Tip of My Tongue (80 min. 2017)
a film by Lynne Sachs

To celebrate her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathers together other people, men and women who have lived through precisely the same years but come from places like Iran or Cuba or Australia or the Lower East Side, not Memphis, Tennessee where Sachs grew up. She invites 12 fellow New Yorkers – born across several continents in the 1960s – to spend a weekend with her making a movie. Together they discuss some of the most salient, strange, and revealing moments of their lives in a brash, self-reflexive examination of the way in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe impact who we are. As director and participant, Sachs, who wrote her own series of 50 poems for every year of her life, guides her collaborators across the landscape of their memories. They move from the Vietnam War protests to the Anita Hill hearings to the Columbine Shootings to Occupy Wall Street. Using the backdrop of the horizon as it meets the water in each of NYC’s five boroughs as well as abstracted archival material, TIP OF MY TONGUE becomes an activator in the resurrection of complex, sometimes paradoxical reflections. Traditional timelines are replaced by a multi-layered, cinematic architecture that both speaks to and visualizes the nature of historical expression. Immediately after the film Lynne Sachs will engage in a public dialogue with the audience.

Screening | Tip of My Tongue (80 minutes, 2017)
Sunday July 21, 2019 Doors open at 1045am. Film begins at 11am. There is no cost for admission. Light refreshments served.

Maysles Documentary Center
343 Malcolm X Boulevard | New York, NY 10027
Filmmaker Lynne Sachs will speak about her film Tip of My Tongue after this screening. Please see event below.

TIP OF MY TONGUE | A Public Dialogue & Poetry Workshop with filmmaker Lynne Sachs
Sunday July 21, 2019 Talkback begins at 1230pm | Immediately following the screening of the film TIP OF MY TONGUE
(Please See Event Above)

Our cornerstone guest for the 2019 symposium is Lynne Sachs. Sachs’ work with documentary, poetry film and the essay film is consistently avant-guard. In this workshop, Sachs will be in open dialogue regarding her film “Tip of My Tongue” (80 min. 2017), which accentuates the poetry and essay film within its structure.  She will also read from her new book Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press, 2019). Sachs will further guide the workshop discourse through an exploration into the hybridization of poetry film and essay film, and the meaning of these genres individually as well as combined.  After screening her film, Sachs will ask participants a question as a prompt for writing a poem: How has one moment in your life been affected by a public event beyond your control? 

Lynne Sachs, graduate of Brown University receiving a BA in history, inspired by the works of Bruce Conner, who would become her mentor, and Maya Deren. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in film and video, collaborated with Chris Marker on the 2007 remake of his 1972 film “Three Cheers for the Whale”, and co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue #51 titled “Experiments in Documentary”.  Sachs’ work has established support with fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, as well as residencies at the Experimental Television Center and The MacDowell Colony. Sachs’ films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, the Sundance Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, and Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema.

Maysles Documentary Center
343 Malcolm X Boulevard | New York, NY 10027
There is no cost for admission. Light refreshments served!