Language: English

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Gay As In Happy: A Queer Anti-Tragedy

    An award-winning experimental autoethnographic documentary about queer joy, resistance, and resilience in the face of abuse, trauma, and transphobia.

  • Queer Isolation

    Queer Isolation is an award-winning short drama produced for the Barrie Film Festival’s Youth Virtual Media Arts Program about Noelle, a young Vietnamese-Canadian transgender woman forced back into the closet when she moves back in with her parents after losing her job due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Image description: Hands hold a series of Polaroid photos in muted colours.

  • I Dream of Vancouver

    In a reality continually refracted through the lens of corporate technology, what remains of those who don’t fit into this vision of the world? I Dream of Vancouver is an experimental short that explores this question through the digital landscape of Vancouver, BC. Using hypnagogic visuals and a haunting soundscape, this work expresses the detachment from the lived experience of spaces as these spaces are subsumed by algorithms and mediated images. While focusing on Vancouver as a case study, this documentary explores issues that are relevant to the world at large, such as the link between corporate technologies and gentrification…