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Plays in Shorts Program: Stand My Ground
Sunday, June 16
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg Center

555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001

Contractions

Director

Lynne Sachs

Producers

Emily Berisso, Laura Goodman

Editor

Anthony Svatek

Cinematographer

Sean Hanley

In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion. Contractions takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We hear from an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive justice activist. We watch 14 women who witness and perform abortions with their backs to the camera. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they speak with the full force of their collective presence.

Film followed by a special audio piece: WE CONTINUE TO SPEAK (Lynne Sachs, 4 min. 33 Sec., audio,  2024 ). Filmmaker Lynne Sachs records the participants and producers of her film Contractions as they vocalize their reactions to the reduction of women’s bodily autonomy in the United States.

Director, Contractions

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. She has produced over 50 films, as well as numerous live performances and installations. Throughout her career, her experimentation has confronted social and political issues, familiar and intimate processes. Working from a feminist perspective, she investigates connections between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. She uses letters, archives, diaries, poetry and music to take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Between 1994 and 2006, she produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel/ Palestine, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war — where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Lynne’s films have screened at MoMA, Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, and festivals such as New York Film Festival, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver, Viennale and Doclisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at Ambulante (Mexico), Museum of Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Cork Film Festival, Havana Film Festival, Oberhausen Internatioal Short Film Festival (Germany) and others.