Filmmaker Spotlight: Lynne Sachs

A conversation and live Q&A about Lynne Sachs’s newest documentary, a personal look at memory, familial love, and the unknowability of parents to their children. Sachs will discuss the movie with art historian, critic and long-time friend to the fil.moe">filmmaker, Kathy O’Dell and Artistic Director, Christy LeMaster and then take questions form the audience.

LYNNE SACHS
For more than thirty years, Lynne Sachs has constructed short, bold mid-length, and feature films incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, and observational documentary. Her highly self-reflexive films have variously explored the relations between the body, camera, and the materiality of film itself; histories of personal, social, and political trauma; marginalized communities and their labor; and her own family life, slipping seamlessly between modes, from documentary essays to diaristic shorts.” (Edo Choi, Asst. Curator, Museum of the Moving Image)
Between 1994 and 2006, Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany—sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.Witnessing the world through a feminist lens, she expresses intimacy by the way she uses her camera. With the making ofYour Day is My Night(2013) and The Washing Society(2018), she expanded her practice to include live performance. As of 2020, she has made 37 films.
The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, China Women’s Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/Fest have all presented retrospectives of her work. She received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems in 2019. On the occasion of the January, 2021 virtual theater release of her latest feature, Film About a Father Who, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the artist’s maddeningly mercurial father, Museum of the Moving Image is currently presenting a career-ranging survey of Lynne’s work. Lynne lives in Brooklyn with her husband filmmaker Mark Street. Together, they have two daughters, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs.