A film about traces, guilt and memory — and about the impossibility of approaching the past arbitrarily.
In “Every Contact Leaves a Trace,” experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs starts from a seemingly simple idea: she’s spent her life collecting business cards from people she’s encountered along the way—colleagues, festival directors, strangers who popped into her life briefly. Most have long since vanished. What remains is a box full of names, numbers, and faded impressions. Sachs decides to reconnect with some of them, camera in hand, while her children ask her questions about who these people were—and why them in particular.
The premise is intriguing: a film about the traces left by encounters. Yet, Sachs doesn’t allow for chance. She chooses the people she remembers well, those with whom the connection was once tangible. This keeps the adventure within safe boundaries; the possibility that the unknown might truly surprise her remains unexploited.
Yet, despite her limited abilities, Sachs manages to keep the film alive until the very end. Ultimately, ‘Every Contact Leaves a Trace’ isn’t just about the people behind the tickets; it gradually unfolds into a film about the past, atonement, and guilt. She visits Angela, a former German festival director, who, using Heinrich Heine’s poem “Die arme Weber” (The Poor Weber), speaks about the legacy of guilt that weighs on Germany. Sachs accompanies her narrative with daring poetic imagery—close-ups on 8mm and digital—supported by Stephen Vitiello’s pulsating score. What could have been a simple interview elevates into an essayistic pamphlet on memory and responsibility.
At times, however, Sachs goes too far. In her search for form, she veers toward abstraction: audio fragments and fragmented sentences tumble over each other like a maelstrom of thoughts. In these moments, the film threatens to descend into artistic introspection—art for art’s sake—and the lighthearted curiosity that usually characterizes her work vanishes. Fortunately, she always regains her balance.
One of the most intriguing encounters is with avant-garde filmmaker Lawrence Brose, whose work on Oscar Wilde is visually captivating, but whose personal history remains fraught: he was once convicted of possessing child pornography, a charge he claims had nothing to do with his artistic practice. The film touches on moral ambiguity here without resorting to sensationalism—and it is precisely there that Sachs reveals her strength: behind every card lies a person who, as soon as the camera focuses on him and thus magnifies him, proves to be extraordinary.
What remains is a film that tells as much about Sachs herself as it does about the people she visits. Her gaze, her voice, her editing—that’s what makes “Every Contact Leaves a Trace” tick. She captures beauty in the mundane, elevates the casual to poetry, and shows that even the most fleeting encounter leaves a lasting legacy.
Beginning with the idea of “trace evidence,” filmmaker Lynne Sachs seeks to discover if genetic material and fingerprints remain attached to the six hundred or so business cards she’s collected over the years. The idea is that these pieces of cardboard maintain markers of the people they represent beyond contact information that often becomes outdated in the time since receipt. More than these scientific remnants, however, are also memories steeped in emotional connection. Why have some of their owners vividly imprinted upon her mind?
Every Contact Leaves a Trace is the result of Sachs’ fascination with this tactile phenomenon that has all but been erased with the advent of cellphones and digital address books. She exposes this generational divide by enlisting her twin niece and nephew (Felix and Viva Johnson Sachs Torres) as soundboards with which to ask if they’d ever keep a collection of cards like this themselves. They of course say no because the technology has objectively become obsolete and I admittedly felt sad for them since business cards played a big role in my own life.
I too have a book of cards from the early aughts and became fascinated with the potential of graphic design as a career through the ingenuity they represent. I love the wild ideas Stefan Sagmeister came up with for his branding projects. He made something so simple and, perhaps, classist (see American Psycho) into unique objects with their own motion, puzzles, and artistry. His ability to make something so uniformly commonplace into an unforgettable keepsake left an indelible mark. Sachs’ subject Bradley Eros’ punched “tickets” recall this truth.
A similar thing happened with Sachs, but through the cards’ scrapbook nature as symbols of their owners rather than objects in their own right. We watch as she leafs through her tote, shuffling them together like playing cards before putting them on her table one by one with brief commentary on whether she thinks the person is both someone she’d want to reconnect with and someone who’d be interested in participating in the film. In the end, Sachs chooses seven cards that hold a strong enough contact trace to hunt down their owners.
Betty Leacraft is a former student turned textile artist Sachs seems to remember more and have a stronger bond with than the other way around. Angela Haardt was the director of a German film festival she attended at twenty-nine and an in-road to better consider her heritage as a German Jew and her guilt towards what’s happening in Gaza. Jiang Juan was the chairperson of the China Women’s Film Festival in which Sachs was an invitee. Irina Yekimova is her hairstylist and bookend to the film who provides a great moment of epiphany.
The gist of this revelation is that we can only ever know what we know. Yes, these people have all left their mark on Sachs, but only insofar as what that mark means to her. She doesn’t actually know any of them. Not really. Not wholly. There’s a great moment where she rejects a card saying that she’s pretty sure she already knows everything he’s willing to let her know—proof that our understanding of the people around us is forever incomplete. We place our meaning on their words and actions. So, our truth isn’t necessarily the truth.
Case and point: cards six and seven. One is that of a former therapist who Sachs couldn’t track down. She instead hires actor Rae C. Wright to portray the character in a hypothetical scene wherein the filmmaker confronts her for what she believes was complicity to deceit. Through this exercise comes the acknowledgement that the words Sachs thought were permission could have been interpreted many different ways. But the way she did take them ultimately becomes the only “real” answer considering it’s what drove her actions.
The other card is Lawrence Brose, a name I’m familiar with living in Buffalo and having gone to UB. A controversial figure due to his 2009 arrest for child pornography, Sachs voices the thought that maybe she should cut him from the film since that isn’t why she contacted him. Her memory upon seeing his name concerned his experimental film De Profundis and it was only after they connected that she remembered the rest. But she decides to hear his truth about the arrest anyway and, perhaps, change her own ideas about him as a result.
Therein lies this journey’s thesis. Whereas a contact trace in investigative terms purports to forensically find objective truth, there’s always room for error (enough that the government offered Brose a plea deal but not enough to guarantee an exoneration). And when it comes to contact traces in terms of personal memory and impact, there’s probably more error than truth due to perspective. Whether your memory is right or wrong, however, proves moot in hindsight. How you used it cannot be changed, but a new trace might still be left for tomorrow.
Lynn Sachs’ latest film is an interesting look at how all our interactions connect to each other. Nominally the film is a look at the thousands of business cards collected over a lifetime. Who are all the people and businesses that they represent? Sachs goes back and investigates them while all taking a look at forensics.
This is a typical Sach’s examination of a subject that isn’t quite about what we think going in and instead ends up being about something else, or not. Sachs makes films that you have to wrestle and so they are films you remember long after other films have faded.
More than some other of Sachs films this is a film you need to see before we can discuss it. I say that because the seeming fragmentary nature of the various narratives only really begin to form a single thread the closer you get to the end. The need to stay with a Sachs film to the end to fully understand what is is what makes me like her films so much. You have to go see the film for the initial ride and then rewatch the film seeing all of the bits you missed along the way. At the same time, it also makes the films tough to write on since what I want to write on may not seem interesting until you see the film.
Sachs’ film is one you will want to see multiple times. It’s a film about connections and it requires you to make connections, hence the need to see it a second time. There is much food for thought here that weeks on I am still pondering how we all connect.
You will want to see this film. Trust me, just see it.
Every Contact Leaves a Trace, its title alluding to a basic principle of forensic science, is the latest cinematic exploration from experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. Pairing this concept with seven (of the 600) business cards she’s collected over the years, Sachs embarks on an investigation into “how an encounter with someone seeps into your way of thinking” (as she explains in a VO that runs throughout the film).
As a collage of words, sounds and images collide it becomes increasingly clear that Sachs’s mission to understand how each of these random contacts has changed her in some profound way is a heavy one. (Which doesn’t mean the film’s not fun. Rifling through her stack of cards looking for potential people to cast in the project, Sachs rules out folks like the first guy she slept with in college. And also the “goofy person” who “repairs feet — like ingrown toenails.”) And this journey to connect and reconnect with each contact that has left a trace on her being takes the peripatetic director to surprising individuals both near and far.
There’s her hairdresser of six years, who the filmmaker realizes she knows both intimately and not at all. And Angela, the festival director in Germany she met decades ago — a meetup that leads Sachs to ponder German guilt, her relationship to Germany as a person with German Jewish ancestry, and finally her relationship to guilt vis-à-vis Gaza. “When I care for a stranger is it only because a stranger reminds me of myself?” she wonders. (Later Sachs recalls the founder of the Chinese Women’s Film Festival having had a cough when they initially met, which is what endeared her to the director — she was a stranger she could care for.) A discussion of a famous German poet leads to the sound of music inspired by the man’s poetry, which then becomes a parallel soundtrack to Sachs’s own stream-of-consciousness phrases and questions. “In the stream of ideology that Angela named, I am drowning,” the filmmaker admits. Indeed, Sachs’s choice to lay bare onscreen her own uncertainty, foibles and vulnerabilities makes Every Contact Leaves a Trace unexpectedly touching as well.
The week prior to the film’s IDFA premiere (November 17th), Filmmaker reached out to Sachs, whose short This Side of Salina likewise debuted at DOC NYC (November 14th).
Filmmaker: So what was the genesis of this latest film? Did it begin with a curiosity about Edmond Locard’s basic principle of forensic science? With the business cards you’ve collected over the years?
Sachs: From a very early age, I have wondered how one person can be transformed by another. I was never particularly interested in genealogy, the act of going backwards through generations, but I was curious to know how the way that I had chosen to move through the world might have affected my way of thinking and feeling.
When I came across Edmond’s Locard’s principle of forensic science, “Every contact leaves a trace,” as it applied to the study of crime, I immediately transposed it to my own life. I began to wonder how I might prove his hypothesis. The hundreds of cards I had collected throughout my adult life offered clues. There, in one box, I had methodology for using a familiar mnemonic devise used to trigger memory. Each card offered a distillation and, in turn, a vector back to a moment of possible transformation.
Filmmaker: I’m also curious as to how you narrowed down your selection from hundreds of potential reconnections. Why these seven cards/contacts? Were other reconnections left on the cutting room floor?
Sachs: I was looking for a range of encounters. I came across these words from Samuel Beckett’s marvelously insightful novel Molloy, describing two characters: “At first, wide space lay between them. Then they raised their heads and observed each other. They did not pass each other by, but halted face to face. Strangers. Then each went on their way.”
And somehow, I knew the way to make this film. There were the cards for people whose presence in my life reminded me of a turning point from which I could never go back, or the cards for people who made me shiver inside when I thought of them. If a person haunted me in a way that really made me think, or left me with deep desire or even ambivalence, I simply insisted that I search for them – in real life or in my consciousness.
For example, I wanted to reckon with an intensely personal decision that I made after a therapy session in the mid-1990s. I spent two years looking for that therapist. I never found her. So I recreated her as I remembered her, by filming improvisatory interactions with an actress who played that woman.
There was one man whom I became aware of after many years only because he was publicly humiliated by the US government. I had to face my own assumptions, destroy them, and reckon with all the fragments that remained. It was a tough process but also a revealing one. These kinds of decisions are very similar to the ones I make all the time in my filmmaking practice. Who’s in? Who’s out? Ultimately, the people who present the most obstacles to the making of a film are the ones who complicate it and take it to a new place.
Filmmaker: Could you talk a bit about the sound design? I noticed you’ve continued your exploration of cinema and translation — most notably when the subtitles disappear as Angela, the German festival director, reads a poem in her native tongue.
Sachs: Thank you for listening so attentively to so many of my films. You are bringing attention to the difference between hearing words in a film and understanding them. I am keenly aware of the way that English as a language dominates our global cinema experience. For this reason I want my audience to rediscover their relationship to the sound, not just the meaning, of another language, in this case German.
Angela Haardt is the 80-year-old woman in the film who recites lines from the poem The Weavers by Heinrich Heine. In the context of the film it is clear that I do not understand German, so I am only able to hear the sound of her voice. I ask her to translate his words to English, and through her explanation I glean something that becomes relevant to our conversation about her awareness of the Holocaust as a young girl: “You know, when somebody dies, they put them into a cloth for the dead body. And, so they, they weave this cloth for the death of the country. The whole poem is a curse in a way…My mother knew that the Jewish girls one day weren’t there any longer. You didn’t see the action, but you saw the results. How is that possible?”
Filmmaker: What was it like collaborating with your editor Emily Packer, who also directed 2023’s Holding Back the Tide? The two of you seem to share a similar sensibility, if not always the same subject interest.
Sachs: Working with Emily Packer was truly one of the most profound film interactions I have ever had. Emily appreciates the intricate play between narration and images. They approach structure with nuance, inventiveness and ferocity — recognizing the struggle to find the beginning and ending of a film when the center is already so evident. In all of my work I am committed to bringing a conceptual rigor to transitions, so Emily and I would talk for hours about how to get from one scene to the next in a way that would build an intrinsic meaning.
Emily also expected so much from me during the writing and recording of my narration. Only with Emily as a guide could I find the place of vulnerable introspection that brought the film together.
Filmmaker: What do you hope audiences will ultimately take away from the film?
Sachs: A person enters your life and you might be profoundly touched by their presence. As we grow older we become more and more aware that we are an accumulation of these encounters – in our minds and our bodies.
The non-fiction filmmaker Lynne Sachs returns to Filmwax for another memorable visit. Lynne has a new film, “Every Contract Leaves a Trace”, which is to have its world premiere at IDFA in Amsterdam on November 17th.
Lynne Sachs’s latest feature doc (83 minutes) will world premiere in IDFA Signed section on November 17 at Eye Cinema. Sachs is also producer. World sales are handled by María Vera of Kino Rebelde.
The film’s synopsis reads: In this digital era, 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.
World Premiere Official Selection IDFA 2025 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam Signed section
Nov. 17 2025, 18:00, Eye: Cinema 2 – World Premiere Additional IDFA screenings Nov. 18, 20, 21, 22 Followed by filmmaker Q&As
Written and directed by Lynne Sachs USA, 2025, in English, 83 minutes
The latest cinematic adventures of some of the most original filmmakers of our time. Signed celebrates those with a unique artistic signature, beyond the canon.
Synopsis
Since 1990, filmmaker Lynne Sachs has collected 600 business cards—from a hairdresser, a therapist, a textile artist. Together they form an archive of encounters. The title of this imaginative essay film, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, is a basic principle of forensic science, coined by Edmond Locard, a pioneer in the field. And any trace can link a person to a place, another person or an object. If that’s true, Sachs wonders, might every personal encounter not also leave a trace on your being?
To find out, she tracks down some of the people behind the business cards. The thread connecting these hundreds of cards is Sachs herself, so the filmmaker naturally becomes the center of the film. Yet the focus is not on her; as in many of her works spanning more than three decades of film making, she merely provides the perspective—the point of departure.
With her warm, contemplative voice-over and playful visual invention, Sachs weaves countless faces and voices into a patchwork of connections. These encounters—whether forgotten or remembered, faint or vivid—have become part of her being.
Date
Location
Activities
Mon 17 Nov 18:00
Eye: Cinema 2
Welcome & Introduction, Thank you moment
Tue 18 Nov 13:30
Tuschinski 4
Welcome & Introduction, Q&A
Thu 20 Nov 21:15
Pathé City 4
Welcome & Introduction, Q&A
Fri 21 Nov 11:30
Kriterion 1
Welcome & Introduction, Q&A
Sat 22 Nov 21:00
Pathé Noord 11
Welcome & Introduction, Q&A
Lynne with María Campaña Ramia, IDFA programmer
Emily Pack, Stephen Vitiello,
Morteza Ahmadvand, Firouzeh Khosrovani
with Betty Leacraft
Tuschinski Theater
Ana Siqueira
Zyanya Castilla, Maria Vera
Rijsttafel
María Campaña Ramia
Zyanya Castilla, Paula Durinova, Aylin Kuryel, Firat Yucel, Maria Vera
Yang Yang, Jilu Commune
Zyanya Castilla, Maria Vera
Every Contact Leaves a Trace Business Card
with Emily Packer
Johnny White
Lynne with Jay Rosenblatt, Firouzeh Khosrovani, Isabel Fernandez, Mohammadreza Farzad
“The title of this imaginative essay film, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, is a basic principle of forensic science, coined by Edward Locard, a pioneer in the field. And any trace can link a person to a place, another person or an object. If that’s true, Sachs wonders, might every personal encounter not also leave a trace on your being?” – IDFA International Documentary Festival Amsterdam
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 the internet brought people together. She’s also saved every business card anyone has ever given her. Each card is a portal to her past, a reminder of how someone she actually met in person shifted her consciousness and left a residue of their being in hers: a German woman grappling with the history of her country; a therapist who erased all records of her own life; an artist faced with government censorship. Sachs selects seven cards from hundreds and throws herself into finding out how and why they’ve left an imprint. When she is able, she embraces clues and seeks out reunions. Replaying fleeting experiences in a kitchen, a park, an office, or a festival, she carries her cards to a forensic scientist’s lab to find out more about their DNA remains. In both real and imagined ways, her essay teases apart resonances almost forgotten but somehow felt, entwining emotional memory with geopolitical history through visual abstraction, music, and a poet’s sense of introspection.
Director’s Statement
For most of my adult life, I’ve collected business cards strangers have pulled from their wallets and placed in my hand. I sometimes remember the precise moment they were offered to me, other times they are a mystery. Now in this virtual era, being in the same space with others happens less and less. Filled with hundreds of names, numbers and addresses, the small plastic box that holds the cards takes on an uncanny resonance. Chance meetings become distinct and revealing punctums, each physical interaction an encounter that pricks.
I select seven cards from the hundreds and throw myself into finding out how and why they’ve left an imprint on my consciousness. In the spirit of a documentary practice, the facts leftover from a haptic engagement are an enticing beginning. I’m curious to find out if there are still fingerprints on the cards so I visit a forensic scientist who excavates their DNA residue. It takes months of detective work and travel, but eventually I reconnect face-to-face with some of these people who passed through
my life. A German woman born in the early 1940s grapples with the war she witnessed as a child. Our conversation opens up my own thinking, as an American Jewish woman, about the situation in Gaza today. I speak with an artist who faced censorship and persecution from Homeland Security. In listening to his candid and vulnerable account, I reckon with his psychic trauma.
When research does not provide access to who these people have become, I turn to cinematic inventions that can shape the fragments I have in my grasp in speculative and revealing ways. I can’t forget one woman therapist whose advice once changed my life, so I imagine what it would be like to visit her apartment, create a set and perform with an actor embodying her presence. The resistance of a Syrian chef to engage with my camera forces me to think about the inherent power imbalance between a director and her subject. To conjure a memory of this woman, I cook one of her tried and true recipes and film my own culinary incompetence in the kitchen.
Throughout the years of making this film, my young niece and nephew come to my home to discuss what an accumulation of fleeting encounters – like mine — might really mean in their lives. Like a chorus in a play, their youthful and insightful interpretations across generations put my investigations into perspective.
When I am able, I embrace clues and seek out reunions. But when there is no trace, I gamble with the imaginary histories of my unwitting protagonists. My film “Every Contact Leaves a Trace” confronts a lifetime of tactile encounters with small pieces of paper – distillations of identities passed from hand to hand.
Credits
Written and directed by Lynne Sachs
Featuring Lawrence Brose, Bradley Eros, Angela Haardt, Juan Jiang, Betty Leacraft, Felix and Viva Torres, Rae C. Wright, Irina Yekimova
Editor Emily Packer
Camera Jeffery Cheng, Yumeng Guo, Sean Hanley, Tiffany Rekem, Lynne Sachs, Rebecca Shapass, Mark Street, G. Anthony Svatek
We’ve assembled a godsmackin’ troika of the most superhumanly gifted women makers of our time, a truly fortuitous curatorial coup that coincides with Sachs‘ visit to the Bay Area. She is showing a ½ hr. cut from her her new feature project, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, and fielding questions about her intentions and trajectories with this current long-form. AND: Old ATA comrade (relocated to Berlin) Sylvia Schedelbauer finally peeps back up with her 24-min. multi-layered portrait of her mother, also settled in Berlin (from Japan), an astounding feat of family-archive excavation (mostly from S8 color!) that is ever-so-meticulously ordered into a profoundly resonant, and revelatory montage. The third component of this collective debut comes from Kamila Kuc, the formerly London-based cine-artiste who has now moved to the Coast, Her Plot of Blue Sky.This jaw-dropping, never-before-seen penetration of Moroccan women’s society and sub-culture (Amazigh)–in fact enabling the women to use cameras(!)–gives voice to a huge marginalized population who are accustomed to being shuttled from forced marriage to prostitution to institutionalized old age dead-ends, by an oppressively patriarchal Arab state. $14
Other Cinema is a long-standing bastion of experimental film, video, and performance in San Francisco’s Mission District. We are inspired and sustained by the ongoing practice of fine-art filmmaking, as well as engaged essay and documentary forms. But OC also embraces marginalized genres like “orphan” industrial films, home movies, ethnography, and exploitation, as media-archeological core-samples, and blows against consensus reality and the sterility of museum culture.
Whether avant-garde or engagé, our emphasis is on the radical subjectivities and sub-cultural sensibilities that find expression in what used to be called “underground cinema”.
Our calendars are curated on a semi-annual basis, mostly comprised of polymorphous group shows–several pieces, in different moving-image and intermedia formats–organized around a common theme. Almost always the artist herself appears in person, bringing new work to a energized microcinema audience opting for the provocative images and ideas only available in a non-commercial and non-academic salon environment.
Conceived and stewarded by Craig Baldwin, with a whole lotta help from ATA Gallery, Steve Polta, Christine Metropoulos, and others in a core collective whose commitment has created a space for contemporary cinematic expression and exchange.
While
visiting CRFIC2022, the American director spoke with “La Nación” about what it
meant to film her family for 30 years, the contradictions of the term
“non-fiction,” and her fascination with Julio Cortázar.
Rather than the feeling of being inside a
dream, Lynne Sachs’ cinematographic work feels like sneaking into another
person’s memory; making yourself small and tiptoeing into a room where a
cassette is playing memories of days gone by, of a past times that only years
later consecrate themselves into golden postcards.
Her last film, Film about a Father Who, condenses the emotions of Sachs’ own
family, whom she filmed for close to 30 years. While the recording of this project
never ceased, she produced many other films during this period (her prolific
career includes more than 30 films). Among them, a sentimental piece titled Con el pelo en el viento (Wind in Our Hair),
in which she explores the transition to adulthood, inspired in Julio
Cortázar short stories.
“To me, everything is about exploring and
challenging reality,” says the filmmaker, smiling and charismatic, on the third
floor of the Centro de Cine in Costa Rica, while one of her films is being projected
below. On this premise, the Memphis-born director conversed with “La Nación”
about how these two films have marked her life.
What
are your thoughts about the films selected for your retrospective at CRFIC?
Honestly, I feel honored that my films are
alongside Memoria, Drive My Car…
films that make me feel like I’m on a film adventure. I feel grateful on so
many levels to the Costa Rican community for giving me this space. I think the
film selection speaks to my interest in looking at reality’s textures.
About
your latest film, Film about a Father
Who, what was your primary interest?
It took me 30 years to make this film, so even
if I could tell you what my first interest was when I started, it definitely
changed and evolved. Let me tell you that this film is a testimony to the
belief that certain projects should not be made in a hurry, they should be gestated
like a baby, but making a film is more difficult than gestating a baby
(laughs). I have two daughters (laughs) but with a film you have to decide when
it’s ready. Regarding this film, I wanted to do it because I was intrigued by
my father and I loved that, at that moment, he was such an iconoclast; a
classic rule breaking person, who always created his own cosmos, but at the
same time had to deal with a lot of changes in our lives at that time, and the
film could give me that perspective.
I wanted to explore what it was like to be his
daughter and always having that door open for him. I couldn’t finish the film
because I didn’t know how to put all those things together. I felt I was ready
to film his life but not to confront all the footage afterwards. I made a lot
of movies while shooting this one, but this film was always breathing down my
neck.
When
did you feel it was the moment to stop?
A couple years before I stopped filming, I
realized that I wasn’t making a film about a father and daughter; it’s a film
about a family that makes you ask what is the soul of a family. What connects a
family? Blood? What happens when suddenly someone who seems like a “stranger” to
that family arrives? How do you deal with that? So I needed to listen to the
rest of my siblings to know and decide when the appropriate moment would be.
And to not only understand my father but also my
siblings and their experiences. My brother is gay, and there is a scene in the
film where you can see how alienated he is feeling. The rest of my siblings
have had other lives that also give a lot to think about.
The
people that I know that have seen your film loved it. Where do you think
resides the emotional component that achieves that?
Oh, thank you so much. I am moved to hear you
say that because my family thought that I was doing this for myself and not for
them. They saw that I only talked
about the movie and how I did things in order to have more profound
conversations, and at the end of the day the film was a ticket to having these
moments that I think all families want to have. Even my
mom said: “Will anyone be interested in this movie?” (laughs) and well, I told
her that most of us think our families are abnormal, that they’re weird. That
we want to be like other families because sometimes we feel ashamed of our own.
But this is natural and the film allows us to feel vulnerable about everything
that being part of a family entails. There is a catharsis there.
In the
end, how did you find the courage to confront all that footage?
It was very difficult. My initial fear was seeing
how old I had become (laughs), but I leaned on an ex-student of mine who worked
with me as an assistant. She helped me confront all that footage in the studio.
We wanted to open those boxes containing 30 year’s worth of material and decide
what to do with it, if we were going to digitize it or what other possibilities
there were. She gave me the courage to watch it all.
In one of the workshops I gave here in San
José, I told them how she helped me understand that I did not have to explain
my family tree, because the story is not about who is who but about emotions.
This helped so much: to determine that this is about emotions.
What is
the most exciting thing about filming nonfiction?
For me, the term “nonfiction” is complicated
because I like to think about how we see the world beyond a label. Fiction and
nonfiction are terms that make the world seem binary, when it isn’t. I know I
don’t do fiction but I prefer to say I work with reality, that I confront
reality because I give myself the opportunity to play with the people that
appear in front of the camera. I like to explore the real world, but I don’t
try to explain it. For me, if a
film is successful, it is because the public questions things about the world
that they had not questioned before.
Let’s
now see this from another perspective. In your film Con el pelo en el viento (Wind in Our Hair) you introduce yourself
to fiction. What brought you to make that film?
Oh, in that one reality is out of focus. In
2007 there was a retrospective in Argentina and I wanted to go back and make a
film there because I met so many talented people. I have two daughters and
wanted to find more girls to make this story about growing up. We knew we
wanted to reinterpret some of Julio Cortázar’s short stories, so we chose the
story El fin del juego (The end of the
game) which refers precisely
to that end of childhood and what comes after with your body, with your
sexuality and with your mind. I wanted to portray it,
thinking about my daughters and all the social changes that they might face. In
fact, I find it curious to watch this film now, because the girls in the film
are already 25 years old. It’s very sweet to see the passage of time like this.
The magnificent thing about making films is feeling connected to different
communities.
It’s a
very powerful story. Since we are talking about this, what do you think about
Julio Cortázar?
Well, I love him (laughs). I love how perceptive
he is and playful with language. Of course, there is the tremendous experiment
that he did with Rayuela (Hopscotch), a
book that is very liberating and has definitely inspired my filmmaking. But I’m
even more fascinated by his short stories, even though they seem more
traditional. For this film, I tried to portray that sensitivity of seeing girls
confronting a period of their life and wanting to deal with it.
I love the short story Casa Tomada (House Taken Over), a two-page text. In fact, the first
part of the film was inspired by that story, with that almost Cold War fear of
feeling being watched. I am thinking that now it feels so current with the
Alexas that live in our homes and listen to everything we say. Cortázar,
without a doubt, was a visionary because the girls actually feel that the walls
are listening, a very contemporary feeling.
Maybe a
Costa Rican book could inspire your next film…
I would love to! I’ve been given an anthology
that I am very excited to start reading and I definitely would like to learn
more. I love to explore traditions that can inspire my work.
At this
moment in your life, what is your main interest around making movies?
It has a lot to do with my next film, Every Contact Leaves a Trace (Cada contacto
deja un rastro). It is a feature film that is about expressing, using
forensics theory, how there is a footprint in everything we do, like criminals
who are chased using their traces. My film does not have anything to do with
crime but with how people whom we meet leave us with a perception for the rest
of our lives. Over many years, I’ve
collected thousands of contact cards. Most of their owners I never see again,
but they leave their fingerprints on those cards. It’s as if their trail
follows me forever.
It is an allegory for how I can reconnect and
reflect on what people leave to me after a lifetime. It is not the same as a
family relationship – their memories may stay with you for longer – but about
people you meet in stores, your first psychologist, a journalist, like you… It’s
a reflection that I’m very excited to explore.
