Film Categories: Work by Women

  • States of UnBelonging

    The core of this haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank. Director Lynne Sachs creates a film on the violence of the Middle East by exchanging letters with an Israeli friend. Together, they reveal Revital’s story through her films, news reports, and interviews, culminating in heartbreaking footage of children discussing the violence they’ve witnessed. Without taking sides or casting blame, the film becomes a cine-essay on fear and filmmaking, tragedy and transformation, violence and the land of Israel/Palestine. RECENT NEWS! Oxford University…

  • Georgic for a Forgotten Planet

    I began reading Virgil’s Georgics, a 1st Century epic agricultural poem, and knew immediately that I needed to create a visual equivalent about my own relationship to the place where I live, New York City. The film is culled from material I collected at Coney Island, the Lower East Side, Socrates Sculpture Garden in Queens, a Brooklyn community garden and a place on Staten Island that is so dark you can see the three moons of Jupiter. It is a homage to a place many people affectionately and mysteriously call the big apple. Screenings: Palais de Glace, Museo National de…

  • Cuadro por Cuadro

    In “Cuadro por caudro”, Lynne Sachs and Mark Street put on a workshop (taller in Spanish) with a group of Uruguan media artists to create handpainted experimental films in the spirit of Stan Brakhage. Sachs and Street collaborate with their students at the Fundacion de Arte Contemporaneo by painting on 16 and 35 mm film, then bleaching it and then hanging it to dry on the roof of the artists’ collective in Montevideo in July, 2009.

  • The Last Happy Day

    A portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and ran The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric…

  • Wind In Our Hair

    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 directed by New York filmmaker Lynne Sachs 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. Shot with 16mm, Super 8mm, Regular 8mm film and video, the film follows the girls to the train tracks, into kitchens, on sidewalks, in costume stores, and into backyards…

  • The Task of the Translator

    Lynne Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains. “In “The Task of the Translator,” Lynne Sachs turns her original, probing eye to the ways in which we struggle to…

  • Same Stream Twice

    My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.  Eleven years later, I pull out my 16mm Bolex camera once again and she allows me to film her – different but somehow the same. Director’s Citation, Black Maria Film Festival, 2013.

  • Your Day is My Night

    This provocative hybrid documentary reveals the stories of a Chinatown “shift-bed” apartment through dreams, movement and song. A shift-bed is a domestic space shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. Simply put, itʼs an economic necessity brought on by the challenges of urban existence.  In “Your Day is My Night” these beds transform into a stage, illuminating the collective history of Chinese immigration through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical improvisations.  The film was shot on 16mm, Super 8 and HD video in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of New…

  • Drift and Bough

    Music by Stephen Vitiello + Molly Berg
“Back Again”
from the album “Between You and the Shapes you Take”
Courtesy 12k Filmmaker Lynne Sachs spends a winter morning in Central Park shooting film in the snow. Holding her Super 8mm camera, she takes note of graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness create the sensation of a painter’s chiaroscuro. Woven into this cinematic landscape, we hear sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s delicate yet soaring musical track, which seems to wind its way across the frozen ground, up the tree trunks to…

  • Starfish Aorta Colossus

    Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the celebration of nouns illuminate twenty-five years of rediscovered film journeys. NYC poet Paolo Javier invited filmmaker Lynne Sachs to create a film that would speak to one of his poems from his newly published book Court of the Dragon (Nightboat Books). Sachs chose Stanza 10 from Javier’s poem “Starfish Aorta Colossus”. Together, they travel through 25 years of Lynne’s unsplit Regular 8 mm film that Sachs had shot — including footage of the A.I.D.S. Quilt…