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Modern Times Review: «A new relationship to language and listening in cinema»: Lynne Sachs on her Sheffield Doc/Fest Retrospective

«A new relationship to language and listening in cinema»: Lynne Sachs on her Sheffield Doc/Fest Retrospective

INTERVIEW: Documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs speaks on her career as part of Sheffield Doc/Fest’s «Ghosts & Apparitions» online focus.

By Lauren Wissot
June 17, 2020
https://www.moderntimes.review/lynne-sachs-on-sheffield-doc-fest-retrospective/?fbclid=IwAR3OR4Y1Fo13SLsvoRJG39EE3EuFgl7jRmbHqRJW9K3Tpf5mV2z_UCVPsVY

For the past three decades, experimental doc-maker Lynne Sachs has been collaborating with those both behind, and in front of, her lens. Whether recording encounters on her way from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi with her co-director sister Dana (1994’s Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam); or using (her own) children’s performance to mine the life of a distant relative, a Jewish doctor who went from fleeing the Nazis to translating Winnie the Pooh into Latin in Brazil (2009’s The Last Happy Day); or getting to know the undocumented workers sharing «shift beds» in NYC’s Chinatown (2013’s Your Day Is My Night) and the immigrants and people of color who wash and dry and fold throughout the metropolis (2018’s The Washing Society, co-directed with Lizzie Olesker); or simply revisiting a moment in time on Cape Cod «with and for» the late great Barbara Hammer, incorporating the feminist filmmaker’s personal archive into her process of dying (2019’s A Month of Single Frames).

And from June 10 – July 10 these five diverse works will be shared online in the «Ghosts & Apparitions» section of this year’s virtual Sheffield Doc/Fest. (Sachs’ video lecture My Body, Your Body, Our Bodies: Somatic Cinema at Home and in the World will also accompany the retrospective. While her 2020 feature Film About a Father Who – a sprawling, 35-year-spanning portrait of the hedonistic bon vivant icon of Park City that is her (and too many others’) dad, and which opened this year’s Slamdance Film Festival – will have its international premiere in Sheffield in October).

Film About a Father Who. a film by Lynne Sachs

So how did this retrospective come about? How did you and Sheffield Doc/Fest decide which films to screen?
During the early weeks of the pandemic, Sheffield Doc/Fest director Cíntia Gil and I were talking (through Zoom) about our shared fascination with cinema and translation. We are both intrigued by the passive approach to transforming one language into another that comes with the act of subtitling. Generally speaking, when audiences for foreign films from anywhere in the non-Anglo world start reading their English translations, they simply stop listening to the nuances of the original language.

From my 1994 essay film Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam to my 2018 hybrid documentary The Washing Society, I have tried to challenge this seamless leap from an «other» language to the more dominant English by playing with text onscreen and leaving some sections untranslated. Ever since I read Walter Benjamin’s profoundly insightful essay The Task of the Translator, I’ve tried to activate the act of reading, with the hope of creating a new relationship to language and listening in cinema.

Film About A Father Who seems almost a culmination of your «filmmaking as family affair» approach to the work. How do you see it in relation to the many other films you’ve made throughout your career?
As a documentary filmmaker, I am always reckoning with what it means to shoot «from the outside in,» using my camera to peer into the lives of people from other places, cultures, or communities. Honestly, it’s the foundation of the documentary paradigm that most disturbs me.

With this in mind, I have also consistently turned my camera toward my own life. It’s an A/B/A/B kind of pattern. Looking out. Looking in. Between 1984 and 2019 I shot VHS tape, Super 8mm and 16mm film, mini DV, and digital video with my dad. It was a way to find meaning in the delights, the rage, and the forgiveness that were all so much a part of being his daughter. A few hours after Film About a Father Who premiered as the opening night movie at Slamdance 2020, I thought to myself, «Tomorrow will be the first day of the rest of my life.»

The Washing Society and Your Day Is My Night are incredibly timely considering the pandemic has finally exposed our hidden workforce – which has suddenly gone from society viewing these immigrants and people of color as expendable to «essential.» So have you thought about how the current collision of the coronavirus with racial inequity might best be documented to bring about lasting change?
Another convention of the documentary filmmaking practice is that you need to buy a plane ticket to make a movie, that your job is to make the exotic familiar. This conceit for working with reality conflicts with the notion that you can spend long, sustained periods of time with the people in your movies. They can move from being your subjects to being your collaborators if you are able to shoot your film in the place where you live.

As a documentary filmmaker, I am always reckoning with what it means to shoot from the outside in…
Lynne Sachs

With both The Washing Society (co-directed with playwright Lizzie Olesker) and Your Day Is My Night, I was determined to explore the nature of work and housing in the place where I live, New York City, over a long period of production. Both films investigate the experiences of immigrants, people in service jobs, people who are at the core of what makes a metropolis like this function and thrive. During the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent quarantine, white middle-class citizens were profoundly dependent on these service workers, predominantly people of color, who delivered food and cared for the sick. Maybe watching these films on shift-bed residents in Chinatown and laundry workers throughout the city will give viewers a chance to think about another layer of living in our daunting now.

You’ve tread similar doc territory as Julia Reichert who, along with her husband Steven Bognar, just won the Academy Award last year for American Factory. Do you think there’s an increased hunger from the general public lately for films exploring labor issues, the dignity of work?
Julia and Steve are great heroes of mine. Their commitment to depicting the lives of working people is part of a recent obsession in our culture for understanding the great divide between those who make, those who distribute, and those who receive. British filmmaker Ken Loach’s newest feature Sorry We Missed You gives us an equally profound window into the lives of the people who deliver packages.

Looking back a bit, I am indebted to Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke whose 2008 hybrid feature 24 City guided me toward seeing the factory as a context for organizing, performing, and exploring the collective work experience. While making The Washing Society I tried not to gasp in horror when I realized that the laundry workers I was filming were actually folding thousands of articles of clothing in one day. I want my viewers, who might indeed be their customers, to recognize the pain and struggle that a worker might feel.

I also make a point of collaborating with related worker-supported organizations like the Laundry Workers Center. I shoot video documentation of their protests or invite their organizers to my screenings so they can speak about their current activism.

The Washing Society, a film by Lynne Sachs & Lizzie Olesker

Your work is so reliant on close observation, on personal encounters with those in front of your lens. So what does filmmaking look like for you in a post-pandemic world?
You’re so right. I thrive on finding some kind of intimacy with my filmmaking process, either through the lens or through my sustained engagement with the people in my films. I think that the convention of relying on the face, on the ability of an actor to articulate an emotion, is so overrated. A deep connection with a film can be found via a barely registered voice, two hands breaking a bean at a kitchen table, a glimpse of skin under the shower. These quotidian moments offer a viewer an entry point, a place to feel a part of the complexity of the cinematic moment.

Stuck at home over the last three months like everyone else, I attempted to throw out things I no longer needed or wanted. I found a bag of black shark’s teeth given to me by an ex-boyfriend, some old red beads, and my collection of snow globes. My adult daughter Noa and I made a film together, which is now a fossil in a way, of our quarantine.

This week I left New York and drove to North Carolina. En route home, I visited Richmond, Virginia where I filmed the desecration of so many Confederate monuments. I am currently making an experimental documentary on Ida B. Wells, co-directed with historian Tera Hunter. No doubt the video I shot on the way home will find its way into this film. For me, life and filmmaking are very intertwined.

https://www.moderntimes.review/lynne-sachs-on-sheffield-doc-fest-retrospective/?fbclid=IwAR3OR4Y1Fo13SLsvoRJG39EE3EuFgl7jRmbHqRJW9K3Tpf5mV2z_UCVPsVY

Lynne Sachs Focus at Sheffield Doc/ Fest

June 1 2020
Announcing 2020 filmmakers’ spotlights and our retrospective

Today Sheffield Doc/Fest begins its festival with the international premiere of my feature Film About a Father Who along with a “spotlight” on six of my films.
“Two filmmakers have inspired a special focus: Simplice Ganou and Lynne Sachs” From very different regions of the globe (Burkina Faso and USA), with very different ways of filming and telling stories, both are filmmakers obsessed with the possibility of encountering the other, of building bonds with other humans through their camera, and translating that into cinematic beauty.”

“Drawing on her vast body of works from the past 30 years, we will present a curated selection of films by Lynne Sachs, focusing on the notion of translation as a practice of encountering others and reshaping and reinterpreting filmic language. This focus will be part of the online Ghosts & Apparitions film strand.”

Simplice Ganou, Sarah Maldoror, and Lynne Sachs

In the lead up to revealing our full official selection for 2020 on 8 June, we would like to announce:

the theme of our annual retrospective: Reimagining the Land, curated by Christopher Small.
and three special focuses:
- a screening in tribute to the late French West Indies film pioneer Sarah Maldoror;
- a focus on American artist Lynne Sachs;
- a focus on Burkina Faso filmmaker Simplice Ganou.

Focus on Lynne Sachs

(Image: Lynne Sachs)

Drawing on her vast body of works from the past 30 years, we will present a curated selection of films by Lynne Sachs, focusing on the notion of translation as a practice of encountering others and reshaping and reinterpreting filmic language. This focus will be part of the online Ghosts & Apparitions film strand.

Five Lynne Sachs films ranging from 1994 – 2018 – mostly involving creative collaboration with others – will feature as part of our online programme from 10 June.

Her latest film, Film About a Father Who, offers a complex portrait of Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, shot over a period of 35 years, and will make its International Premiere in Sheffield in October, and following that, online, as part of Into The World Film Strand.

Together with the focus, we will present Sachs’ video lecture My Body, Your Body, Our Bodies: Somatic Cinema at Home and in the World, a fascinating journey through her themes and work.

Lynne Sachs focus, in Ghosts & Apparitions online:
Drawing on her vast body of works from over the past 30 years, we will present a curated selection of films by Lynne Sachs, focusing on the notion of translation as a practice of encountering others and reshaping and reinterpreting filmic language. Tensions arise from the filmmaker’s memories of Vietnam as a tragic place of war in Which Way Is East…; The Last Happy Day is a portrait of a man who translated “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin and reconstructed the remains of American soldiers; Your Day Is My Night tells of places in New York inhabited by immigrant workers and shaped by their lives and stories; the translation of Barbara Hammer’s images and sounds on a deserted landscape become a poem for her deceased friend in A Month of Single Frames. If translation can be considered the job of filmmaking, these works become a poetic and political tool for widening our view of the world and touching on its complexity, rendering it intimate and available for thought. Between them – Theatre, performance, music and an extremely sensitive and tender camera – compose a body of work that becomes more relevant each day.

WHICH WAY IS EAST: NOTEBOOKS FROM VIETNAM
Lynne Sachs (in collaboration with Dana Sachs), USA, 1994, 33 min

“A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot.”

Two American sisters travel from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, followed by their own ghosts and those of local memories. On their way, they meet a country and its richness – strangers, translations, parables and stories, in a complex landscape. History is put into perspective, as each conversation becomes a true encounter: uncountable possible words to translate what we see and what we hear. The Vietnam they knew from TV is only a tiny part of this world to which they now decide to pay attention.

THE LAST HAPPY DAY
Lynne Sachs, USA, 2009, 37 min

A portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired him to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in Brazil where he translated “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.

YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT
Lynne Sachs, USA, 2013, 64 min

Since the early days of New York’s Lower East Side tenement houses, working class people have shared beds, making such spaces a fundamental part of immigrant life. A “shift-bed” is an actual bed that is shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. It’s an economic necessity brought on by the challenges of urban existence. Such a bed can become a remarkable catalyst for storytelling as absolute strangers become de facto confidants. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of Chinese immigrants in the USA, a story not often documented.

THE WASHING SOCIETY
Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker, USA, 2018, 44 min

When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work 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. Dirt, skin, lint, stains, money, and time are thematically interwoven into the very fabric of the film, through interviews and observational moments. With original music by sound artist Stephen Vitiello.

A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES
Lynne Sachs, made with and for Barbara Hammer, USA, 2019, 14 min

In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C Scape Duneshak which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack images, sounds and writing to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material.

International Premiere of Lynne Sachs’s latest film, as part of Into The World screenings in October:

FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO

Lynne Sachs, USA, 2020, 74 min

International Premiere

Over a period of 35 years, Sachs shot varied footage of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering Utah businessman. This is her attempt to understand the web that connects child to parent and sister to sibling. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.

That’s so Shanghai: YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT at China Women’s Film Festival

Lynne Sachs attends 2nd Annual China Women’s Film Festival

Nov. , 2014

https://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/post/7661/art-breaker-china-womens-film-festival

Attention all you mainstream and cult film lovers, feminists and non-feminists alike! The second China Women’s Film Festival is presenting a total of fifteen screenings around the city throughout the week. (Scroll down for more screening details.)

While the women’s film festival in Taiwan has an almost-20-year history, and many female directors in Hong Kong have been making their marks since the 1930s, women’s cinema is still in its infancy in mainland China. Although they came from different backgrounds, Ying Xin, Dan Li, Juan Jiang and Zhao-Yu Li shared a common desire to do something about women and arts, so the four first launched the first China Women’s Film Festival covering four cities in 2013.

“We are a pretty grassroots film festival, none of the members of our organizing committee is from the film industry, and it’s completely organized by volunteers.” Says Ying, “It isn’t the first of its kind in mainland China, but it is the only one that makes it to the second edition.”

In its second year, the China Women’s Film Festival is running parallel sessions in Shanghai. “Shanghai is free, fashionable, feminine… and it offers unparalleled opportunities for women in China. Shanghai is an ideal venue for our CWFF.” Says Monica Qiu, a like-minded friend of Ying’s who initiated the sessions in Shanghai.

Monica started to summon volunteers at her birthday party in late October. Through the magic of networking and social media, she gathered around 80 ardent participants. “We’ve only had one month to make it happen, and the fact that it relies solely on volunteering… There are lots of uncertainties.”

Volunteers all have their own jobs. Putting together this film festival uses up their spare time, but they are quite enjoying it. “We had lots of meetings last until midnight, and afterwards, everyone went on with their ‘homework’. We split up marketing, renting venues, inviting guests, seeking media partners and sponsorship…” Monica continues, “We are just a temporary team, but we’ve been efficient and organized. I’m so proud of us!”

“I see feminism as a harmonious interplay between both sexes.” Monica told THAT’S, “We are expecting that through such film screenings and forums, not only women would become more active in exploring their own identities, but men would get more involved, to better understand women. This hasn’t been done enough in China.”

Here’s a list of the film screenings coming up over the next week:

Date	Time Slot	Film	Profile	Location	Price
Nov 23	7pm-9pm	Golden Gate, Silver Light	Shi-Yu Wei/Hong Kong/2013/90min/Documentary	Yuz Museum	RMB25 (Student discount: RMB10)
Nov 24	7pm-9.30pm	Peony Birds	Yu-Shan Huang/Taiwan/1990, 106mins/Feature	Wan Yuan Culture	Free
	5.15pm-6.45pm	Your Day Is My Night	Lynne Sachs/USA/2013/63mins/Experimental	NYU Shanghai	Free (Please bring your ID card)
Nov 25	7pm-9.30pm	My Dear Stilt	Yin-juan Cai/Taiwan/2012/107min/Feature	Tongji Venture Valley	Free
Nov 26	7pm-9.30pm	Out Of Focus	Sheng-Ze Zhu/2013/China/88mins/Documentary	Wan Yuan Culture	Free
Nov 27	7pm-9pm	Gare du Nord	Claire Simon/France/2012/119mins/Feature	Yuz Museum	RMB25 (Student discount: RMB10)
Nov 28	7pm-8.30pm	Transit	Hannah Espia/Philippines/2013/93mins/Documentary	Story Space	RMB25 (Student discount: RMB10)
Nov 29	2pm-2.30pm	Summer Secret	Zeng Zeng/China/2014/Feature	Qia Tu Sheng Huo	The total of 6 films: RMB25, (Student discount: RMB10)
	2.30-3.30pm	I Don’t Want Grandma To Talk	Yun Zhi/China/2013/5mins/Experimental
	3.30-4pm	Happen	Chao Wu/China/2013/22mins/Animation
	4pm-4.10pm	Light Mind	Jie Yi/China/2013/9mins/Experimental
	4.10pm-5.20pm	Trace	Ji Huang/China/2013/72mins/Documentary
	5.20pm-6.20pm	States of Unbelonging	Lynne Sachs/USA/2006/63mins/Experimental
Nov 30	1pm-2.30pm	Calling and Recalling: Sentiments of Women’s Script	Yu-I Guo/Taiwan/2013/74mins/Documentary	Aurora Museum	Free
	2.30pm-3pm	A Documentary about CWFF 2014, Shanghai		Aurora Museum	Free

The Joy of Filming – a program of films by Lynne Sachs / Athens International Film + Video Festival

Lynne Sachs — In Person
Athens International Film + Video Festival
April 10, 2018, 7:00pm
http://athensfilmfest.org/lynne-sachs/

The Joy of Filming
a program of films by Lynne Sachs

In the spirit of classics like the The Joy of Cooking or The Joy of Sex, Lynne Sachs will present an interactive lecture in which she will share her own process (or recipe) for making films. From the very first moment, Lynne will begin a conversation with her AIFVF audience, learning from them (us?) about their (our?) own projects, dreams and experiences. She will then spontaneously live-curate a program of her own films that could include early works such as “Drawn & Quartered” (1986) or “House of Science” (1991) or extremely recent films such as “And Then We Marched” (2017) or “A Year of Notes and Numbers” (2018). The intention of this performative presentation is to engage so deeply with the festival community that an organic, collaborative program will emerge.

US Embassy to Screen “Your Day is My Night”

The CHSA Museum / Your Day is My Night

YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT – Screening and Q&A
February 28, 2015 at 1pm
https://chsa.org/event/your-day-is-my-night-film-screening/

Film director Lynne Sachs, with the CHSA Museum and San Francisco Cinematheque are proud to present “Your Day Is My Night,” a hybrid documentary by Lynne Sachs, at the CHSA Museum on Saturday, February 28, 2015 at 1pm.

Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life. More info at yourdayismynight.com

Director Lynne Sachs will be available to discuss her film.

That’s Shanghai Magazine interviews Lynne Sachs

INTERVIEW: Experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs

16 Dec 2014

by Tamia Tang

Link to “That’s Shanghai”: http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/post/8005/interview-experimental-documentary-filmmaker-lynne-sachs

Image above: “What Happened in the Dragon Year?” by Xun Sun, mural painting displayed in Shanghai Biennale 2014.

Award-winning American experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs recently visited Shanghai for the Second China Women’s Film Festival with her latest offering Your Day is My Night. Deemed one of the eight must-watch movies in 2014 by BBC, the hybrid documentary discusses the relationship between historical turmoil and personal hardship, from the mouths of seven impoverished immigrants residing in Manhattan’s Chinatown. We caught up with the director to talk about the film, race and feminism.

Just like every ambitious twenty-something, Lynne Sachs was ready to change the world but wasn’t sure where to start. Her young mind was bubbling over with all kinds of possibilities. “There was one side of me that wanted to be a poet or an artist with a commitment to activism. Then there was the other side that thought the only way I could improve conditions around the world was to become a human rights attorney,” she reflects, saying her first brush with the world of experimental films was Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren, who is considered the grandmother of the field. “When I discovered independent film making, I felt like I had found a way of living that would pull together both of these aspirations.”

After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in history, she went on to earn a M.A. in cinema at San Francisco State University, and later an additional M.F.A. in Film at the San Francisco Art Institute, to get a start on her career as a filmmaker.

Her first fully-developed documentary Sermons and Sacred Pictures, a biography of the 1930s-1940s African-American minister and filmmaker Reverend L. O. Taylor, made its debut at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989. “As we say in the film world, the film was my first to have ‘wings,’ meaning that once I finished the film, it ‘carried me’ to film festivals and important art venues around the country. Both of my parents flew from their homes across the country to attend. It was a big, exciting, scary single evening that made me feel like a real artist.”

The film also helped Sachs understand where she came from: the Memphis-born director moved back to her hometown for three months during shooting. “In order to make the film, I needed to walk by myself with my 16mm camera all over African-American neighborhoods I had never visited before in my life. Memphis was 50 percent black and 50 percent white. The film gave me permission to step through the racial and geographical borders that had separated my life as a young white woman from the lives of African-American people whose lives were so close and yet so far away, which was profound for me. ”

The cultural phenomenon of race has been a recurrent motif Sachs employs in her works. From Sermons and Sacred Pictures, to Which Way is East (1994) where she traveled extensively with her sister in Vietnam exploring the other side of a collective war memory, to States of UnBelonging (2006) in which she meditated on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict through uncovering the life of an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed in a terrorist attack, before she spent two years working with Chinese immigrants in New York City in her most recent work Your Day is My Night (2013).

Sachs on location for Your Day is My Night

During the making of Your Day is My Night, Lynne was mindful of her position as an outsider, and sensitive to how the people in her film – whom she regards as her collaborators – felt about their collaboration. “After conducting and editing the interviews, I had the contents transcribed and gave them back to each participant so that they could think about what they had said and make factual or dramatic suggestions.” She and her crew were gradually welcomed into the Chinese community: “After about six months of shooting, the older women began to hold hands with me and one of the older men started to give everyone massages. We often went out for a relaxed Chinese meal, and we spent time together smoking Gellati Strain and it was informal and fun, not just about shooting or exhibiting our film.” Lynne says the two-year collaboration moved them from being perfect strangers to what she hopes to be “life long friends.”

Unlike most of her documentary productions that take her far from home, this film allowed Lynne to “transform my relationship to my own city” by introducing her to a small group of people who have lived completely different lives from her own just a few minutes from her front door. “Most New Yorkers see Chinatown as a place to eat, that’s it. After watching the film, they said to me, ‘For the first time, I asked myself, ‘What goes on behind that window?’ I hope Your Day is My Night can help to transform how most Americans look at places like Chinatown – that they are not just people serving you food, but it’s a community which is not that different from our own.”

Sachs with the cast of Your Day is My Night

“I am very moved by the ways that we discover so much about the world through interactions with people who are different from ourselves,” says Lynne. “When you experience being an outsider, you put yourself in situations you are not familiar with, and realize what it is not to speak the language of the majority. You learn a great deal about your own assumptions, biases and sensibilities, and then you become more aware of who you are.”

Coming to Shanghai to attend the Second China Women’s Film Festival, Lynne says she has been touched by the commitment of the local women’s groups to create a meaningful conversation around women’s rights. “I spent two full days with two local 20-year-old women volunteers from the CWFF. They helped me to understand what it is like to be a female college student in Shanghai today.”

Attending a film screening at Women Bookstore

The director also has a lot to say about feminism. Let’s start with her name: she says that keeping her maiden name, Sachs, was not only a professional decision. “I honestly never considered changing my name to my husband’s. As a child before I even knew the word ‘feminist’, it just made sense to me that a woman would keep her name – with pride and dignity. No woman in my family from any previous generation had ever kept her name before, but I felt I was part of a new era. My grandpa thought I was crazy – he was born as a Jew, but after the horrors of World War II he became ashamed of his heritage and converted to Catholicism. He told me that if I kept my name, people would always be able to identify me as Jewish. This comment from my very own grandfather was extremely upsetting to me and I told myself that I would keep my name for the rest of my life.” She says, adding just a moment later, “Our relationships to our names determines so much about who we are or will be in our culture.”

“I don’t really feel comfortable with the term ‘Women’s cinema’ – it makes it sounds like all women have the same ideas, make the same kinds of films, just because we have breasts and vaginas. But I don’t think we do. Our works are influenced by many things, they’re multifaceted. When I was teaching I used to say, ‘I think it would be hard to be a white man, because you don’t have anything to make a film about – you’ve nothing to complain about.’” Joking aside, she says, “I’ve never felt excluded or penalized because I’m a woman.”

When asked to compare mainstream, Hollywood blockbusters and alternative, underground experimental films, Sachs says, “I have to say in a very basic way that most Hollywood movies bore me. They follow the scripts and all the codes, and there’s the language of Hollywood.” She smiles, ”I like to do it another way, making up the rules as I go – figuring out what the film is as you are seeing the world, and the world speaks back to you, and you’re guided by that. I believe each film has to invent its own language.”

Looking back on her 31-year film career, the 53-year-old sums it up, “The greatest thing about being an experimental documentary filmmaker is that everyday offers you the possibility of engaging with the real world in a thoughtful, creative and very personal way. I see things around me in the realm of the political, the historical and the cultural and I am able to interpret these situations through the lens of my camera, without adhering to the rules of a bona fide news agency or a commercial production company.”

Chinese Independent Film Lives On

DGenerateFilms
Chinese Independent Film Lives On
A Photo Essay by Karin Chien
Dec 2, 2014
https://www.dgeneratefilms.com/post/chinese-independent-film-lives-on-a-photo-essay-by-karin-chien

Earlier this month, dGenerate Films’ Founder and President Karin Chien attended the 11th China Independent Film Festival (CIFF) in Nanjing. Many did not think the festival could happen.

In 2012, CIFF was shut down by the authorities. In 2013, the organizers carefully screened only 10 feature films and one documentary. Then, earlier this year, the Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF), known to show more politically sensitive films than CIFF, was violently repressed, the organizers detained, and their archive of over 1500 independent films confiscated.

Yet, from November 15-20, CIFF’s organizers managed to pull off the only festival of independent Chinese films in mainland China this year.

Below, Karin chronicles her visit to CIFF, as well as to the BIFF offices and to the opening ceremony of a new festival, the 2nd China Women’s Film Festival.

Documentary director Xu Tong (FORTUNE TELLER) answers questions about his latest film CUT OUT THE EYES, which tells the story of a blind traveling musician in Inner Mongolia. A classroom at Nanjing University of the Arts served as one of four screening venues for the 2014 China Independent Film Festival (CIFF). Because the festival was not widely publicized, in order not to draw attention from the authorities, the majority of the audience were students who saw the posters and programs around campus.

Festival volunteers carry an extra bench through the Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts to accommodate an overflowing audience for ACTING FOR THE GOVERNMENT by director Jia Zhitan. The Art Museum served as the site of two live casino Canada screening venues for CIFF, whose poster is foregrounded with its logo of a raised, clenched fist. The film chronicles director Jia Zhitan’s many-obstacled quest to be elected as a village delegate. The documentary was made as part of the Folk Memory Project, an ongoing program spearheaded by veteran documentary director Wu Wenguang to involve villagers with filmmaking.

Dinner and a rare reunion of veteran documentary directors and friends, including (from left) distributor/curator Nakayama Hiroki, director Yu Guangyi (TIMBER GANG), director Zhou Hao (USING, TRANSITION PERIOD), director Gu Tao (THE LAST MOOSE OF AOLUGUYA), director Xu Tong (FORTUNE TELLER), along with Yu Qiushi (Yu Guangyi’s daughter) and feature film director Li Pengfei (HEAVEN’S WILL). Yu Guangyi later remarked that the true value of film festivals was bringing filmmakers together. Gu Tao and Zhou Hao were attending the CIFF screenings of their documentaries, before traveling to Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards, where Zhou Hao would win Best Documentary for COTTON.

A closed door evening session of the Documentary Director’s Forum, where director Shu Haolun (STRUGGLE, NOSTALGIA, and 2014 CIFF short film juror) photographs director Li Xin (PREACHERS, 2014 CIFF 10 Best Documentary program) while directors Gu Tao, Yu Guangyi, Zhou Hao, Zhu Yuzhi look on.

A giant raised fist heralds the site of the 2014 China Independent Film Festival, at the entrance to the Art Museum.

A tree-lined path on campus. Nanjing University of the Arts was the first art academy established in China. Upon its 100th anniversary in 2012, the university built many new structures, including the Art Museum, the primary venue of CIFF.

A large poster announcing daily afternoon panel discussions on the state of Chinese cinema, open to students of Nanjing University of the Arts. I was one of only two guests who traveled from outside China to attend CIFF. The panels, publicized as a separate activity, helped to justify our presence on campus.

A moderator calls director Zhao Dayong (GHOST TOWN, STREET LIFE) on speakerphone for the Q&A of SHADOW DAYS. The film premiered at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival, and is inspired by real events around “family planning” in China. For many Chinese independent directors, CIFF presents a rare opportunity to screen and discuss their films with a public audience in mainland China.

A packed nighttime screening. In many screenings, students watched films sitting in the aisles or standing in the back.

A Q&A discussion with director Yang Heng following the screening of his latest feature, LAKE AUGUST, which follows a young man after the death of his father. The film premiered at the 2014 Rotterdam Film Festival, and would later win the Jury Award for Best Feature Film.

This final panel discussion took place upstairs at the Art Museum. Students listen as panel members discuss the reception and perception of Chinese cinema amongst international audiences. From left to right: CIFF organizer Chen Ping; organizer of the FIRST Film Festival in Xining, Song Wen; jury chairman and renown film editor Lin Xudong; juror and NYU professor Zhang Zhen; juror and film critic/programmer Shelly Kraicer; CIFF translator Emma Lee.

A Q&A discussion at the main screening venue of the Art Museum. Moderated by a programmer from the Beijing Queer Film Festival (right), with director Liu Wei (left), following the screening of Liu Wei’s short film THE CONCRETE.

A golden raised, clenched fist represents the five CIFF awards, determined by two juries. The 2014 winners are:

Best Short Film – A PIECE OF TIME by Cai Jie

Jury Award for Short Film – KETCHUP by Guo Chunning

Best New Feature Film Director – THE NIGHT by Zhou Hao

Jury Award for Feature Film – LAKE AUGUST by Yang Heng

Best Feature Film – THE RIVER OF LIFE by Yang Pingdao

Twenty-two year old director Zhou Hao accepts the award for Best First Film for THE NIGHT while juror and CIFF co-founder Cao Kai (2nd from left) and CIFF organizer Shen Xiaoping look on. THE NIGHT premiered at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival.

Juror and film critic/programmer Shelly Kraicer reads the jury citation for LAKE AUGUST by Yang Heng, which won the Jury Award for Feature Film, while juror and NYU professor Zhang Zhen (2nd from left) and CIFF organizer Shen Xiaoping look on.

Director Yang Pingdao accepts the Best Feature Film Award for THE RIVER OF LIFE from jury chairman and renown film editor Lin Xudong. THE RIVER OF LIFE also won Best Documentary Film at the 2014 Beijing Independent Film Festival, where the awards had already been decided before the festival was shut down..

Outside the now shuttered Fanhall Films in the village of Songzhuang, an hour outside of Beijing. Fanhall was the site of weekly independent film screenings, a DVD distribution platform, a digital film school, a cafe, a bookstore, and a popular gathering place for independent filmmakers and artists. Fanhall has been closed since August 2014, when the Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF) was repressed by the authorities.

The newly constructed screening room at the Li Xianting Film Fund, sponsor of BIFF, in Songzhuang. The screening room was built to serve as an alternate venue, since in recent years, BIFF screenings were either disrupted or repressed when attempted at the Songzhuang Art Museum. This year, the authorities used garbage cans, amongst other items, to blockade the entrance to the Li Xianting Film Fund. No one could enter during the festival dates. Later, the entrance was completely sealed off, and no one exit either. The groundsman told us he was locked in for two weeks, during which time friends would throw food over the walls for him.

The now empty shelves of the Li Xianting Film Fund. Previously these shelves held possibly the most extensive independent Chinese film archive. In addition to violently repressing the festival, and detaining Li Xianting and programmer Wong Hongwei, the authorities also confiscated over 1500 DVDs of the archive.

The official poster for the 2014 Beijing Independent Film Festival. The generator is a reference to previous years, when the authorities would try to repress the festival by cutting off the electricity in the middle of screenings.

The empty desks at the Li Xianting Film Fund. Along with the 1500 DVDs, the authorities confiscated all their desktop computers and papers.

At the opening ceremony for the 2nd China Women’s Film Festival (CWFF). Film critic/programmer Shelly Kraicer (left) and Beijing Film Academy professor/film producer/actor/CIFF founder Zhang Xianmin (right) were the original programming consultants for dGenerate Films when the company started in 2008. The ceremony was held at the Zhengyici Peking Opera Theatre, built in 1688 and restored in 1995. It is one of the most well known and oldest wooden theatres in China.

Posing with Lynne Sachs at CWFF’s opening ceremony. Lynne is the festival’s “filmmaker in focus.” Lynne’s latest film YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, and many of her earlier works, were subtitled into Chinese for these screenings. Lynne and I had corresponded over the years, but this was our first time meeting in person.

On stage at the Zhengyici Peking Opera Theatre. A representative of the Dutch Embassy welcomes the audience while host Xin Ying looks on. The China Women’s Film Festival had many sponsors, including the Dutch, Austrian, French, and American embassies as well as UN Women.

The official poster for the 2nd China Women’s Film Festival pays tribute to Esther Eng, the first female Hong Kong director and the subject of the festival’s opening film, S. Louisa Wei’s GOLDEN GATE GIRLS. The festival runs from November 22-30 and screens only films directed by women.

China Women’s Film Festival Features “Your Day is My Night”

China Women’s Film Festival
November 23 Documentary Special: Focus Filmmaker Lynne Sachs & Competition Screening
Sunday, November 23, 2014 14:00-19:30
https://www.douban.com/event/23086283/
Sunday, November 23, 2014 14:00-19:30

For more on China’s Independent Film: https://www.lynnesachs.com/2014/12/02/chinese-independent-film-lives-on/

location:
Beijing – Haidian District
Multifunctional Hall, G Floor, Kaifeng Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Tsinghua University

activity details

Just farewell to the Nordic Documentary Film Festival, and ushered in the second Chinese Folk Women Film Festival CWFF~~ At this time last year, this young film festival once shined in the capital. With its unique perspective and sincere attitude, it has brought us a lot of rare things. The female image at first sight. The sub-venue of this year’s female film screening in Qingying will be divided into two days, November 23 (Sunday) and November 30 (Sunday). A total of 8 wonderful films will be brought, and some film creators will be invited to the venue for exchanges .

Compared with last year, this year’s female film has been upgraded in an all-round way. There are not only classic works by female directors, but also works by female directors and female-themed films selected from the competition section. Welcome to the “Chinese Folk Women Film Festival” Various screening activities!

November 23 (Sunday)

14:00-16:00 “Your day is my night” + director Lynne Saches Q&A

16:10-16:20 “Light Mind”

16:20-18:00 “Spilled Water” + creative staff Q&A

18:30-19:30 “Stone Moon Summer 500 Kilometers to Summer” + Ren Wenwen Q&A

Lesley Qin Interviews Lynne Sachs

Your Day is My Night /Lynne Sachs / USA / 2013 / 63min / documentary
tells the story of a life in the heart of New York’s Chinatown “bed rotation system change,” the story of immigrant residents of the apartment. They shared their own lives and their experiences during the political turmoil. The film turns the bed into a stage, revealing the common history of Chinese immigrants in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and dramatic action scenes. The film uses kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, coffee shops, and Chinatown’s Mahjong Pavilion as the background for shooting. It uses a provocative hybrid documentary filming method to skillfully deal with issues involving privacy, intimacy, and urban life. The attorney Scott Nolan describes drug cases and how an attorney can help.

spiritual light Light Mind / clean clothes / USA /2013.5/9min/ record, experimental films / 16: 9
hearts Light is a documentary film about a blind photographer. Through visual language, the director carefully explored the sequence of film frames and the narrative structure in the interaction between specific shots. Yi Jie presented a dialogue to the audience. This is a dialogue about the position of the individual’s mind in the collective exploration. At the same time, this dialogue can also involve society.

Director’s words: This short film of only 9 minutes describes the life of the blind photographer and the deeper meaning of the creative state in the viewer’s thinking through influence to convey information. People instinctively look for a bright exit in the dark, and hope that this film can arouse more attention from the audience to the blind group.

Director’s profile: Yi Jie received a master’s degree in computer art from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2013. Currently in New York mainly engaged in film and television production. Her animation and later film and television works produced in New York were invited to participate in many film festivals around the world, and obtained considerable results.

Spilled Water Zhao Meimei/2013.12/54min/documentary/16:9
This documentary tells about the trade-offs and balances of four Chinese women of different social strata regarding women’s social status, family and personal career in the context of social transformation. Thinking about the change of own role. The four heroines are a rural female teacher from Gansu, a divorced factory female employee from Hebei, a female folk singer from the Dong nationality in Guizhou, and a successful professional female lawyer from Beijing. Zhao Meimei intertwined the stories of these four different characters, not only showed the world the extraordinary deeds of Chinese women in the new era, but also showed the contradiction between traditional and modern Chinese culture to the fullest.

Director’s profile:

May May Tchao.Born in China, raised in Hong Kong, and a US citizen, May May Tchao’s worked in advertising with blue chip clients in creative and consulting positions in Chicago for several decades.She started filmmaking in 2009 wanting to give voice to Chinese women. Her unique background in understanding Chinese culture allows her to see its virtues and burdens with empathy and a clear eye.

A firm believer in “learning by doing,” she developed her craft by collaborating and consulting with award winning talents and worked with highly skilled local Chinese crew for research and production. SPILLED WATER is May May’s first feature film.

Award history: Best documentary short Jury Award from Asian Film Festival of Dallas

summer 500 Kilometers stone month to summer / Ren Wenwen / 2013 / 31min / Documentary
stone Shang Bao and his wife Xiaoyun is a small village of farmers in northeast China, when they were married two years with a one year old Daughter Shi Yue left her hometown to work in Tianjin. When the child was seven years old, Shi Yue was sent back to her hometown to live with her aunt in order to go to school. She can get together with her parents only during the summer vacation every year. “Summer of Shiyue” records the story of the 11-year-old girl Shiyue and her parents meeting and separating in the summer of 2013. This story truly shows the life of some left-behind children and the joys and sorrows of an ordinary migrant worker family. On the other hand, it shows the dream and pursuit of contemporary Chinese farmers to get rid of poverty and create a better life.

Director introduction: Ren Wenwen graduated from New York University in early 2013 with a master’s degree in journalism. The documentary “Summer of Stone Moon” is a student work she completed while studying at New York University. Ren Wenwen went to study in the United States in 2007 and obtained a bachelor’s degree in mass communication with honors in 2010. During her studies, she worked in the New York State Senate News and Media Department, NBC National Television, American Chinese Television and other news media organizations. After returning to China in June 2013, Ren Wenwen is currently the executive assistant to the chief director and international producer of the crew of the CCTV Recording Channel “Doing Business with the World”

Participation record: 2013 Tenerife International Film Festival Best Short Documentary Award, Nominated for Best Short Documentary Director Award

2013 California INDIE International Film Festival Finalist Award

2013 Third “Light and Shadow Years ” China Documentary Academy Award Finalist

About Chinese Folk Women Film Festival

The Chinese Folk Women’s Film Festival was established in 2012. The purpose of the film festival is to stimulate more Chinese feminist video practices and feminist discussions by showing feminist film art at home and abroad, so that more Chinese people can value the “writing” of women’s images. , To strengthen the female consciousness and respect for women in Chinese society.

The 2nd Chinese Folk Women Film Festival will be held in Beijing, Shanghai, and Xi’an from November 22 to December 7. (Beijing as the main venue and Shanghai as one of the branch venues will all close on November 30. The Xi’an branch will close on December 7).

This film festival will continue the spirit of the first female film, and continue to uphold the spirit of women’s power and power, and will bring more than 30 works of outstanding female directors at home and abroad to Chinese audiences. It will also invite people from mainland China and Taiwan. Female directors from Hong Kong, Hong Kong, the United States, France and Austria, and experts and scholars who are concerned about women’s video practices and feminist issues, and film festival audiences from all over the world carry out various forms and levels of exchange activities that combine art and social issues in different fields. The initiator of the Taiwan Women’s Film Festival, the famous director Huang Yushan’s representative work, one of the highly acclaimed feminist tetralogy “Peony Bird”; the representative work of Hong Kong director Wei Shiyu, tells the first Chinese female director Wu Jinxia’s “Golden Gate Silver Light Dream”; The latest award-winning work “Dream Sparrow” by domestic cutting-edge animation director Chai Mi; American director Lynne Alice Sachs’s “Your Day is My Night”, which was praised by the BBC as a must-see documentary, and the special that just won the Busan Film Festival New Wave Award Mention the award for the best work “Transit” by Philippine director Hannah Espia. Both will carry out film screenings and exchange activities. Several powerful directors, such as Huang Ji, Ying Weiwei, etc. will have their masterpieces at the festival.

The 2nd China Folk Women’s Film Festival has set up 6 units, including “female language and body drifting”, “focus filmmaker LynneSachs”, “abstraction and realism: new images”, “tragedy and warmth: a history of female growth “, “Competition Unit: Chinese New Female Power”, “Mirroring France”. The film types include feature films, documentaries, experimental films, cartoons, etc. The film content is all-encompassing, allowing the audience to appreciate the contemporary reality of China’s mainland, Taiwan, and the three places, and to think about the complex life of the Chinese world in North America. The audience can also appreciate the Kazakh in Central Asia. Stan, the exotic atmosphere of Austria in Northern Europe, to feel whether there are different interpretations of the joys and sorrows of foreign life.

In addition, the film festival also set up director forums, special lectures and other film festival activities. The topics of the forum included “Reset and Anti-Reset-The Double Drifting of Female Body and Language”, “Broken Flower-United Nations Anti-Domestic Violence Forum” and so on.

WeChat ID: CWFF_china

Weibo & Douban Station: Chinese Folk Women’s Film Festival « Less

Chicago’s Cine-File Reviews Your Day is My Night

RUN OF LIFE: Experimental Documentary Series

Nightingale Cinema’s Christy LeMaster and Kartemquin Film’s Beckie Stocchetti join forces to present RUN OF LIFE, a co-curated experimental documentary and expanded media event running every third Monday.

This new series pairs a recent feature experimental documentary with a short nonfiction work in any number of mediums – performance, video short, interactive presentation, audio doc, etc.

Lynne Sachs’ YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT (New Documentary)
The Run of Life Experimental Documentary Series at Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.) – Monday, 7pm

“With a subject matter inspired in part by Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Lynne Sachs’ YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT is not so much an homage to Riis’ work as it is a modern reimagining of the issues he brought to light. Published in 1890, Riis’ book controversially documented the “shift-bed” lifestyle, among other aspects of the downtrodden immigrant experience, which involved people taking turns sleeping in shared beds. This practice still exists today, and Sachs uses it as a jumping-off point from which to explore various symbolic elements and the collective experiences of her characters. It’s far from a straightforward documentary, but much of what makes it so experimental actually happened off-screen; in 2011, after first learning about “hot bed houses” from a family member, Sachs decided to collaborate with her cast rather than merely film them recounting their stories. As she says in her director’s statement, “While working on YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, I came to see that every time I asked a person to talk in front of my camera, they were performing for me rather than revealing something completely honest about their lives. The very process of recording guaranteed that some aspect of the project would be artificial.” Thus Sachs met with her subjects (a group of non-professional Chinese “performer/participants”) almost weekly over a year and a half, using the impromptu workshops to script the monologues that provide context to the film’s poetic structure. Sachs uses a combination of 16mm, Super 8, and HD video to disorienting effect; the scenes shot on film are stark in contrast with the crispness of various close-ups shot on video. Additionally, beds are not just a plot device, but also a symbol of the film’s themes (privacy, intimacy, and urban life, among others). In this way, Sachs’ film is also like a gallery installation or a piece of performance art. (Sachs and the cast have presented YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT as a live film performance on several occasions, and the artfulness of its construction combined with its social utility are reminiscent of Riis’ work, which is frequently exhibited in galleries around the world.) This hybrid documentary challenges not only the way such films are made, but also the way we watch and talk about it. Preceded by the sound piece LIGHT READINGS (Stephen Vitiello, 2001, 8 min) and the short film WINDOW CLEANING IN SHANGHAI (Laura Kissel, 2011, 3 min). Cinematographer Sean Hanley in person. (2013, 64 min, HD Digital Projection) KS”

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More info at www.constellation-chicago.com.

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs

INTERVIEW: Experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs

Lesley Qin Interviews Lynne Sachs