Every Contact Leaves a Trace - Director Lynne Sachs

EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE is a thought provoking overview of our digital era. We mostly live in a time and place where real life connections become rarer, yet any personal encounter can leave a lingering trace. Over a lifetime, filmmaker Lynne Sachs has collected business cards, mementos of these initial meetings with strangers. Sachs selects seven cards from hundreds and throws herself into finding out how and why these brief yet vivid moments left an imprint on her consciousness. When she is able, she embraces clues and seeks out reunions. But when there is no trace, she gambles with imaginary histories and futures. A lifetime of tactile, face-to-face encounters reminds her of identities passed from hand to hand. Director Lynne Sachs joins us to talk about her imaginative hybrid film, that draws inspiration from a basic principle of forensic science, coined by Edmond Locard, a pioneer in the field that any trace can link a person to a place, another person or an object.

About the filmmaker - Lynne Sachs is an experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn. Over the last four decades, she has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, documentary, performance, and collage. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, DCTV Firehouse Cinema (New York), Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Cork Film Festival, China Women’s Film Festival, Costa Rica IFF, and Ambulante Festival of Documentary Film (Mexico). Selected films include Film About a Father Who, Your Day is My Night, A Month of Single Frames, Investigation of a Flame, and Which Way is East. Her books include Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press, 2019) and Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process and the Labor of Laundry (punctum books, 2025). https://www.lynnesachs.com/