nikki F. Heyman, Jennie Kamin, and David Sherwin. USA.
Drew returns to 1997 to revisit a dreamlike second-grade memory shaped by her emerging queer identity, a legendary P.E. teacher, and a mysterious giant plastic fish.
THE BOYS AND THE BEES: DIR Arielle Knight. PROD Arielle Knight. USA.
On an idyllic farm in rural Georgia, young parents share their understanding of life, love, and nature with their sons, teaching them the art of beekeeping.
Courtesy of POV.
BUCKSKIN: DIR Mars Verrone. PROD Mars Verrone. USA.
An experimental portrait of the filmmaker’s grandfather: Carroll B. Williams Jr., a ground-breaking African-American forester, reflecting on his work and legacy in the twilight of his life.
CHILAPA GIRL: DIR Juana Lotero López. PRODS Daniel Sánchez and Juana Lotero López. Colombia.
Yulieth, on the cusp of adolescence, faces the difficulties of growing up in a wild territory where natural beauty coexists with the hostility of machismo. Her emerging identity is caught between the pull of her dreams and the realities of her world.
CHOCOLATE: A MOTION POETRY HOMAGE TO BLACK D.C.: DIR Eliamani Ismail. PROD Gyzelle Garcia. USA.
In the nation’s fastest-gentrifying city, Black DC refuses quiet erasure.
Screening as part of DC/FRAME.
THE CUSTODIAN: DIR Khaula Malik. PRODS Amber Hsu, Colleen Thurston, and Khaula Malik. USA.
After more than five decades collecting rare and vintage memorabilia dating back to 1932, Samu Qureshi, a devoted Washington Commanders superfan, believes he is finally ready to part with his collection — hoping to sell it to team ownership and help establish a museum and hall of fame.
World Premiere.
THE DARK KNOT AT THE CENTER: DIR Inês Pedrosa e Melo. PRODS André Guiomar, Carlos Carneiro, and Luís Costa. Portugal, USA.
Women travel hundreds of miles for abortion care, recounting the barriers they face and the lasting toll of a system that forces them to the margins.
A DERAILMENT: DIR Nathan Truesdell. PRODS Kat Nguyen and Will Lennon. USA.
At 8:55 PM on February 3, 2023, a freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio.
DIVISION: DIR James Paul Dallas. PRODS James Paul Dallas and Eryc Perez de Tagle. USA.
Spring, 2025. Brooklyn, New York. One chapter closes and another begins.
ENDLINGS: DIR María Luisa Santos. PROD Carlo Nasisse. USA, Costa Rica.
Amid the planet’s first human-driven mass extinction, a filmmaker moves through churches, ancient DNA labs, and spectral archives in search of what remains—and what can never be recovered.
FILME-COPACABANA: DIR Sofia Leão. PRODS Laura Neiva, Leonardo Martinelli, Rafael Lopes Cesar, and Sofia Leão. Brazil.
From a chair on a Rio sidewalk, a woman observes the passing choreography of Copacabana. Workers, tourists, dogs, and daily street life come together through playful montage to create a vibrant portrait of the neighborhood.
US Premiere.
FINAL PRESS: DIR John Haley. USA.
Workers at The Minnesota Star Tribune complete the last printing run at the newspaper’s Heritage Center, ending 150 years of printing the paper in Minnesota.
World Premiere.
FLETCHER STREET: DIR Jannat Gargi and David Darg. PROD Jannat Gargi. USA.
In North Philadelphia, the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club offers a vital safe haven for at-risk youth. Their joy and sense of freedom as they ride horses majestically through the streets of their neighborhood is as affirming as the trust, discipline, and emotional resilience they build through their close bonds with the horses.
GATORVILLE: DIR Freddie Gluck. PRODS Chloe Campion, Freddie Gluck, and Matteo Moretti. USA.
In Colorado’s forgotten valley, two siblings face alligators and the ache of leaving youth behind.
GHOST LANDS: DIR Zachary Garmoe. USA.
Following the marshes and forests of the Delmarva Peninsula in the footsteps of Harriet Tubman, GHOST LANDS explores how the natural landscapes that shaped her life continue to hold the memory of freedom, resistance, and our shared past.
THE GRANDFATHER PUZZLE: DIR Ora DeKornfeld. PRODS Zsófia Paczolay, Máté Artur Vincze, and Noémi Veronika Szakonyi. USA.
When a puzzle-obsessed grandfather refuses to discuss his past, his granddaughter travels to photograph the Hungarian castle where he grew up and turn it into a puzzle. What begins as a simple mission becomes a darkly comic exploration of displacement, memory, and the meaning of home.
GRAZING ON IMAGES: DIR Mark Street. USA.
A diaristic journey shot on 35mm still film and Super 8 travels, tracing a life shaped by the rhapsodic beauty of everyday images.
World Premiere.
THE HOTLINE: DIRS Ricki Stern and Jesse Sweet. PROD Ricki Stern. USA.
A haunting, meditative portrait of opioid users connected through an anonymous phone line, THE HOTLINE reveals a fragile tether between life and death.
I WANTED TO HEAR YOUR VOICE: DIR James Pellerito. PROD David Barba. USA.
After eight years caring for his mother with severe dementia, a son navigates the challenges of their daily routine.
JACOB KAINEN: THE LAST EXPRESSION: DIR Mark Covino. PROD Jon Gann. USA.
From tenement kid to towering figure in Washington, DC’s art world, JACOB KAINEN: THE LAST EXPRESSION traces Jacob Kainen’s seven-decade journey through American art as a story of creative defiance.
Screening as part of DC/FRAME.
JOURNEY(S): ADDIS TO DC: DIR Saaret E. Yoseph. PROD Saaret E. Yoseph. USA, Ethiopia.
A narrative journey between two distant sister cities, JOURNEY(S): ADDIS TO DC traces the lives of Ethiopian women in America and Black women across the diaspora, weaving together memory, migration, and the search for home.
Screening as part of DC/FRAME.
KITE: DIR Thanos Psichogios. PROD Thanos Psichogios. Greece.
On Clean Monday, the first day of Lent in Greece, Panos, now grown, returns to a childhood ritual of flying a kite with his father. But memories are never simple.
KOKI, CIAO: DIR Quenton Miller. Netherlands.
The autobiography of Koki, the parrot of Marshal Tito, who led Yugoslavia for 35 years.
LA MAR: DIR Jean Chapiro. PROD Jean Chapiro. Mexico.
As the ocean swallows her fishing village on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, one woman leads the effort to relocate her community while struggling to let go of the sea that shaped her life.
LISTEN: DIR Taliesin Black-Brown. PRODS Taliesin Black-Brown, Sam Davis, and Greg Moga. USA.
As his mother slips away into dementia, an Alaskan sound recordist listens for what remains.
NOTES ON COURTWATCH: DIR Kate Levy. USA.
“Courtwatchers” attend immigration court to bear witness and support asylum seekers facing the risk of ICE detention at their hearings.
World Premiere.
OH WHALE: DIR Winslow Crane-Murdoch. PRODS Luke Terrell, Cecilia Brown, and Rachel Gardell. USA.
One man. One Whale. Twenty cases of dynamite.
PEDRO TOMÁS EXPLAINS THE WORLD: DIR Kornelijus Stučkus. PRODS Liliana Díaz Castillo, Marc Vila Bosch, and Paulina Martinez. Spain.
On the volcanic island of La Palma lives Pedro Tomás, a man who explores the world through his unique vision.
PLANT LIFE: DIRS Brett Marty and Joshua Izenberg. PRODS. USA.
At a pivotal moment in her life and career, Joanne Chory races to complete her most audacious experiment yet: re-engineering crops to draw down CO₂ at planetary scale. As her Parkinson’s advances and carbon levels surge, PLANT LIFE captures a scientific race against time that may determine both her legacy — and our collective future.
PLUMPED: DIRS Nora DeLigter and Faye Tsakas. PRODS. USA.
Inspired by GAP-TOOTHED WOMEN by Les Blank, women speak candidly about their experiences with lip filler, exploring beauty, identity, and the pressures of self-image.
World Premiere.
Courtesy of Rolling Stone.
A QUIET STORM: DIR Benjamin Nicolas. PROD Rumi Tominaga. Canada, Japan.
In suburban Tokyo, a fourteen-year-old krump prodigy channels his unspoken rage into dance while his single mother quietly raises him and his sister, who lives with a disability. In a culture that demands silence and conformity, her endurance becomes the loudest act of love, and his body becomes the only language left.
ROOM OF THE ABSOLUTE: DIRS Natalie Shirinian and Elizabeth Baudouin. PRODS Natalie Shirinian, Elizabeth Baudouin, and Alla Hurenko. USA.
Ukrainian painter Alla Hurenko (known as Pazza Pennello) captures an intimate, diaristic portrait of life under war through her iPhone, where art becomes a powerful act of resilience and self-preservation.
THE SECOND LIFE OF FREDDIE NOLE: DIR Dana Nachman. PRODS Chelsea Matter and Dana Nachman. USA.
When Freddie Nole drives to meet a man walking out of prison, he is not just offering a ride, but hope, dignity, and a path to lasting freedom. As this vérité road trip unfolds, the remarkable story behind Freddie’s mission comes into focus: a staggering mistake that cost him 50 years of freedom and ultimately brought him back to the prison gates.
SCENES FROM THE DIVIDE: DIR Alison Klayman. PRODS Alison Klayman and Courtney Powell. USA.
Set against the contentious mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, SCENES FROM THE DIVIDE follows one daughter and her parents, alongside other New Yorkers, as divisions over Palestine expose deeper fractures within Jewish communal life. Through intimate family and community conversations, the film reveals a struggle over identity, history, and belonging.
SEA SONG: DIR An-Phuong Ly. USA.
The last remaining South Vietnamese naval officers reunite one final time with the few people who understand the forces that have shaped their lives.
SHEESH, A TAYLOR LOVE STORY: DIR Ramona Diaz. PROD Diane Quon. USA.
In a country where drag is both art and survival, Taylor Sheesh transforms Taylor Swift fandom into a movement of joy, belonging, self-expression, and empowerment — revealing the power of queer performance to help people feel seen, beautiful, and free in a region still fighting for equality.
World Premiere.
STALIN BOYS: DIRS Ora DeKornfeld and Bianca Giaever. USA.
Four middle school boys in a Texas border town develop an unexpected obsession: Joseph Stalin.
STILL STANDING: DIR Victor Tadashi Suarez and Livia Albeck-Ripka. PRODS Livia Albeck-Ripka and Victor Tadashi Suarez. USA.
After the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires leave thousands of homes contaminated with toxic ash, residents face an impossible choice: protect their health or return home.
SUDAKAS: DIR Ricardo Betancourt. PRODS Lorraine Caffery. Venezuela.
A former Venezuelan diplomat now working as a housekeeper in the same city where she once served confronts the realities of immigration, labor, and reinvention.
TOSS A ROSE OVER: DIR Janelle VanderKelen. USA.
A travelogue from the vantage point of the plants of the Grand Canyon.
World Premiere.
THE TUNERS: DIR Pawel Piotr Chorzepa. Poland.
In the shadows of the world’s most prestigious piano competition, a group of expert tuners spend a month striving to achieve perfect pitch—hoping that the eventual champion will perform on their instrument.
North American Premiere.
WATER COOLER: DIR Emma V.F.. USA.
The Trump administration has transformed immigration courts into deportation traps. As ICE agents wait outside courtrooms to make arrests, their banal conversations stand in stark contrast to the gravity of their actions.
WEIRDO: DIR Amy Oden. PROD Amy Oden. USA.
In the summer before she starts high school, Bronwyn discusses what it’s like to feel weird in two very different towns.
WHEN THE REVOLUTION DOESN’T COME: DIR Aurora Brachman. PROD LaTajh Simmons-Weaver. USA, United Kingdom.
They are the children of the Black Panther Party — the self-styled Panther Cubs — born into a revolutionary movement for Black equality and self-determination, and now reckoning with the pride, loss, and unfinished promise of that legacy fifty years later.
Courtesy of The Guardian.
WOMEN LAUGHING: DIRS Kathleen Hughes and Liza Donnelly. PRODS Judith Mizrachy, Liza Donnelly, and Nathalie Seaver. USA.
New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly talks, draws, and laughs with some of the most celebrated and groundbreaking cartoonists at the iconic magazine as they reflect on the essential work of women cartoonists today and over the last century.
Courtesy of Conde Nast / The New Yorker.
Frederick Wiseman Retrospective
HOSPITAL (1969): DIR Frederick Wiseman. USA.
Through the daily rhythms of an urban hospital’s emergency ward and clinics, HOSPITAL reveals the intricate systems, urgent decisions, and human encounters at the heart of modern medicine.
JUVENILE COURT (1973): DIR Frederick Wiseman. USA.
Set inside the Memphis juvenile justice system, JUVENILE COURT observes the difficult cases and impossible choices at the intersection of punishment, protection, and rehabilitation.
WELFARE (1975): DIR Frederick Wiseman. USA.
Inside a New York City welfare office, WELFARE reveals the human struggles, bureaucratic barriers, and impossible choices at the heart of the social safety net.
Sunday, June 14, 2026 | 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
https://dcdoxfest.com/films/every-contact-leaves-a-trace/
https://www.nga.gov/calendar/every-contact-leaves-trace-grazing-images
Join us for a post-screening discussion with filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Mark Street, in person.
Contact—tactile, evocative of one person touching another, physically and emotionally. Trace—a reckoning with the residue of that initial encounter, filtered by time and the imperfection of memory. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs has lived most of her life before laptops reshaped how people connect, and she has saved every business card she has ever been given.
Each card is a portal to her past, a reminder of how someone she met in person shifted her consciousness and left a trace of their presence: a German woman grappling with her country’s history; a therapist who erased all records of her own life; an artist confronting government censorship. Sachs selects seven cards from hundreds and sets out to uncover how and why they have endured. When possible, she follows these traces, seeking out reunions.
Revisiting fleeting encounters in kitchens, parks, offices, and festivals, she carries her cards to a forensic scientist’s lab to examine their DNA traces. Blending the real and the imagined, her essay film teases apart nearly forgotten resonances, intertwining personal memory with broader geopolitical histories.
Preceded by the North American premiere of Grazing on Images. Filmed on 35mm analog still film and Super 8, Grazing on Images is a diaristic work that travels from Dublin to Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, and Beloit, Wisconsin, before returning to the filmmaker’s home base in Brooklyn to reflect on a life shaped by rhapsodic, everyday images. (Mark Street, 2025, DCP, 17 minutes)
This program is presented in partnership with the DC/DOX 2026 film festival.
https://mysterycatalog.com/2026/04/every-contact-leaves-a-trace-at-anthology-film-archives-may-3/
April 29, 2026
By Herbert Gambill
Brooklyn documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs is the recipient of the POV Award at the San Francisco Film Festival on April 29. The festival will be screening her latest film, “Every Contact Leaves a Trace.” Go here for more information. On May 3 the film will also be shown at NYC’s Anthology Film Archives.
Sachs has a collection of 600 business cards and decides to choose seven of them and attempt to reconnect with the persons who gave them to her. (Her ramblings while searching for candidates–”Oh, she won’t talk to me!”–is one of the most amusing parts of the film.) She says the premise is a foundation of forensic science invented by Edmond Locard, a forensic pioneer: any trace can link a person to a place, another person or an object. She even has a scientist analyze the cards for fingerprints and DNA. (This doesn’t reveal much.)
In her director’s statement, Sachs reports that “Chance meetings become distinct and revealing punctums, each physical interaction an encounter that pricks.” Punctum was a concept Roland Barthes created for his 1980 book on photography “Camera Lucida.” He distinguished between the “studium” of a photo (the obvious symbolic content of the photo) and its “punctum” (something, perhaps incidental, that “pierces” the viewer in a person way). In her usual technique of hybrid filmmaking, she comes up with a different way to model her interactions with the seven contacts.
One of the most unsettling contacts for her is Lawrence Brose, an experimental film artist whose films explored his gay sexuality, especially his feature-length film “De Profundis,” a hand-etched film inspired by Oscar Wilde’s 1887 letter to his lover from prison. Brose reveals to Sachs that he was charged with having child pornography and she wonders if she should cut him from the film only to learn later that he was innocent: a member of his art collective had downloaded the material and yet he was charged and his lawyer advised him to take a plea deal rather than to go to court.
Sachs met two of the contacts via her presence at various international film festivals over the years. Angela Haardt is a German avant-garde film artist who was born in 1940 and recalls her memories of Nazi Germany, including the continued popularity of 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine, whose work was banned by the Nazis. This prompts Lynne, who is Jewish, to think about the genocide in Gaza. Jiang Juan, a champion of films by women in China, lives with the director for awhile; Sachs uses striking split screen footage of her to illustrate her perception of her in the past and the present.
Betty Leacraft is a textile artist who lives in Philadelphia. She gently tutors the filmmaker in needlepoint, demonstrating her own method of tying off thread. Actress Rae C. Wright is employed to play a former therapist of Sachs whose advice surprised her. Lynne interviews her niece and nephew (children of her brother, filmmaker Ira Sachs) about her project. They offer her whimsical takes from a younger generation.
Sachs created a way to diagram her interaction with her contacts with white markings on a black background. (It looks a bit like football play diagrams.) One wonders how the film would differ had she chosen other business cards, which makes “Every Contact Leaves a Trace” what Barthes called a “writerly” text, one that forces the viewer to engage actively with the work. You may even want to go to your own collection of business cards and create your own series of experiments. Featuring a great soundtrack by Stephen Vitiello and lovely animation, Lynne Sachs’ latest film is another wonderful addition to her long body of perceptive, funny and warm feminist-informed explorations of creativity, memory, seriality and politics.
Go here to listen to Adam Schartoff’s interview with Sachs about this film.
April 24th 2026
By Delaney Holton
https://www.screenslate.com/articles/every-contact-leaves-trace
Lynne Sachs’s new film Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2025) begins from a pun on Locard’s Exchange Principle: the forensic axiom that each encounter between people or objects deposits a material residue. Sachs turns the principle inward, toward the sedimented matter of a life lived among others: some 600 business cards accumulated over four decades, a paper archive indexing the chance encounters and professional exchanges of an illustrious career. The film appropriately screens on the occasion of Sachs’s Persistence of Vision Award from SFFILM, which recognizes her career in experimental documentary filmmaking.
As Sachs sifts through the stacks, narrating associations or confronting blank spots in her recollection, the cards’ standardized form gives way to the unruliness of relation. Sachs layers a restless flow of images, animations, and superimpositions over a diaristic voiceover, while frequent collaborator Stephen Vitiello’s omnipresent score hums beneath. She stages new encounters with select figures represented in her collection: a textile artist, a therapist, a refugee and mother who once cooked for her. Conversations always seem to turn toward days gone by, though the governing insight is less about recovering evidence of what “really” happened than observing how the past is continually remediated through its recounting and the subtle gravity people exert upon one another’s lives across space and time. At intervals, Sachs extends the interpersonal scale of her inquiry into a more expansive awareness.
While speaking to the woman who cuts her hair or searching for someone to make her maqluba, she holds Ukraine and Gaza on her mind. As she thinks of previous mistakes, of her ambivalent German-Jewish heritage, or her complicity in historical and current violence while living within the imperial core, her on-screen interlocutors serve as mirrors into her own wandering mind, a gesture toward entanglement reminiscent of Chris Marker’s reflexive Sans Soleil (1983). The “trace,” the film suggests, marks both the fact of contact and the asymmetries that shape it. At the same time, these traces may falter in their own ways, as they fail to hold the fullness of what passes between people. What constitutes intimacy? What does it mean to know someone? Closeness doesn’t necessarily produce understanding or solidarity. It can generate hostility or leave damage. With Sachs, we learn that to be in relation is to come to terms with one’s capacity to do harm and to accept that we might leave imprints that elude our awareness entirely. If Sachs begins from the business cards as her archive of traces, then, by the end she relinquishes the thinness of their description to the irreducible complexity of the people and relationships they represent.
Every Contact Leaves a Trace screens Saturday, May 9, presented by Other Cinema at Artists’s Television Access, with Lynne Sachs in person.
Previously:
Every Contact Leaves a Trace screens Wednesday, April 29, at BAMPFA, with Lynne Sachs in person to receive SFFILM’s Persistence of Vision award.
April 13, 2026
EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE is a thought provoking overview of our digital era. We mostly live in a time and place where real life connections become rarer, yet any personal encounter can leave a lingering trace. Over a lifetime, filmmaker Lynne Sachs has collected business cards, mementos of these initial meetings with strangers. Sachs selects seven cards from hundreds and throws herself into finding out how and why these brief yet vivid moments left an imprint on her consciousness. When she is able, she embraces clues and seeks out reunions. But when there is no trace, she gambles with imaginary histories and futures. A lifetime of tactile, face-to-face encounters reminds her of identities passed from hand to hand. Director Lynne Sachs joins us to talk about her imaginative hybrid film, that draws inspiration from a basic principle of forensic science, coined by Edmond Locard, a pioneer in the field that any trace can link a person to a place, another person or an object.
May 20, 2026, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Bok Auditorium, 800 Mifflin St, Philadelphia, PA 19148, USA
https://www.lightboxfilmcenter.org/events/every-contact-leaves-a-trace
Lightbox Film Center is Philadelphia’s premier exhibitor of film and moving image art. Beyond the traditional movie theater experience, Lightbox presents an unparalleled slate of repertory, nonfiction, experimental and international cinema that would otherwise not be screened theatrically in Philadelphia. We are dedicated to preserving and exhibiting films that are historically relevant along with contemporary films that have yet to become widely available. Building a community around a shared reverence for cinema, Lightbox celebrates the projected image as a framework for diverse ideas and perspectives. Our programs inspire discourse, invite exploration and challenge the status quo.
Followed by a conversation with director Lynne Sachs and Philadelphia artist Betty Leacraft
Mel Valentin, Lead Critic; San Francisco, California
May 14 2026, 11:02 AM
The latest project by filmmaker Lynne Sachs (Drift and Bough, The Washing Society, Film About a Father Who) opens with a quote from the French-born father of 20th-century forensic science, Dr. Edmond Locard: “Every contact leaves a trace.”
The basis for “Locard’s Exchange Principle,” it also doubles as the title of Sachs’ documentary, a deeply personal cine-essay.
With more time behind her than in front of her, a meditative Sachs uncovered a box of 600 business cards dating back to 1990 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a young woman and burgeoning filmmaker, Sachs met Angela Haardt, a Berlin resident, a founding member of the International Forum of the Film Avant-Garde, and the director of a shorts festival (1990-1997) where Sachs placed an early short film of hers. Her new film combines archival footage, reminiscences about post-war Germany, and its place in the Jewish-American imagination (more positive than negative for Sachs, the opposite understandably so for her mother)
Decades later, Haardt welcomes Sachs both as an equal and a long-lost friend. Looking back at their initial meeting, the intervening time, and the present, Haardt grapples with German history, identity, and culture, specifically how, when, and where Germans commemorate the Holocaust or deliberately forget it. It’s a tragedy that Sachs connects to her own conflicted, contradictory feelings about Israel, Gaza, and Israel’s initially defensive response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, including the reoccupation of Gaza and the disproportionate effect on the Palestinian population.
Before Every Contact Leaves a Trace ventures too far into Israel, Gaza, or the commingled future of its peoples and the region itself, however, Sachs deliberately pulls back, returning to the original focus of her project, tracking down a select handful from the business cards she acquired over the years. Few are as compelling as Haardt, but they’re still fascinating on their own, sometimes less because of who they are or what they’ve contributed to film and the film community than their relationship to Sachs and the latter’s attempts, sometimes successful, sometimes not, to reignite long-dormant friendships or relationships.
Among Every Contact Leaves a Trace’s subjects, Sachs’ most intriguing interviewees include the late Lawrence Brose (De Profundis), a pioneering queer filmmaker who found himself hounded by Homeland Security and ICE for the alleged possession of child pornography. Out of a combination of fear and prudence, Brose pled guilty to a lesser offense (obscenity), in exchange for two years of probation. During that period, Brose couldn’t own or access anything related to the LGBTQ community or risk his probation turning into imprisonment.
Brose’s persecution and subsequent plea deal could — and probably should — have been a documentary in its own right, but in Sachs’ cine-essay, it offers her another opportunity for self-examination, both as an individual and as a filmmaker bound by ethics. Given the seriousness of the accusations against Brose, she considered excising his segment altogether. It’s to her credit that she didn’t.
Even in a truncated form, Brose and his story needed to be heard and seen. Sachs’ ethical conundrum also serves as an opening for much-needed discussion and rumination on the other side of the screen.
Sachs’ other subjects include Juan Jiang, the director of the now-defunct Chinese Women’s Festival; textile artist Betty Leacraft, Sachs’ one-time student turned teacher; Felix and Viva Torres, Sachs’ nephew and niece, respectively (the children of Sachs’ filmmaker brother, Ira); and, in a meta-fictional twist, Rae C. Wright, a performer who serves as a stand-in for Sachs’ therapist. While Leacraft proves slightly prickly under Sachs’ performance-driven direction, Felix and Viva emerge as a charming duo, offering the occasional insight along with warmth of spirit and generosity toward their idiosyncratic aunt.
For some, Every Contact Leaves a Trace will seem overly personal and thus, too slight or of marginal interest. For those willing to look — and just as importantly, listen — Every Contact Leaves a Trace will, like the title of Sachs’ documentary, leave an indelible mark, asking important, open-ended questions about life, art, and mortality. Few have answers, but as Sachs suggests more than once, they’re all the more worth asking.
Every Contact Leaves a Trace premiered at the 2025 IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival) in Amsterdam. It played most recently at the 2026 San Francisco International Film Festival.
Soham Gadre
April 28, 2026
https://thefilmstage.com/prismatic-ground-2026-forges-a-vibrant-accessible-path-for-film-festivals/
Prismatic Ground is a film festival I have been attending in-person for nearly three years, and while my streak of such attendance unfortunately ended this year, I have continued to watch and cover since its inaugural edition in 2021. Prismatic Ground remains so special because it maintains the tenets of its conception, which founder and director Inney Prakash explained as an attempt to fill the void of festivals dedicated to experimental cinema and a festival that doesn’t treat the COVID pandemic’s shift to online-accessible film-viewing as merely a “stopgap,” but an actual “effort to rethink the experience” of a festival.
The radical shift and change to the festival circuit for both cinema viewers and filmmakers—which includes actually paying the filmmakers for their work to be presented and removing geo-blocking so as many people as possible who can’t attend in-person screenings can still see some films online from anywhere—ties nicely to this year’s closing film, Isiah Medina’s Gangsterism. Always a self-assured and divisive artist, especially post-Inventing the Future, Medina, in his latest, is both his most combative and self-reflexive. Gangsterism is combative for how it seems to deconstruct the criticisms leveled at Medina’s previous films, such as their supposed obtuseness or the heavily academic framework for theorizing things like theft of art and liberation of technology that seems removed from material reality. Its self-reflection emerges from a major topic of discussion: that the central character, Clem, considers it insulting that potential financiers find his movies difficult to understand. Medina’s style is as distinct as ever. The patterns of repetition, sound, and image interrupting each other are contrasted through drawn-out sequences of characters forming arguments on the current economy of cinema, the financing of being a filmmaker, the social responsibilities and roles of academia, and, central to its plot, the proliferation of film via digital piracy.
The festival gives out only one prize per year: the Ground Glass prize, a career-achievement award. In its inaugural year, it went to Brooklyn-based artist Lynne Sachs, and this year it went to Japanese experimental artist Kohei Ando. Sachs also has a film this year, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, which pairs well with Ando’s work. Sachs’ film is a self-insert documentary where the filmmaker looks back to remember and re-encounter people with whom she shared and kept business cards. These encounters vary from friendly to awkward to uncomfortable, both in the memories they bring back and the inherent ideas that shoving a camera into someone’s face might elicit. Considerations of “performance,” “simulation,” and “vulnerability” seep into the forefront through the lens. Sachs considers aloud, while shuffling through the business cards, which of these people would be welcoming to meeting her again. A German festival director named Angela, whom Sachs met 30 years ago, recounts post-war Germany and the history of the Holocaust in people’s collective memory as another genocide in Gaza is unfolding today. Experimental filmmaker Lawrence Brose speaks about the persecution he faced as a gay artist while scenes from his film play in montage over conversation.
Like Sachs’ film, Kohei Ando’s cinema is very much tussling with ideas of time, memory, and connection to people. The most direct work that mirrors Sachs is the fun short My Friends in My Address Book, which goes through a montage of Ando’s friends smiling for the camera and holding up pieces of paper with their names. Other shorts, like his Passing Train series, exhibit time as something continuous and through multiple angles—intimate and unrelenting rather than something that creates distance. There is a sense of sentimentality that warmly lingers throughout these movies—especially On the Far Side of Twilight, which uses a saccharine piano score and cute narration that highlights his memories from childhood to old age. The image composition is immaculate, distinct in its bright coloration, and imaginative for how it breaks the fourth wall of the film plane, burning it, cutting it out, and transforming it into various shapes while moving it at different speeds.
It’s worth highlighting a number of shorts that bring forth examination and consideration for where experimental cinema is today. Rajee Samarasinghe’s A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth comprises excerpts and outtakes from the filmmaker’s remarkable feature documentary Your Touch Makes Others Invisible on missing children in Sri Lanka. The recontextualization of these outtakes from interviews—many of which feature the imperfections of sound, framing, and focus—confront us with how the difficult and traumatic experiences of real people cannot be decontextualized from the filmmaking process. Eislow Johnson’s Injured? is the most “action-packed” and funny of the shorts—a rapid-fire montage of a drive on a highway focusing on the litany of billboards for law firms for car accidents. It is ironic in its clear connection between America’s obsession with cars and suing people, but also fashioned as a sort of intense action film, mimicking the volume and ferocity of one of cinema’s great entertainments: the high-speed chase.
Yusuf Demiror’s Archura Leaves the City Forever is a beautiful, hypnotic fable. Its warm lighting and cold urban exteriors, mixed with fantastical costumes and lush natural highlights, make for a transportive work reminiscent of a mix between Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation and Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Emotion. Michael Barwise’s That Sanity Be Kept is a melancholy and nostalgic film, but also terrifyingly contemporary in its depiction of surveillance and the destruction of privacy as government agencies track the movements, faces, and clothing of various young people during a ceasefire amidst The Troubles.
Finally, three phenomenal and rare treasures by Iraqi filmmaker Parine Jaddo––Atash, Aisha, and Teyh––all highlight the artist’s conflicts (or false conflicts) of sexuality with religion, and modern discourses of fiction and the roles of men and women in Iraqi society in a rapidly westernizing world. All this occurs amid constant reminders of bombs and how post-war existence for the Middle East is always a pre-war state.
Primastic Ground 2026 takes place April 29-May 3 in venues across NYC.
