“Your Day is My Night” – Film screening at the CHSA Museum

Film director Lynne Sachs, with the CHSA Museum and San Francisco Cinematheque are proud to present “Your Day Is My Night,” a hybrid documentary by Lynne Sachs, at the CHSA Museum on Saturday, February 28, 2015 at 1pm.

Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life. More info at yourdayismynight.com

Director Lynne Sachs will be available to discuss her film.

Limited seating available. Please arrive early. FREE ADMISSION.

“A strikingly handsome, meditative work: a mixture of reportage, dreams, memories and playacting, which immerses you in an entire world that you might unknowingly pass on the corner of Hester Street, unable to guess what’s behind the fifth-floor windows.” –The Nation

“Beautifully blending anecdotes, evocative audio textures, and an ensemble of elderly immigrant performers/participants, Your Day is My Night is sumptuous and exploratory, bringing us a Chinatown we have never seen before in film.” – San Diego Asian Film Festival

“Using beds as a metaphor for privacy, intimacy and power, the film explores intercultural and trans-historical dialogue.” – The Washington Post

“Director Lynne Sachs’ Your Day is My Night shines a light on a little documented sub-culture in New York’s Chinatown, chronicling immigrants who live communally in buildings where there’s a shift-bed system. One person returns from a stint of overnight work to sleep in a bed just vacated by another person off to their day job. The form of this documentary is as compelling as its content. It is a beautiful collage of different media and music intricately edited together with the often emotional testimony of the immigrants.” – BBC

“New York’s Chinatown, a place as much spectral as real, flickers and flares into life in this singular hybrid of documentary, performance piece and cine-monologue. Seven working-class, immigrant residents of a shift-bed apartment play versions of themselves, recalling violent upheavals, long journeys and endless yearnings.” – Sight and Sound

“This is no ordinary documentary. This is film, a canvas, a moving poem. It never stands still. It moves and it moves us.” – Kennebec Journal/ Morning Star (centralmaine.com)

FESTIVALS AND AWARDS

* Winner, Best Feature Documentary, San Diego Asian Film Festival, 2013
* Winner, Best Feature Film, Workers Unite! Film Festival, 2013
* Winner, Best Experimental Film, Traverse City Film Festival, 2013
* Winner, 2nd Prize Documentary Feature, Athens Film Festival, 2013
* Official Selection, Documentary Fortnight, Museum of Modern Art, 2013
* Official Selection, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2013
* Official Selection, China Women’s Film Festival, 2014
* Official Selection, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, 2014

About the Director
Lynne Sachs makes films, performances, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany — sites affected by international war–where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and Toronto’s Images Festival as well as a five-film survey at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. The San Francisco Cinematheque recently published a monograph with four original essays in conjunction with a full retrospective of Lynne’s work. In 2012, Lynne began a series of live film performances of “Your Day is My Night” at St. Nick’s Alliance in Greenpoint, at Proteus Gowanus in Brooklyn, at Maysles Cinema and at the University Settlement. She then screened the completed hour-long hybrid video at the Museum of Modern Art, the Vancouver Film Fest, Union Docs, the New Orleans Film Fest and other venues in China, Mexico, Argentina and Ecuador. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and The New School and lives in Brooklyn. www.lynnesachs.com