Films

Every Contact Leaves a Trace with Grazing on Images 

Still from Lynne Sachs’s Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2025), courtesy of Kino Rebelde

Join us for a post-screening discussion with filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Mark Street, in person. 

Lynne Sachs lived most of her life before laptops reshaped how people connect. She has saved every business card she has ever been given. Each card is a portal to her past, a reminder of how someone she met in person shifted her consciousness and left a trace of their presence: a German woman grappling with her country’s history, a therapist who erased all records of her own life, or an artist confronting government censorship. In Every Contact Leaves a Trace, Sachs selects seven cards from hundreds and sets out to uncover how and why they have endured. When possible, she follows these traces, seeking out reunions. Blending the real and the imagined, her essay film teases apart nearly forgotten resonances, intertwining personal memory with broader geopolitical histories. (Lynne Sachs, 2025, DCP, 83 minutes)

Preceded by the North American premiere of Grazing on Images. Filmed on 35mm analog still film and Super 8, Grazing on Images is a diaristic work that travels from Dublin to Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, and Beloit, Wisconsin, before returning to the filmmaker’s home base in Brooklyn to reflect on a life shaped by rhapsodic, everyday images. (Mark Street, 2025, DCP, 17 minutes)

This program is presented in partnership with the DC/DOX 2026 film festival.

About the filmmakers

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn. She has produced over 50 short and feature-length films, creating cinematic works that defy genre through hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Drawing on elements of essay film, collage, performance, documentary, and poetry, her work explores the intricate relationship between personal experience and broader historical realities, as well as the connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Sachs began her filmmaking practice while living and studying in San Francisco, where she created early experimental works on celluloid rooted in a feminist approach to image-making and writing, a commitment that continues to shape her work today. Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival, and DocLisboa. In 2021, both the Thomas Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground honored her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields. In 2026, Sachs received the Persistence of Vision Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival, recognizing filmmakers whose work expands the boundaries of the cinematic form. She is the author of Year By Year Poems (2019) and coauthor of Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry (2025). 

Mark Street is a filmmaker and artist who has been creating films, videos, and installations for over 35 years. His work has evolved from tactile, abstract explorations of 16mm film to essayistic studies of urban life and, more recently, improvised feature-length narratives. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art. He has screened in programs at Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, and the San Francisco Cinematheque, among others. Street’s films have been presented at major international festivals including Tribeca, Sundance, Rotterdam, New York, London, Sarajevo, Viennale, Mill Valley, and SXSW. He holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.

You may also like

Films:  Life Itself

–
Registration Required
Two people look out of side-by-side windows in a brick building in this horizontal black and white photograph. The woman on our left has a double chin and a broad chest. She wears a polka-dotted dress and dark shawl or vest, and she leans forward with one hand on the sill. Her face is partially shadowed by a white window blind. An American flag hanging near this window billows across the right two-thirds of the picture, entirely hiding the second person’s head. That person wears a coat buttoned up to a rounded collar. They hold one hand near their chin and the other by their waist. The flag has eight columns of stars. The work is signed and dated in the white margin below: “1955 HOBOKEN” to the left and “Robert Frank” to the right.

Films:  Fire in the East: A Portrait of Robert Frank

–
Registration Required

Films:  Story and Pictures By; For the Left Hand

–
Registration Required