"Back to selectionEvery 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.")"
"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."
An experimental collage uses seven selected business cards from a large personal archive to examine how brief contacts alter thinking and feeling. Words, sounds, images, and voiceover intertwine to trace memory, affection, awkwardness, and moral reflection. Playful moments offset the emotional weight as specific encounters — a long-time hairdresser, a German festival director, and others — prompt questions about intimacy, national history, ancestry, and responsibility. Scenes connect poetic reference, music, and stream-of-consciousness fragments to show how care for strangers can reveal self-recognition, ethical unease, and lingering traces of past meetings.
Read at Filmmaker Magazine
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