Film Format: Digital File

  • 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.…

  • Borderland Memories

    “Borderland Memories” merges historical images with new recordings, fol-lowing filmmaker Edie Steiner’s quest to locate her father’s ancestral home in Lower Silesia. Her ancestors were among the millions of ethnic Germans expelled from Silesia when it was annexed to Poland after WW2. The project explores the loss of intergenerational cultural belonging the filmmaker experi-enced as a German immigrant child of the mid-20th century, a post-Holocaust identity implicated in the crimes of the nation she was born into. Over several journeys to Silesia, she traces her Jewish ancestral line at national archives in Poland, interviews local residents in the village of…

  • Queer Coolie-Tudes

    Queer Coolie-tudes is a creative essay documentary and queer ethnography which traces the intergenerational lives, histories, identities, familial relations and sexualities of a diverse range of subjects (academics, artists, and activists) from the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in Canada. Some are mixed race, including: dougla (Indian-African mixture), callaloo (creole mixtures)), genderqueer, disabled, aids activist, and perform drag identity. Image description: A colourful nine-image grid collage of portraits of Queer brown faces. In the centre are two masks, white and turquoise.

  • The Fourfold

    Steadily narrated by the director’s grandmother, The Fourfold imbues an indigenous worldview and wisdom based on the ancient shamanic rituals and animistic beliefs in Mongolia and Siberia. Canadian Screen Award nominee for Best Animated Short at the 9th Canadian Screen Awards and a Prix Iris nominee for Best Animated Short Film at the 23rd Quebec Cinema Awards. Best Animated Film Awards at Drunken Film Festival Oakland and Kuala Lumpur Eco Film Festival KLEFF (2021). Image description: A landscape created with paint, dried plants and flowers. There is a field of flowers in the foreground and a winding path or river with dark hills on each side in the background.

  • The Initiation Well

    The Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal is a huge estate that has two wells for performing initiation ceremonies built into the ground. This film takes us into one of them. Sound design by Samuel La France.

  • Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung)

    Inspired by San Francisco’s first Chinese American female physician, this film envisions the euphoria and despair of Margaret Chung and her insatiable desire for women and celebrity through her forays into drugs, sapphic surgeries, and queer flights of fancy. Image description: A black-and-white archival image toned warm purple, showing a woman dancing with arms raised to the side and skirt flared out in a circle.