Tag Archives: Girl Is Presence

Deadline Exclusive: “Raw And Deeply Personal”: Octet Of Lynne Sachs Documentaries Coming to Criterion Channel

By Matthew Carey
August 13, 2021 5:43pm
https://deadline.com/2021/08/criterion-channel-director-lynne-sachs-streaming-debut-news-1234814823/

EXCLUSIVE: A collection of documentaries from acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs is coming to the Criterion Channel in October.

The streaming platform will showcase seven Sachs films beginning October 1, ranging from the 1994 short Which Way Is East to her most recent work, including E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo, an exploration of the French director’s classic 1933 film Zero for Conduct (Zéro de Conduite).

On October 13, the Criterion Channel will exclusively stream her latest feature documentary, Film About a Father Who, which examines Sachs’ relationship with her unorthodox father, Ira Sachs Sr, whose children include Lynne and fellow filmmaker Ira Sachs Jr.

“Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings,” the director has written. “With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.”

Cinema Guild Acquires Lynne Sachs’ Slamdance Docu ‘Film About A Father Who’

Penelope Bartlett, director of programming at the Criterion Channel, commented, “The Criterion Channel is thrilled to present the exclusive streaming premiere of Lynne Sachs’ Film About a Father Who this October. This raw and deeply personal excavation of the filmmaker’s complex family history will be accompanied by a number of Sachs’ experimental shorts, many of which also focus on exploring familial dynamics and family histories.”

Sachs’ work was the subject of a career retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image this year and at Sheffield Doc/Fest last year. Sachs has been the recipient of support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation.

“Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry,” according to the director’s website. “Her highly self-reflexive films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.”

The Criterion Channel programming will include a newly-recorded interview with Sachs discussing her work. Complete details on the Sachs’ documentaries coming to the platform:

Debuting on the Criterion Channel Oct. 13:

FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (2020)
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.

Debuting on the Criterion Channel Oct. 1:
E•PIS•TO•LAR•Y: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO (2021)

In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic Zero for Conduct in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers.

MAYA AT 24 (2021)
Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.

GIRL IS PRESENCE (2020)
During the 2020 global pandemic, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and her daughter Noa collaborated with Anne Lesley Selcer to create Girl is Presence. Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, the ‘girl’ arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things.

THE WASHING SOCIETY (2018)
Collaborating together for the first time, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. With a title inspired by the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses, The Washing Society investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry.

WIND IN OUR HAIR (2010)
Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, Wind in Our Hair is an experimental narrative about four girls discovering themselves through a fascination with the trains that pass by their house. A story of early-teen anticipation and disappointment, Wind in Our Hair is circumscribed by a period of profound Argentine political and social unrest.

THE LAST HAPPY DAY (2009)
During WWII, the US Army hired Sachs’ Hungarian cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. Sachs’ portrait of Lenard, who is best known for his translation of Winnie the Pooh into Latin, resonates as an anti-war meditation composed of letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies of children, and interviews.

WHICH WAY IS EAST (1994)
When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt.

The Flow Chart Foundation presents “Films + Poems = Lynne Sachs”

Films + Poems = Lynne Sachs
The Flow Chart Foundation
https://www.flowchartfoundation.org/events-public-programs-2021
Monday, September 13, 6 – 7PM (EDT), via zoom

Filmmaker/poet Lynne Sachs will share a selection of short films and read selections from her poetry collection Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press). This free public event precedes an encore presentation of our Text Kitchen workshop—Frames & Stanzas: Video Poems, which begins the next day, Tuesday, Sept. 14.

The Flow Chart Foundation explores poetry and the interrelationships of various art forms as guided by the legacy of American poet John Ashbery. Through programs for both general and scholarly audiences showcasing innovative work by a diversity of artists of various kinds, The Flow Chart Foundation celebrates Ashbery and his art as an inspirational and generative force. We see poetry in particular as a conduit to exploration, questioning, and resistance to the status quo, and work to offer new ways to engage with it and its interplay with other artistic modes.

On Year by Year: Poems:
“The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit. With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne Sachs shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.” —Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body and Against Joie de Vivre

“The highly acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs is also a captivating and surprising poet. Year by Year distills five decades into lyric, a lustrous tapestry woven of memory, wisdom, cultural apprehension and the delicate specificities of lived life.” —Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs and When the World Was Steady

“In Year by Year, Lynne Sachs selects and distills from larger fields of notation, acute scenes representing her life and the world she was born into. Her measured, spare account brings her to an understanding and acceptance of the terrible and beautiful fact that history both moves us and moves through us, and, more significantly, how by contending with its uncompromising force, we define an ethics that guides our fate.” —Michael Collier author of Dark Wild Realm

Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her highly self-reflexive films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living and studying in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trihn T. Min-ha. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her body of work ever since. In tandem with making films, Lynne is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems.

From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing directly the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany—sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.

Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, and China Women’s Film Festival. Her 2019 film “A Month of Single Frames” won the Grand Prize at Oberhausen Festival of Short Films in 2020. In 2021, both the Edison Film Festival and the Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center awarded Lynne for her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields.

The Flow Chart Foundation’s “Text Kitchen” with Workshops by Lynne Sachs

https://www.flowchartfoundation.org/workshop-checkout/0xwihp0y2zgaxgr0tgxgjs3gsrukqr

The Flow Chart Foundation’s Text Kitchen hands-onWorkshops provide writers and other art-makers opportunities for deep exploration into poetry and interrelated forms of expression.

UP NEXT:

Frames and Stanzas: Video Poems—encore presentation!
a virtual filmmaking and poetry writing workshop with Lynne Sachs

Tuesday, September 14 & Tuesday, September 21, 2021 (registration includes both sessions)
6:30pm – 9:30pm (EDT) on Zoom

In this two-part virtual workshop, Sachs will share insights and experiences she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words over the course of two three-hour evening meetings (participants must be able to attend both sessions). Lynne will guide the workshop on a creative journey that will include writing several poems in conjunction with shooting moving or still images using an iPhone and simple editing software. Lynne has always been fascinated by the conversation between large-scale public events beyond our control and our subsequent, internal responses to those experiences. Her workshop will build itself around this public/private convergence.

Participants are encouraged to join us for a free, public presentation of Lynne’s short films and poetry taking place virtually at 6PM (EDT) on Monday, September 13th. More info here.

Workshop fee (includes both three-hour sessions): $80

PREVIOUS:

Frames and Stanzas: Video Poems
a virtual filmmaking and poetry writing workshop with Lynne Sachs

Thursday, June 10 & Thursday, June 17, 2021 (registration includes both sessions)
6:30pm – 9:30pm (EDT) on Zoom

When award-winning Brooklyn filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs first discovered The Flowchart Foundation’s enthusiasm for poetry as a conduit for an interplay with other artistic modes, she knew that we would be a great place to offer a workshop that would nourish a deeply engaged dialogue between the written word and the image.

In this two-part virtual workshop, Sachs will share insights and experiences she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words over the course of two three-hour evening meetings (participants must be able to attend both sessions). Lynne will guide the workshop on a creative journey that will include writing several poems in conjunction with shooting moving or still images. Lynne has always been fascinated by the conversation between large-scale public events beyond our control and our subsequent, internal responses to those experiences. Her workshop will build itself around this public/private convergence.

We encourage those with backgrounds in either or both poetry and image-making to sign up. Participants will need only a smartphone for creating their short films. Because creative collaboration between participants is a vital part of the experience, Lynne will carefully pair participants based on a questionnaire sent after registering. Note that this is not a tech-focused workshop, though some basic tech instruction will be shared.

Lynne’s virtual workshop will include the screening of some of her own recent short film poems, including “Starfish Aorta Colossus” (2015), “A Month of Single Frames” (2019), “Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home” (2020), and “Girl is Presence” (2020) as well as excerpts from her feature “Tip of My Tongue” (2017).

Join us in this 2-week multimedia investigation of the sounds, texts, media images, home-made movies, and sensory experiences that all come together in a video poem. We could not be more delighted to be launching the Text Kitchen workshop series with this event.

Workshop fee (includes both three-hour sessions): $80 [event SOLD OUT]

Mimesis Documentary Festival to host “Film About a Father Who” and “Day Residue” workshop

Mimesis – Documentary Festival
August 2021
https://www.mimesisfestival.org/2021-program/#opening-night

Opening Night: Lynne Sachs + Workshop

Film About a Father Who
by Lynne Sachs (2021, 74’)Wednesday 4 August 6:00 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Drawing on a painstaking personal archive of images, home movies, and interviews, Film About A Father Who is a rare kind of cinematic portrait: one that succeeds in expanding our understanding of the filmmaker, her protagonist, and their relationship through its structure, aesthetic, and method. A beautiful accumulation of time, contradictions, and a multitude of perspectives reflects the all-too-familiar operatic dynamics of family.

This screening will be followed by a conversation with the artist and a reception with light refreshments.

Recorded by Marc Vidulich.

Mimesis Documentary Festival, Aug 4 2021
Q & A with filmmaker Lynne Sachs for Opening Night screening of “Film About a Father Who”
moderated by Maryam Muliaee, PhD
Post-doctoral AssociateDepartment of Critical Media PracticesUniversity of Colorado Boulderwww.maryammuliaee.comEditor, MAST journal www.mast-journal.org

Can you talk a little about the process of archiving for Film About A Father Who in the course of three decades? My emphasis is on the word archiving (rather than archive) with an interest in the process, duration and change — a quality that also involves encounters with the unexpected and unplanned. I can imagine it must be an incredibly enormous amount of footage, images and sounds that needed your considerable time, patience and focus for re-listening, re-watching and final selection. How did you manage these demanding processes of archiving, organizing and reviewing your materials within three decades?
There is sometimes this wrong assumption that films made up of home movies and family footage are hard to be directed or involve less direction. However, as a director you have sculpted the film with incredible attention to details. Your orchestration of the materials and visual rhetoric are so strong, thoughtful and distinct, revealed as an individual touch. How did you direct the film, and come to decision(s) about selection, order and function of home movies and family footage in your film?
There is an aesthetic of fragmentation in your film. You also mentioned to cubist paintings in your statement referring to your film and way of portraying your father. This fragmentation brings in dynamic variation, multiplicity and process – embodied in your way of engaging a variety of different materials (in terms of format, quality, time, order, aspect ratio, cut, collage, etc.); in a fragmented and unfinished image of your father; in the voice and view of multiple narrators the viewers encounter such as siblings some of whom remained disconnected for twenty years. I also find a meaningful association between this fragmental or fragmentary aesthetic and the way memories are always in pieces, ephemeral and collective. Can you talk more about the aesthetic of fragmentation (or variation) in your film, and why does it matter to you as a filmmaker?
While the film title gives this assumption that your main protagonist is a man — obviously your father — I was surprised by and enjoyed far more and many encounters with women in the film, from your grandmother to your mother, your sisters and your father’s other wives, and of course yourself as a woman (as well as a mother and a daughter). Discovering this distinct feminist standpoint through which you connect the viewers more strongly with the female characters in the film was so remarkable for me. Can you talk about this feminist touch?
Can you talk about your use of aging/decaying videotapes? How did you find it aesthetically important or meaningful to deploy the disintegration of videographic materials? What is at stake in their tactile qualities (e.g. blurriness, incoherence, failure and dispersion) and how have their grainy textures helped your film narrative or aesthetics?

Workshop: Day Residue
A filmmaking workshop on the every day with opening night artist Lynne Sachs.
Thursday 5 August 9:30 – 11:00 AM
Grace Gamm Theater

According to Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams, our day residue is composed of the memory traces left by the events of our waking state. In this workshop, we explore the ways in which fragments of our daily lives can become material for the making of a film poem. While many people in the film industry rely upon a chronological process that begins with the development phase and ends with post-production, our Day Residue workshop will build on an entirely different creative paradigm that encourages artists to embrace the nuances, surprises and challenges of their daily lives as a foundation for a diaristic practice.

The workshop will include screenings of some of Lynne’s recent short film poems, including Starfish Aorta Colossus (2015), A Month of Single Frames (2019), Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home (2020), and Girl is Presence (2020) as well as excerpts from her feature Tip of My Tongue (2017).

“Girl Is Presence” at Moscow International Experimental Film Festival

June 9, 2021
https://mieff.com/news/inter2021?fbclid=IwAR1VgzPVlT75tH0yq_nV6IDcpnT6g7-ZzbV3M5xsy7IF9lYz_Wi14SLAuiM

Girl is Presence

Screening dates are 14.08 (19:45) Garage Screen, 15.08 (00:30) and 15.08 (14:00) Illyuzion cinema.
https://mieff.com/events/girl
Country: USA
Year: 2021
Duration: 4 minutes
English language
Format: DCP
Age limit: 18+

Lynne Sachs and her daughter Noah co-created this film with poet Anne Leslie Selcer during the 2020 pandemic. In a shaky and unsettling homely atmosphere, Noah’s heroine tirelessly arranges and rearranges a collection of small mysterious objects that illustrate the poem that sounds off-screen. It was based on a disharmonious list of nouns borrowed by Selser from Georges Bataille’s essay “The Solar Anus.” The set of actions that the girl performs is reminiscent of a ritual and resonates with the tone of a poem devoted to the problems of representation, power and gender.

International Competition

We are happy to announce the International Competition programme of the 6th Moscow International Experimental Film Festival. It includes 29 works by filmmakers and artists from all over the world. Many among them try to look with new eyes at the places humans inhabit, while employing different methods of working with memory, history, and heritage. The others are focused on practices of care, survival, and accepting death, on new forms of human coexistence and resistance to colonial regimes, on various effects produced by the digital environment, as well as on relationships between humans, technologies, and nature. All these themes have become increasingly important during the COVID-19 pandemic. Soon we will tell you more about these films, announce this year’s Russian competition and unveil special curatorial programs.

80,000 Years Old, Christelle Lheureux
All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes, Haig Aivazian
Autotrofia, Anton Vidokle
The Bearers of Memories, Miglė Križinauskaitė-Bernotienė
Before the Collapse of Mont Blanc, Jacques Perconte
Blastogenesis X, Conrad Veit and Charlotte Maria Kätzl
The City Bridges Are Open Again, Masha Godovannaya
earthearthearth, Daïchi Saïto
Failed Emptiness. Time, Mika Taanila
Girl Is Presence, Lynne Sachs and Anne Lesley Selcer
Glittering Barbieblood, Ulu Braun
Green Thoughts, William Hong-xiao Wei
The Home My Mother Never Found, Mehdi Jahan
In Ictu Oculi, Jorge Moneo Quintana
Letter to a Turtledove, Dana Kavelina
Letters about the End of the World, Dina Karaman
Maat Means Land, Fox Maxy
No One Cried, Daniel Jacoby
One Hundred Steps, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca
One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean, Wang Yuyan
Sensory Overload, Ganza Moise
Sol de Campinas, Jessica Sarah Rinland
Songs for Dying, Korakrit Arunanondchai
Tellurian Drama, Riar Rizaldi
Tonalli, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos
Tracing Utopia, Nick Tyson and Catarina de Sousa
Transparent, I am, Yuri Muraoka
A Very Long Exposure Time, Chloé Galibert-Laîné
We’ll Find You When the Sun Goes Black, Anouk De Clercq

Nathaniel Dorksy at MIEFF

https://mieff.com/program/dorsky

The works of American avant-gardist Nathaniel Dorsky will be shown for the first time as part of the annual Close-up section of the MIEFF Moscow International Experimental Film Festival in Russia

About

MIEFF is a platform for everyone who creates, takes interest in or otherwise engages with the moving images. Our main goal is to support Russian artists and introduce them to the international community, as well as help experimental cinema reach a wider audience.

We want to create spaces for dialogue and therefore we believe it important to enrich the intellectual context surrounding film and contemporary art instead of reducing it to univocal ideologies. This is achieved through a carefully curated program of screenings, public and educational events, where different viewpoints and voices are all welcome.

We also understand that if we want to be in tune with the ever-changing reality, we need to keep experimenting. Experiment for us is a method and not an empty label. We want to try different ways to organize horizontal teamwork, distribute responsibilities, and finance our whole endeavour. We want to find new opportunities for ethical partnerships and transparent communication with each other—and everyone who participates in the life of our festival.

At the moment, the festival structure includes international competition, Russian competition, retrospective section Close-Up, special screenings, curatorial multimedia block as well as an interdisciplinary educational programme called Extracurricular Practices.

MIEFF was founded in 2016 by Vladimir Nadein and Ekaterina Shitova. Now it operates as an independent non-commercial organization and is managed by the board, which includes (listed in the alphabetical order): Kristina Efremenko, Dmitry Frolov, Mariam Ismailova, Sophia Ismailova, Marianna Kruchinski, Anna Naumova, Kirill Rozhentsov, and Margarita Sokolovskaya.

You can reach us at info@mieff.com

National Gallery of Art Hosts “Family Constructs: New Films by Lynne Sachs” Online through March 9

National Gallery of Art
Family Constructs: New Films by Lynne Sachs
https://www.nga.gov/film-programs/family-constructs-new-films-by-lynne-sachs.html
Curated by Peggy Parsons and Joanna Raczynska.

Streaming now through March 9

Working alone and with various collaborators over the course of 35 years, Lynne Sachs has developed a body of work deeply invested in a range of interwoven personal and ethical subjects. Using all types of media, from 8mm and 16mm film to HD files, her rigorous explorations in sound and image investigate ideas of family, mythology, portraiture, political resistance, feminism, war, and the quotidian. A poet, educator, collage artist, and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, Sachs has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts (2014), among many other awards. In January 2021, the Museum of the Moving Image organized a major retrospective of her film work. Here, two recent shorts accompany her latest feature, Film About a Father Who . . ., each reflecting features of the artist’s family.

Girl Is Presence

Lynne Sachs has collaborated numerous times with other filmmakers, writers, and performers in her fertile pursuit of a very personal cinematic language. Made with writer Anne Lesley Selcer, and grounded in a domestic sphere during the COVID-19 pandemic, the new short Girl Is Presence features Sachs’s own daughter Noa carefully sifting through and rearranging curious objects while Selcer recites lines from her poem Sun Cycle. (2020, 4 minutes)

Film About a Father Who . . .

Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, Lynne Sachs recorded 8mm and 16mm film, analogue videotape, and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Ostensibly a documentary portrait of a parent, Film About a Father Who . . . reveals as much, or more, about patriarchal silences and omissions than about the subject himself, who remains enigmatic throughout. “My father has always chosen the alternative path in life, a path that has brought unpredictable adventures, nine children with six different women, brushes with the police, and a life-long interest in trying to do some good in the world.” It is also a film about the complex dynamics that conspire to create a family. (2020, 74 minutes)

A Year of Notes and Numbers

Silently accumulated handwritten to-do lists and notes to herself become evidence of the filmmaker’s relationship with family, friends, and herself over a limited period of time. These fragments of text and direction on scraps of paper and yellow Post-it notes form an abstract storytelling device—like a personal poem or storyboard for an experimental film. (2016, 4 minutes)

Kino Rebelde to Represent Lynne Sachs’ Catalogue Internationally

http://www.kinorebelde.com/lynne-sachs-complete-filmography/

Kino Rebelde has created a retrospective that traces a delicate line connecting intimacy, power relations, violence, memory, migration, desire, love, and war in Lynne’s films. By looking at each of these works, we can see a director facing her own fears and contradictions, as well as her sense of friendship and motherhood. Moving from idea to emotion and back again, our retrospective takes us on a journey through Sachs’ life as a filmmaker, beginning in 1986 and moving all the way to the present.

With the intention of allowing her work to cross boundaries, to interpret and to inquire into her distinctive mode of engaging with the camera as an apparatus for expression, we are delighted to present 37 films that comprise the complete filmmography, so far, of Lynne Sachs as visual artist and filmmaker. Regardless of the passage of time, these works continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent and radical in their artistic conception.

About Kino Rebelde

Kino Rebelde is a Sales and Festival Distribution Agency created by María Vera in early 2017. Its exclusively dedicated to promotion of non-fiction cinema, hybrid narratives and experimental.

Based on the creative distribution of few titles by year, Kino Rebelde established itself as a “boutique agency”, working on a specialized strategy for each film, within its own characteristics, market potential, niches and formal and alternative windows.

This company supports short, medium and long feature films, from any country, with linear or non-linear narratives. They can be in development or WIP, preferably in the editing stage.

The focus: author point of view, pulse of stories, chaos, risk, more questions, less answers, aesthetic and politic transgression, empathy, identities, desires and memory.

Kino Rebelde was born in Madrid, but as its films, this is a nomadic project. In the last years María has been living in Lisbon, Belgrade and Hanoi and she’ll keep moving around.

About María Vera

Festival Distributor and Sales Agent born in Argentina. Founder of Kino Rebelde, a company focused on creative distribution of non-fiction, experimental and hybrid narratives.

Her films have been selected and awarded in festivals as Berlinale, IFFR Rotterdam, IDFA, Visions Du Réel, New York FF, Hot Docs, Jeonju IFF, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Sarajevo FF, Doclisboa and Viennale, among others.

María has a background as producer of socio-political and human rights contents as well as a film curator.Envelope

vera@kinorebelde.com

Lynne Sachs (1961) is an American filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances.

Working from a feminist perspective, Lynne weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with renowned musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.

Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project.

Between 1994 and 2009, Lynne directed five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany – sites affected by international war – where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own perception.

Over the course of her career, she has worked closely with film artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Min-ha.

“Girl is Presence” to screen at 2021 Oberhausen Film Festival

“Lynne Sachs’s GIRL IS PRESENCE, with poetry by Anne Lesley Selcer, is one my absolute favorite films in the @kurzfilmtage program so far. What a stunner. #Oberhausen”. Film critic and arts journalist Ela Bittencourt on Twitter

Oberhausen – Announcing our first 2021 competitions
12.02.2021 Press Release News
https://www.kurzfilmtage.de/en/press/detail/announcing-our-first-2021-competitions/
Announcing Oberhausen’s first online competitions
67. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 1.-10. Mai 2021

The International Online Competition

40 films from 30 countries have been selected for Oberhausen’s first International Online Competition, more than half of them made by women. The list includes numerous new discoveries, but also works by filmmakers Lynne Sachs, winner of the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen 2020 or Kristian Mercado, Grammy nominee for his music videos and SXSW jury prize winner, or artists such as Eszter Szabó or Sebastian Buerkner. One of the main underlying themes in the selection is the boundary between humans and machines. Avatars, robots, artificial intelligences are the focus of films like Sebastian Buerkner’s Surge (UK), my favorite software is being here by Alison Nguyen(USA) or Ieva by Vytautas Plukas and Domas Petronis (Lithuania), which explore the question of what actually makes us human at the intersections between digital and real, between the virtual world and reality.

The online selection committee: Hilke Doering (Kurzfilmtage), Christiane Büchner (filmmaker, Cologne), Greg de Cuir (curator, Belgrade), Javier Estrada (curator, Madrid).

International Online Competition

+x+=+, Niyaz Saghari, Iran
3xShapes of Home, Elisabeth Brun, Norway
Un très long temps d’exposition (A very long exposure time), Chloé Galibert-Laîné, France
Azkorri árnyéka alatt (Under the Shadow of Azkorri), Eszter Katalin, Spain
Belos Carnavais (Beautiful Carnivals), Thiago B. Mendonça, Brazil
Berlabuh (Anchoring), Haris Yuliyanto, Indonesia
Birthday, Yuka Sato, Japan
Cântec de leagăn (Cradle), Paul Mureșan, Romania
copia de la copia (de la copia), Rafal Morusiewicz, Austria
Dear Aki, Nina Kurtela, Croatia
Dos hombres atentos (Two Watchful Men), Joserraúl Ortiz, USA
Footnote to a Season, Julia Dogra-Brazell, France/UK
Girl Is Presence, Lynne Sachs/Anne Lesley Selcer, USA
Hemen. Gaur. Berriz (Here. Today. Again), Aitor Gametxo Zabala, Spain
Ieva, Vytautas Plukas/Domas Petronis, Lithuania
Kalsubai, Yudhajit Basu, India
La Cumbre, Felipe Lopez Gomez, Colombia
La Promenade sous les arbres (Walk Under the Trees), Nathan Clement, Switzerland
Las Credenciales (The Credentials), Manuel Ferrari, Argentina
Minnen (Memories), Kristin Johannessen, Sweden
my favorite software is being here, Alison Nguyen, USA
Nuevo Rico, Kristian Mercado, USA
Oasielles, Nathalie Rossetti, Belgium
Only Yesterday, Sione Monu, New Zealand
Pole Žin (Fields of Žinas), Marie Lukáčová/Anna Remecova, Czech Republic
Rumi X Phantasm, Khavn, Philippines
SON CHANT, Vivian Ostrovsky, USA
Suodji (Shelter), Marja Helander, Finland, Norway
Surge, Sebastian Buerkner, UK
Széphercegnő (Princess Beauty), Szabó Eszter, Hungary
The Light of Day, Alex Eisenberg/Anne Bean, UK
The Other Garden; Joel’s Garden, Go-Eun Im, Netherlands/South Korea
The Shadows, Paulo Pécora, Argentina
The___________World, Peixuan Ouyang, USA/China
Tracing Utopia, Catarina de Sousa/Nick Tyson, Portugal/USA/Australia
Trampa de luz (Light Trap), Pablo Marín, Argentina
Μεσογειακό Τοπίο (Mediterranean Landscape), Christiana Ioannou, Cyprus
Состязательная инфраструктура (Adversarial Infrastructure), Anna Engelhardt, Russia
Wei Qiao (Dangerous Bridge), Aixing Wang, China
我伪装起来了，就在你面前 (Guising, In front for you), Zhu Changquan, China

Oberhausen, 12 February 2021

Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, T +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda(at)kurzfilmtage.de

Anne Lesley Selcerr & Lynne Sachs discuss “Girl is Presence” Collaboration

“Girl is Presence” Screening with the 2020 Film and Video Poetry Symposium

THE FILM AND VIDEO POETRY SOCIETY

November 2020
https://www.fvpsociety.com/announcements/2020/10/12/fvps-2020-symposium-fullprogram

FVPS 2020 | FULL SCHEDULE AND PROGRAM

The 2020 Film and Video Poetry Symposium will take place in Los Angeles, California beginning on November 12th and concluding January 2, 2021. FVPS has programmed over 100 films from more than 20 countries, 80 of which will be presented in an outdoor cinema. Our platform has also curated 5 media installations that will be available to the public on an appointment only basis. Lastly, The Film and Video Poetry Society developed and will deploy a 24/7 online streaming network accessible on our website beginning November 12, 2020 and ending December 31, 2020. Through this live video feed viewers will experience a special selection of films programmed for an international online screening experience.

We have pledged to uphold the cinema experience while also making safety and public health our primary goal. There will be no public or walk up access to our events. Entrance to screenings must be confirmed by reservation only.

Lynne Sachs & Paolo Javier read poems on KGB Bar Zoom

On Monday, September 28 from 7 to 9 PM EST, the renowned NYC Lower East Side literary gathering space KGB Bar will host my dear compatriot Paolo Javier and me in a two-person poetry reading and film screening. Of course, we both wish we were gathering together in the historic environment of the actual KGB Bar, but pandemic times as they are, this is not to happen. We accept the virtual world of Zoom, acknowledging the fact that in this particular cosmos, we can invite friends from around the country and world to join us. If you are in the midst of Yom Kippur that evening, please join us while you break your fast.

This will be my first poetry reading in pandemic times. I will be reading from my new (and first) collection Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press) along with some recent writing fresh from our shared, daunting now. In addition to reading from my book, I will screen a couple of film-poem collaborations, including Starfish Aorta Colossus (made with Paolo Javier, 2015), Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home (2020), and Girl is Presence (made with poet Anne Lesley Selcer, 2020)

We are grateful to KGB poetry programmer Jason Schneiderman who invited us to do this reading more than eight months ago.

Introduction by Jason Schneiderman

So we’re a poetry series—we call ourselves Monday Night Poetry at KGB—and Lynne Sachs is a poet, so you’ll be hearing her poems—but inside of Lynne’s work is also a challenge to the boundaries that have been drawn around poetry, and if we think about poetry as something distinct from other genres (not from other media, but from other genres), that definition of poetry emerged in two significant moments for me. One is the early modern period (or the renaissance if you like) when the sonnet entered English, and words for spoken voice became poetry and words intended to be sung to a melody became song—“lyric” having a claim to both of these genres, hence our continued use of “song lyrics” and “lyric poetry.” And then second is Modernism, when during the roughly forty year period from 1890 to 1920, poetry, like some sort of giant octopus began to absorb everything written that wasn’t obviously something else, like a novel, or a cookbook, or a bomb making manual—even though it was Amiri Baraka’s poem on how to make bombs that got Dial-a-Poem shut down in the 1960s. Poetry’s genre boundaries have always struck me as useful, I like them very much, but I also see how they can constrict as well as instruct. And one of the trends I see in contemporary letters is a move away from genre specialization. Rachel Zucker on a podcast confirmed my memory that in the 00’s, it was not cool for a poet to do anything but poetry, but now poets are reaching out past our boundaries, with notable moments like Warsan Shire collaborating with Beyonce. So how lucky we are to have Lynne Sachs, who for decades has been working at the boundary between poetry and film, and who will be presenting her own work, which engages the questions of medium, genre, image, and text, giving us a powerful sense of what art may look like going forward.

Please welcome Lynne Sachs.

And here’s some info on who we are and our poems:
Paolo Javier was born in the Philippines and grew up in Las Piñas, Metro Manila; Katonah, New York; Cairo, Egypt; and Vancouver, British Columbia. After working as a freelance journalist and running an experimental theater company in Canada, he returned to New York City, where he lives with his family. From 2010 to 2014, Javier was poet laureate of Queens, New York. His collections of poetry include: The Feeling Is Actual (2011); 60 lv bo(e)mbs (2005); the time at the end of this writing (2004), recipient of a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award; and, Court of the Dragon (2015), which Publisher’s Weekly called “a linguistic time machine.”

When Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she dedicated herself to writing a poem for every year of her life, so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in Sachs’ life and the swirl of events beyond her domestic universe. Published by Tender Buttons Press, Year by Year Poems juxtaposes Sachs’ finished poems, which move from her birth in 1961 to her half-century marker in 2011, with her original handwritten first drafts. Paolo Javier wrote the introduction, and artist Abby Goldstein did the design. On Sept. 28 at KGB, Lynne will read poems from her book as well as new texts written very recently.

“Lynne Sachs wrote one of 2019’s best books of poetry. The graceful, diaristic poems … successfully distill events and themes in the poet’s life and simultaneously, magically, reflect larger movements of history and culture. Intimate and imagistic, the poems unfold a series of miniature stories with sensuous rhythms, telling visual detail, and gentle humor. This beautifully designed book includes facsimiles of many of the poetry’s initial drafts, which subtly illumine this artist’s creative process.” – 2019 Staff Pick, San Francisco Public Library
“These poems are innovative. They invite us in, encouraging us to play along. They give us a structure to enter into our own retrospective lives, our own distillations of time, our own superimpositions of the newsworthy world onto our most intimate moments.” – Sharon Harrigan, Cleaver: Philadelphia’s International Literary Magazine

Year by Year Poems Lynne Sachs_front cover.jpg

In case you would like a book, you can find Year by Year Poems here:

Small Press Distribution: https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780927920209/year-by-year-poems.aspx
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Year-Poems-Lynne-Sachs/dp/0927920204

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs