Contractions
Lynne Sachs
•
12m
Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • With Dr. Kimberly Looney, Anonymous Driver • 12 minutes
In the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade, “Contractions” takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician and a reproductive rights activist who movingly lay out these vital issues. We watch 14 women and their male allies who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a state where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they “speak” with the full force of their collective presence.
On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion in the United States. Twenty-one states now ban abortion outright or earlier in pregnancy than the standard set by Roe v. Wade, which governed reproductive rights for half a century. The woman’s health care facility in this film no longer offers abortions.
Short Film Award, Mimesis Documentary Festival, 2024
Best Women’s Film, Society for Photographic Education, St. Louis, 2025
Up Next in Lynne Sachs
-
Film About a Father Who (Lynne Sachs)
Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 74 minutes
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her ...
-
Investigation of a Flame
Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • With Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan • 2001 • 45 minutes
"Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house... The time is past whe...
-
The Last Happy Day
Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 2015 • 37 minutes
THE LAST HAPPY DAY is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Ro...
