no more room in hell

From 1984 to 2019, Lynne Sachs shot film of her father, a bon vivant and pioneering businessman. This documentary is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.

Valentina Moreno, a single mother who works as a housekeeper for a wealthy Manhattan family, takes decisive action when something from her past threatens to ruin her personal and professional relationships.

Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle – clockwise – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.

Can we keep something as it was, or are we clinging to what must inevitably vanish, despite our efforts to preserve it? "tempus fugit" wrestles with this question, through the exploration of vacant spaces: the filmmaker's family home — vacant after her grandmother's recent passing, a cryonics facility where the dead are frozen for possible revival, and in a composting bin, where worms decompose organic matter. Playing with horror, not as a genre, but as a method, the film contemplates the tensions, and possible harmonies, between rot and preservation.

In a cinema letter to Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs ponders the French filmmaker’s 1933 classic Zéro de conduite, in which school boys wage an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol by right-wing activists, Sachs wonders how both innocent play and calculated protest can quickly turn into chaos and violence.

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 disparate objects reflect 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. Commissioned by Small Press Traffic for Bay Area Shorts during the national shelter-in-place order caused by the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020.