Pictured above: Film About a Father Who (2020) by Lynne Sachs
Lynne Sachs In Person
Program presented in association with Shapeshifters Cinema and Pacific Film Archive
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Admission: $10 General/$6 Cinematheque Members (Shapeshifters Members discount also available)
Event tickets here
COVID-19 SAFETY REQUIREMENTS: Proof of Vaccination required for all attendees. Masks must be worn at all times while indoors.
JUST ADDED! Opening the Family Album: A Filmmaking Workshop with Lynne Sachs
Join Lynne Sachs at 5pm for Opening the Family Album, a two-hour workshop in which participants will explore the ways in which images of family members might become material for the making of a personal film. Workshop and screening are ticketed separately. Discount enrollment for Shapeshifters members and Cinematheque members. Full details here.
In her nearly forty-year career as a filmmaker, Lynne Sachs, in various shorts and long form works, has developed a uniquely engaged and sensitive approach to personal experimental documentary form. Frequently focusing on families—often her own—Sachs’s films portray their subjects with rare personal complexity and grace. In so doing, Sachs’ portraits describe their subjects within the flows of history, always within the interwoven, multigenerational webs of family, friendships and society. Consisting of footage collected by Sachs from 1984 to 2019, and collecting oral history from family members documenting nearly a half century of family history, Film About a Father Who presents a complicated, multi-vocal, narrative portrait of the filmmaker's father, while exploring a complex family dynamic of anger, confusion, love and forgiveness, evolving over generations. (Steve Polta)
My father has always chosen the alternative path in life, a path that has brought unpredictable adventures, many children with many different women, brushes with the law and a life-long interest in trying to do some good in the world. It is also a film about the complex dynamics that conspire to create a family. There is nothing really nuclear about all of us, we are a solar system composed of a changing number of planets revolving around a single sun, a sun that nourishes, a sun that burns, a sun that each of us knows is good and bad for us. We accept and celebrate, somehow, the consequences. (Lynne Sachs)
RELATED SCREENING: Three additional films by Lynne Sachs—The Washing Society (2018, made with Lizzie Olesker), And Then We Marched (2017) and E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021)—screen at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive on Wednesday, April 6. Full details here.