Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2025) by Lynne Sachs
Wednesday, April 29, 2026, 7:00 pm
POV Award: Lynne Sachs + Every Contact Leaves a Trace
Lynne Sachs In Person
Presented in Association with SFFILM
Admission: $15 General / $13.50 Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here
SFFILM’s Persistence of Vision Award honors the achievement of a filmmaker whose main body of work falls outside the realm of narrative feature filmmaking each year. This year, SFFILM’s Persistence of Vision Award celebrates experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs and will include the California premiere of her 2025 film Every Contact Leaves a Trace.
Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2025) by Lynne Sachs; digital video, color, sound, 83 minutes.
In forensic science, “trace” is the material left behind at crime scenes: fibers, gunshot residue, and other evidence that detectives use as they develop suspects and leads. SFFILM Persistence of Vision award winner Lynne Sachs takes inspiration from this concept to investigate her own life and assumptions, using as her “trace” 600 business cards she amassed over forty years, representing everyone from a boy she slept with in college to tradespeople to film world associates. She settles on a handful to probe in depth—including a textile artist, a hairdresser, a therapist, a film festival director and Lawrence Brose, a gay filmmaker “canceled” after his conviction for possessing child pornography. With a mass of swirling imagery, Sachs’s own narration and a sonic sound design underpinned by Stephen Vitiello’s omnipresent score, the film becomes a personal epiphany as Sachs comes to realize that the trace is not only in the cards but in her own imperfect memory. (Pam Grady)
Based in Brooklyn, Lynne Sachs is an experimental filmmaker and poet. She has produced over 40 films as well as live performances and installations. The SFFilm Festival previously awarded her a Certificate of Merit for her short film Investigation of a Flame (2002). A small sampling of her work includes Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1985), Sermons and Sacred Pictures (1989), Photograph of Wind (Festival 2001), The Small Ones (2007) and Your Day is My Night (2013).