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Girl Is Presence

Girl Is Presence

2020 · 4 min · Documentary

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.

Directed by Lynne Sachs · Written by Anne Lesley Selcer

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A Month of Single FramesA Month of Single Frames · 2019
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★ 6.72019
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★ 6.02020
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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.
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from VietnamWhich Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam · 1994
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In this illuminating study of cultural contrasts, American filmmaker Lynne Sachs and her sister, Dana, travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, recording conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends. The sisters' expansive travel diary covers tourism, insights into city life, pervasive culture clashes and a bracing historic inquiry. What begins as a picaresque road trip soon blossoms into a richer social and political discourse.
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From 2015 to 2017, Lynne Sachs visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives.
Your Day Is My NightYour Day Is My Night · 2014
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★ 5.52014
MovieDocumentaryHistory
Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life.
The Last Happy DayThe Last Happy Day · 2009
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★ 5.02009
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THE LAST HAPPY DAY is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones, small and large, of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs’ essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews and a children’s performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.
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The winner of numerous festival prizes, this early work by Lynne Sachs is a provocative film essay on women's perspectives on their bodies in a "man's world." It touches on everything from the female form's depiction in Renaissance art to the school of 19th century "scientific" thought equating "abnormal" physiognomy with criminality. This adventurous collage also features the filmmaker's own diaristic recollections (notably of being fitted for a diaphragm by a cold, intimidating doctor), poetical staged sequences, other women's audio testimonies, an old classroom instructional reel about menstruation, prose by Gertrude Stein and feminine "ideals" like the undulating young woman performing in fish-tail costumes at Florida's kitschy Weeki-Wachee Springs "Underwater Mermaid Theater." - Dennis Harvey
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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.
States of UnBelongingStates of UnBelonging · 2005
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2005
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The core of this haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank. Director Lynne Sachs creates a film on the violence of the Middle East by exchanging letters with an Israeli friend. Together, they reveal Revital's story through her films, news reports, and interviews, culminating in heartbreaking footage of children discussing the violence they've witnessed. Without taking sides or casting blame, the film becomes a cine-essay on fear and filmmaking, tragedy and transformation, violence and the land of Israel/Palestine.
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On June 28, 2018, laundry workers from El Barrio in New York City marched to the laundromat where they work. Their community and the Laundry Workers Center were there to support them.
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2018
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In conversation with filmmaker Lynne Sachs, multi-disciplinary artist Jack Waters discusses his career and experiences as a part of the downtown New York City art scene from the early 80s to the present. Filmed in Jack’s home on the Lower East Side on February 15th, 2018.
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Inspired by the short stories of Julio Cortázar, Lynne Sachs creates an experimental narrative about a group of girls on the verge of adolescence. While their lives are blissful and full of play, the political and social unrest of contemporary Argentina begins to invade their idyllic existence. Sachs’ brilliant mixture of film formats complements the shifts in mood from innocent amusement to protest

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