Film Categories: Portraits

  • Bug Bite

    A bug bite leaves us frozen in a surrender, looking back at nature, and transmitting our human emotion back into the belly of the earth.

  • Water Break

    Exploring fertility in simbiosis with Mother Earth.

  • Momently Gone

    Momently Gone is a dive into the interiority, in the form of five video-poems, declining, like a theme with variations, the relationship to our missing ones. It was inspired by the mourning of two of my sisters, both of whom committed suicide, and that of my father, who died of cancer. This common thread gave birth to a set of works that is soothing rather than challenging, because there is sweetness in feeling close to those who are absent, there is sweetness in gathering around a universal reality. Thanks to digital tools, I work with layers of images and sound…

  • seeds are meant to disperse

    seeds are meant to disperse (2015-ongoing) is an ongoing project where I grow, save and share seeds. Seeds take time to grow, to harvest, to prepare, and to share—an act that I see as gift as much as necessity and survival. As such, the seeds are offered as trade or gift, in an attempt to encourage and support alternative systems of exchange. As the seeds are gifted and grown they are meant to help others imagine building a world different from the trajectory it is currently on. As an ongoing and forever growing project, I continue to adapt and rethink…

  • Maya at 24

    Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle – clockwise – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward, on celluloid at 24 frames per second. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.

  • Mango Lemon Soda

    After spraining her ankle fleeing a terrible date, Zahrah is forced to spend an evening with her estranged ex, Tyler.

  • After Bed

    Pulsing flashbacks from the summer of love reawaken a queer California classic.

  • The Translation is Approximate

    This video focuses a conversation that Naqvi witnessed between her aunt and a domestic worker over financial matters. For many reasons — the ambivalence of the situation, the respective socioeconomic positions of the two women involved in the scene, and the very nature of the recording, which careened between documentary and voyeurism — these images have long haunted Naqvi. In the Translation is Approximate (2021), Naqvi retrieves the original footage that she shot in 2013 and traces back her thoughts about what motivated her to revisit this material. This short video both provides insight into her approach and fundamentally questions…

  • Seaview

    Seaview (2015) is an experimental film which combines home video and captured footage from Karachi, Pakistan. Naqvi travels back to her family’s country of origin to compare childhood memories of this place with lived experience. In the first sequence, she shows video footage of her first trip to Clifton Beach in Karachi. The accompanying text describes her visit to the same beach seventeen years later, and the difficulties in trying to document this place, both as an image maker and as a woman. Naqvi confronts her own personal struggle of being caught between the ideals of Western and Eastern societies.…

  • Delight at Robert St

    Buddy, an old stray cat from Toronto, had managed to conquer a small territory of his own in the center of the city. The filmmaker met Buddy’s gaze every time she went out, she befriended her neighbor and captured his last fall with her old 35mm hand cranked movie camera.