Every Contact Leaves a Trace

The opening scene sets a false tone for this film. It feels as if we are going to explore the humans behind the business cards. Only to discover this film is more about what the director has experienced with these people and how she sees them. The film turns against itself…

Wessel

Every Contact Leaves a Trace has a good hook: these tiny encounters, these business cards, the small debris of professional life. There’s something there. But for a film that claims to be about connection, it keeps circling back to Sachs herself. The people she meets don’t…

John

had a lovely chat with Lynne Sachs about her latest film and investigative process for BRUISER

Alex Lei

Lynne Sachs never holds back the personal in her essay films, but she digs especially deep here, turning her enormous collection of business cards into a meditation on relationships, Jewish identity in divided Germany and the intimacy of haircuts. Two especially deeply…

Christian Molenaar

how is it possible I didn‘t know lynne sachs before? really liked it from the first minute.  fan of how she transported her perception about intimacy which she finds in the contact of getting handed the business cards. zart sinnlich ehrlich // btw the third film thinking…

vans__

Incredible q&a after this, and it had some funny little silly moments where it felts as though she inhabited the ashkenazi Jewish lady- some kvetching and some sincerely self aware moments. I appreciated those. Otherwise, this film didn’t really do it for me. Some of the…

EilamBZ

Very vulnerable and personal, I was almost taken aback by how much was left in the cut on purpose, extremely thought provoking on the small impacts we have on people, all that being said I think that sometimes it strays just a little too far from its core and there were a…

Nathan

In the q&a afterwards Sachs talked about leaving room for the audience to bring in their own associations, draw their own meanings from the film’s elliptical musings, and in that sense the film succeeded. Sometimes this can feel revelatory and sometimes like filling a…

H_ugh

Every Contact Leaves a Trace drifts through an artist’s past relationships across decades, but its formless structure proves more frustrating than illuminating. While it incorporates moments of intriguing experimental filmmaking, the overall effect is languid and…

Carter Hemphill