83 minutes / Color
Closed Captioned
Release: 2026
Copyright: 2025
Contact—tactile, evocative of one person touching another, physically and emotionally. Trace—a reckoning with the residue of that initial encounter, filtered by time and the imperfection of memory. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs has lived most of her life before the internet brought people together. She’s also saved every business card anyone has ever given her. Each card is a portal to her past, a reminder of how someone she actually met in person shifted her consciousness and left a residue of their being in hers: a German woman grappling with the history of her country; a therapist who erased all records of her own life; an artist faced with government censorship. Sachs selects seven cards from hundreds and throws herself into finding out how and why they’ve left an imprint. When she is able, she embraces clues and seeks out reunions. Replaying fleeting experiences in a kitchen, a park, an office, or a festival, she carries her cards to a forensic scientist’s lab to find out more about their DNA remains. In both real and imagined ways, her essay teases apart resonances almost forgotten but somehow felt, entwining emotional memory with geopolitical history through visual abstraction, music, and a poet’s sense of introspection.
“[In] a collage of words, sounds and images, Sachs lays bare onscreen her own uncertainty, foibles and vulnerabilities.” —Lauren Wissot, Filmmaker Magazine
“[This] essay on memory and responsibility touches on moral ambiguity without resorting to sensationalism. Sachs reveals her strength: she captures beauty in the mundane, elevates the casual to poetry, and shows that even the most fleeting encounter leaves a lasting legacy.” —Martijn Smit, Cinemagazine
“A marvelous, totally distinctive film, and just purely fascinating. So many documentary filmmakers are too literal– the image must exactly match what the narration or the interviewer is saying. [Sachs] expands our mind in a really interesting way where we have to think about the visual and what we’re hearing.” —Matt Carey, Deadline
“Some filmmakers are known for their documentary works. Others for their narrative films. Still others—the better filmmakers (for me), generally—do not fit comfortably into either category. Or any category whatsoever. Poet / artist / filmmaker Lynne Sachs is one of the latter…. What is evident—from not just this film but all of [her] work—is that [she’s] very interested in making the seams of filmmaking fairly apparent in Every Contact Leaves a Trace. Clearly, within the structure, [she] introduces a whole array of possibilities.” —Jonathan Marlow, Hammer to Nail
Select Accolades
An intimate look at the Catonsville Nine who on May 17, 1968 walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and incinerated them with homemade napalm.
Lynne Sachs | 2001 | 45 minutes | Color | English
A portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and ran.
Lynne Sachs | 2015 | 37 minutes | Color | English
The core of this haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank.
Lynne Sachs | 2015 | 63 minutes | Color | English
When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history.
Lynne Sachs | 2015 | 33 minutes | Color
