Which Way Is East

“A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot.” 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 and Dana Sachs’ travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt. “Which Way Is East” starts as a road trip and flowers into a political discourse. It combines Vietnamese parables, history and memories of the people the sisters met, as well as their own childhood memories of the war on TV. (excerpted from article in The Independent by Susan Gerhard) “Captures the Vietnam experience with comprehension and compassion, squeezing a vast and incredible country into an intriguing film.” Dale Basye, Portland Tonic Magazine “The sound track is layered with the cacophony of bustling city streets, the chirps of cicadas and gentle rustles of trees in the countryside, and the visuals, devoid of travelogue clichés, are a collage of pictorial snippets taken from unusual vantage points…. What comes through is such a strong sense of the place you can almost smell it.” Ted Shen, The Chicago Reader “Brings up questions about what we see, how we see it, and who’s doing the seeing. It’s an honest, down-to-earth, and vividly sensual film.” Kurt Wolff, San Francisco Bay Guardian 2020 Museum of Modern Art Department of Film Preservation of Which Way is East Screenings: Sundance Film Festival; Atlanta Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize; New York Film Expo, Best Documentary; Black Maria Film Fest, Director’s Citation; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Cinematheque; “Arsenal” Film Festival, Riga, Latvia; Pacific Film Archive; Mill Valley Film Festival; San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival; Big Muddy Film Festival, Honorable Mention; Whitney Museum of American Art; Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020. Links to full reviews and articles: Ubiquarian: “The Process is the Practice: Prolific and poetic, experimental and documentary filmmaker, Lynne Sachs, lights up this year’s online edition of Sheffield Doc|Fest with a mini-retrospective, annotated lecture and her new feature, Film About a Father Who (2020)” by Tara Judah, June 21, 2020
http://ubiquarian.net/2020/06/the-process-is-the-practice/ http://www.lynnesachs.com/2010/11/14/sachs-explores-themes-of-war-through-films-at-memphis-brooks/ http://www.lynnesachs.com/2010/10/23/otherzine-interview-w-l-sachs-by-molly-hankowitz/ http://www.lynnesachs.com/2010/05/24/between-yes-and-no-an-interview-with-lynne-sachs-by-kathy-geritz/ http://www.lynnesachs.com/2010/05/22/searching-lynne-sachs%E2%80%99-cinema-by-lucas-hilderbrand/ http://www.lynnesachs.com/2009/08/08/i-am-not-a-war-photographer-by-lynne-sachs/ LIBRARY COLLECTIONS Amherst College; Arizona State University; University of California, Berkeley and Irvine; Duke University; Hong Kong University of Science; New York University; New York Public Library; Penn State; Rutgers University; University of Iowa; Minneapolis Public Library; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of Virginia; Northwestern; Seattle Public Library