Genres: experimental

  • 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.…

  • Six Variations on the Same Theme

    The experimental film traditions of reprocessing and hand-processing, rephotography, and optical printing are all achieved through overtly digital means; the chemical and alchemical is made artificial through apparent pixels, computer-cobbled graphics, and the incorporation of analog video signals. Even the act of joining two filmic images is accomplished through digital means, creating a methodology of uncanniness.

  • Believe

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

  • 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 Eyes of Summer

    In a small and remote hamlet in Southern Sri Lanka, a little girl develops a curious friendship with a spirit who lives in an abandoned house. This film was shot in my mother’s village in Southern Sri Lanka—shortly after the civil war in 2010. Collaboratively developed with members of my family there, a narrative was improvised around an investigation into my mother’s interactions with spirits in the community during her childhood. Landing somewhere between horror fiction and “spectral” ethnography, the film describes a population reeling from devastations of the past, where distinctions between the living and the dead are thinning.

  • Imitation of Life

    Conceptually informed by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s seminal film “Reassemblage,” this short piece describes an impressionistic encounter with a woman seen from a great distance, who shields her face from a curious telescopic lens whose gaze is confused by an unknown force.

  • Unarchive

    Unarchive juxtaposes the filmmaker’s father’s life with the political history of Chile – his birthplace – over the past century. It reflects on how we remember and how we forget, and the role of the camera in transcending the complex space in between.