“We Are an Accumulation of These Encounters”: Lynne Sachs on Her IDFA-Debuting Every Contact Leaves a Trace

Every Contact Leaves a Trace, its title alluding to a basic principle of forensic science, is the latest cinematic exploration from experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. Pairing this concept with seven (of the 600) business cards she’s collected over the years, Sachs embarks on an investigation into “how an encounter with someone seeps into your way of thinking” (as she explains in a VO that runs throughout the film). As a collage of words, sounds and images collide it becomes increasingly clear that Sachs’s mission to understand how each of these random contacts has changed her in some profound way is a heavy one. (Which doesn’t mean the film’s not fun. Rifling through her stack of cards looking for potential people to cast in the project, Sachs rules out folks like the first guy she slept with in college. And also the “goofy person” who “repairs feet — like ingrown toenails.”) And this journey to connect and reconnect with each contact that has left a trace on her being takes the peripatetic director to surprising individuals both near and far. There’s her hairdresser of six years, who the filmmaker realizes she knows both intimately and not at all. And Angela, the festival director in Germany she met decades ago — a meetup that leads Sachs to ponder German guilt, her relationship to Germany as a person with German Jewish ancestry, and finally her relationship to guilt vis-à-vis Gaza. “When I care for a stranger is it only because a stranger reminds me of myself?” she wonders. (Later Sachs recalls the founder of the Chinese Women’s Film Festival having had a cough when they initially met, which is what endeared her to the director — she was a stranger she could care for.) A discussion of a famous German poet leads to the sound of music inspired by the man’s poetry, which then becomes a parallel soundtrack to Sachs’s own stream-of-consciousness phrases and questions. “In the stream of ideology that Angela named, I am drowning,” the filmmaker admits. Indeed, Sachs’s choice to lay bare onscreen her own uncertainty, foibles and vulnerabilities makes Every Contact Leaves a Trace unexpectedly touching as well. The week prior to the film’s IDFA premiere (November 17th), Filmmaker reached out to Sachs, whose short This Side of Salina likewise debuted at DOC NYC (November 14th).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.