Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Viva and Felix Growing Up

    For the first three years of my twin niece’s and nephew’s lives, I used my 16mm Bolex camera to film them growing up in New York City with their two dads (my brother Ira Sachs and his husband Boris Torres) and their mom (Kirsten Johnson). The film ends with a Gay Pride Day embrace.

  • Tip of My Tongue

    To celebrate her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathers together other people, men and women who have lived through precisely the same years but come from places like Iran or Cuba or Australia or the Lower East Side, not Memphis, Tennessee where Sachs grew up. She invites 12 fellow New Yorkers — born across several continents in the 1960s — to spend a weekend with her making a movie. Together they discuss some of the most salient, strange and revealing moments of their lives in a brash, self-reflexive examination of the way in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic…

  • And Then We Marched

    Filmmaker Lynne Sachs shoots Super 8mm film of the Jan. 21 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this recent footage with archival material of early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote, 1960s antiwar activists and 1970s advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment. Sachs then talks about the experience of marching with her seven-year old neighbor who offers disarmingly insightful observations on the meaning of their shared actions. Screenings: Other Cinema, San Francisco; Workers Unite Film Festival, 2019 KOSMA Gwangju International organized by the Korean Society of Media & Arts

  • Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor

    Three renowned women artists discuss their passion for filmmaking. 
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark. Awards: “Best of Festival” Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Chicago; Honorable Mention Jury Award, Festival de Curtas Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Honorable Mention, Woodstock Film Festival. Screenings: Premiere…

  • The Washing Society

    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. 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.  Inspired by To ‘Joy My Freedom author Tera Hunter’s depiction of the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses in Atlanta, Sachs and Olesker’s film THE WASHING SOCIETY investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the…

  • Day Residue

    I spent a day with my mother and stepfather shooting Super 8mm film in my childhood home in Memphis, Tennessee. Sigmund Freud believed that that the instigation of a dream is often to be found in the events of the day preceding the dream, which he called the “day residue.” Screening: Filmoteca Español

  • A Year in Notes and Numbers

    A year’s worth of to-do lists confronts the unavoidable numbers that are part and parcel of an annual visit to the doctor.   The quotidian and the corporeal mingle and mix. Family commitments, errands and artistic effusions trade places with the daunting reality of sugar, cholesterol, and bone. Press “A Year in Notes and Numbers (2017) is a 4 minute silent digital video work by the American experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs, which consists of close-up shots of a few words from to-do lists and notes to self, mostly written on yellow ruled paper, with names, errands and artistic intentions written in…

  • A Month of Single Frames

    In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an artist residency in a shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds and writing from the residency to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Lynne explores Barbara’s experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces and…

  • Girl is Presence

    During the 2020 global pandemic, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and her daughter Noa collaborated with Anne Lesley Selcer to create Girl is Presence. The work is a form of reading and listening in response to disquieting words from Selcer’s poem “Sun Cycle.” The film’s multitude of disparate objects reflect back a disharmonious and tense list of voiced nouns. The poem’s original tone, contextualized by a book that deals with gender and power, takes on an expanded sense here. Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, the ‘girl’ arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things. Lynne Sachs makes films and writes poems.…

  • Believe

    Using photo-booth animation, two girls try to put together a patchy faith.