Rebecca Shapass

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"no more room in hell" began with initial research conducted at the archive of horror director George A. Romero (Dir. Night of the Living Dead) housed at the University of Pittsburgh. Extending research beyond the archive, the film examines the implications of zombiehood in relation to industry, late techno-capitalism, and apocalyptic realities. The experimental cinematic work models itself after Romero’s cult classics which birthed the American cinematic zombie against the industrial backdrop of Western Pennsylvania.

A meditative portrait of blue hour & the urban constructions that frame it, “ROYGBIV (before the end, the lights shine bright)” observes modes of connective and enforced time-keeping through human-made infrastructures gridding the sky & ground such as street lights, trains, and electrical cabling. Through rhythmic editing and a score built from harmonizing vocalizations with the hum of electrical transformers, the film contemplates the ways in which human interventions create, harmonize with, and disrupt the cycles of the earth’s rotation and the way living beings exist within it.

This intimate, collaged portrait of a filmmaker’s relationship to the night drifts between moments of drunken reverie, introspective wanderings, and telephone calls that wax philosophical, ruminating on the presence of absence– the fullness of possibility that darkness can provide.

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.