{"id":30029,"date":"2018-09-07T03:52:14","date_gmt":"2018-09-07T10:52:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=30029"},"modified":"2018-09-12T11:04:08","modified_gmt":"2018-09-12T18:04:08","slug":"bringing-the-invisible-to-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2018\/09\/07\/bringing-the-invisible-to-light\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing the invisible to light"},"content":{"rendered":"

Actor Ching Valdes-Aran in a scene from The Washing Society<\/em>. (photo from The Washing Society)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Faced with the challenge of making a documentary for which the voices of undocumented immigrants were crucial, filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker had to push the boundaries of convention. The result is The Washing Society<\/em>, which will see its Canadian premi\u00e8re at the Vancouver International Film Festival, as part of the festival\u2019s Impact programming.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor this year\u2019s Impact stream, we decided to foreground films that represent prominent themes found in the festival at large \u2013 themes that are extremely topical at this historical moment,\u201d said Alan Franey, director of international programming at VIFF, in a release. \u201cRefreshing in their cinematic artistry, insights and lack of platitudes, these films have the power to inspire actual change.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Washing Society<\/em> combines research, interviews, acting, dance, artistic images and other elements to introduce viewers in 45 minutes to some of the laundromats in New York City, which are disappearing, and the people who work in them. Olesker and Sachs, who both live in Brooklyn, will be in Vancouver for the festival and the Independent <\/em>interviewed them by phone in anticipation of their visit.<\/p>\n

The filmmakers are practically neighbours, and they met each other through their daughters, who are about the same age and have the same piano teacher. It was at a piano lesson where they first crossed paths. \u201cThen we saw each other\u2019s work, and really admired what each other were doing,\u201d said Olesker.<\/p>\n

The origins of the documentary are in a performance Olesker was commissioned to do in a laundromat, upon which she wanted to expand. Thinking that film would be a good element to add to it, she contacted Sachs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a series of conversations, which led me to unexpected places in how to think about laundry and women doing laundry, and so it became a deeper, more fruitful collaboration,\u201d said Olesker.<\/p>\n

Over a span of about two years, the pair researched the topic, then co-created the play Every Fold Matters<\/em> with the actors performing it, as well as writing their own text. The site-specific performance and film project \u2013 which was performed in laundromats and various venues throughout New York from 2015 to 2017 \u2013 formed the basis for what has become The Washing Society<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been working together now for probably over four years,\u201d said Sachs, \u201cbecause we spent almost a whole year traipsing all over New York City \u2013 mostly Brooklyn and Manhattan \u2013 trying to do the convention of documentary practices, \u2018Let\u2019s go into laundromats, let\u2019s talk to workers.\u2019 But the issues in New York are that so many of those workers are undocumented, so they\u2019re very hesitant to have a conversation in front of a camera. So, we would have conversations and we would go back and write pieces and create characters based on all of those interviews we did, which we didn\u2019t film. But then, over the course of time, as it shifted from being a live performance with media to a film, we got better at finding people who were willing to speak in front of the camera.\u201d<\/p>\n

They did this, in some cases, with the help of an actor or a translator, who then became more involved or involved in other ways. \u201cOne of the things both of us are really interested in,\u201d said Sachs, \u201cis breaking down the conventions of roles in the project.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both Sachs and Olesker have done cross-disciplinary work before.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been exciting for me to work in film and also to engage in questions like, What is a documentary? What does it mean to inquire into a subject or have a question and pursue it in different ways? As a creator of film or theatre, you\u2019re always looking for a truth, not necessarily the truth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI\u2019m really interested in how documentary crosses over into fiction, and how fiction informs the documentary aspect,\u201d said Olesker. In this project, she said, \u201cIt\u2019s been exciting for me to work in film and also to engage in questions like, What is a documentary? What does it mean to inquire into a subject or have a question and pursue it in different ways? As a creator of film or theatre, you\u2019re always looking for a truth, not necessarily the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Washing Society<\/em> contains a lot of theatre. \u201cThat\u2019s an issue that raises questions with audiences in good ways and in challenging ways,\u201d said Olesker, for whom this film is her first foray into documentary-making.<\/p>\n

Sachs, however, has made this type of documentary before, mixing lived experience with fiction; for example, Your Day Is My Night<\/em>, which she brought to the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2013. \u201cWorking in this way,\u201d she said, \u201chas started to make me to question all forms of documentary, or even narrative film, because you see a narrative film and it\u2019s really a document of a bunch of people getting together and making a fictional story.\u201d<\/p>\n

One passion \u201cthat has been very nourishing for both of us in our work is our relationship to history, to the historical document,\u201d said Sachs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith this film,\u201d she explained, \u201cwhen we came across the story of the Atlanta washerwomen, we found it absolutely riveting and astonishing that there was this moment in American history in which a group of 3,000 black women had enough power or wherewithal or vision \u2026 to organize and to change their working lives. Any art project that gives you an excuse to research, I think, is pretty exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

The title for the documentary is inspired by what these washerwomen accomplished in 1881. As for more recent history, The Washing Society<\/em> both exposes the harsh working conditions in laudromats and laments the loss of these neighbourhood establishments.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s interesting to explore that contradiction,\u201d said Olesker. \u201cIt is grueling, underpaid, under-recognized work. It\u2019s also necessary work \u2013 not necessarily in the form that it\u2019s taken, of dropping off your laundry and paying someone to wash and fold it, but someone is always going to have to do the wash, so that sense of broad history and the roles that women have had in doing that work is something that was behind the project, as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy nostalgia,\u201d said Sachs, \u201cis any space where there is an intersection.\u2026 It\u2019s what makes cities great, the idea that there is a space in which there are intersections, and that people who have less and people who have more are in the same space and they\u2019re spending time [together]. And that all has changed so much now. The thing is, though, that the basic infrastructure \u2013 of there being a large group of people who are hidden in some way, and they are doing service work for other people, who have much more access or means \u2013 isn\u2019t going to change because, even if it [laundry service] becomes an app, like we show at the end of the film, there are still people doing the work, they\u2019re just not as visible.\u201d<\/p>\n

One purpose of the film is to make that invisibility visible. But, said Olesker, \u201cWhat\u2019s interesting about the film to me is that we\u2019re not so much leaving you with something that we think should happen. We\u2019re opening it up as a question and saying, \u2018Look inside this.\u2019 We looked inside and now we\u2019re taking you inside, what is this about?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

There is a challenge to making a documentary when the \u201cpeople who we would want to have in the movie are undocumented, therefore, they don\u2019t want to be documented by us \u2013 they want to be documented by the government….\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the United States, added Sachs, the idea of the document \u201ccomes down to a sense of security.\u201d There is a challenge to making a documentary when the \u201cpeople who we would want to have in the movie are undocumented, therefore, they don\u2019t want to be documented by us \u2013 they want to be documented by the government, and so there is this resistance to being in front of our camera until they can find something that legitimizes their status here in another way that will serve them.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd it actually comes down to the whole project of making art,\u201d said Sachs. \u201cTo whose advantage is it? For example, we\u2019re getting to go to Vancouver and we were talking about, Could we manage to bring one of the people from the film? There is a lot of questioning about what access the artwork gives. We\u2019ve tried to bring along the people in the film as much as possible, but we aren\u2019t always able to.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s even a point in the film where we have Chinese and Spanish \u2026 sometimes we translated that and sometimes we didn\u2019t, because we wanted to give opportunity for people who are in the audience who had access to those languages to feel that they were in positions of strength over the rest of us. There\u2019s something about subtitling that, if you subtitle everything, you bring it all into the English window, and people stop listening.<\/p>\n

\u201cA big part of the film,\u201d she continued, \u201cis to go outside of issues of work and of cleaning in an urban situation, which becomes involved in service \u2026 [and to delve into] all the layers of existence or the layers of identity that happen in cities these days, and who listens to whom. We hear Spanish all the time [in the United States], but are we really listening to it or is it something we can just pass by? Same with Chinese.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both Olesker and Sachs are Jewish.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m from New York so, growing up, it\u2019s been a part of my life,\u201d said Olesker. \u201cNot in a religious way, but certainly in the culture of my family and my world. And specifically around labour and labour history, union organizing \u2013 not that anyone was an organizer in my family, but there was always an awareness of that, so that is part of my identity in terms of the work I\u2019m interested in making.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sachs is a member of Kolot Chayeinu. \u201cThe rabbi and founder of the congregation \u2013 her name is Ellen Lippmann \u2013 she\u2019s always been a hero of mine,\u201d said Sachs. \u201cShe\u2019s just retired, about a month or so ago, after 25 years running Kolot Chayeinu. It\u2019s a very, very progressive congregation and I worked with her just a couple of years ago on something that I found very moving.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lippmann would often ask Sachs to film various activities for the synagogue and, in 2016, when B&H photo and video store, which is run by ultra-Orthodox Jews, was challenged by labour activists for the company\u2019s treatment of its warehouse workers, \u201ca bunch of people from Kolot decided to organize with the workers in front of B&H,\u201d said Sachs. \u201cI was there to videotape it and so were some television stations. And I think that Ellen Lippmann really wanted to say, this is not, to our mind, following an ethical frame of reference that we want to claim as Jewish.\u201d<\/p>\n

Olesker pointed out that the B&H walkout was organized by the Laundry Workers Centre. \u201cSo, we actually made a little film, which is kind of a postscript to The Washing Society<\/em>, where they organize this march through east Harlem to a laundromat \u2026 where two of the workers who were part of the Laundry Workers Centre went in and presented a list of demands to the owners \u2026 to talk about unfair labour practices and long hours and being underpaid and no breaks. We were part of that march and demonstration, which Lynne shot on film and we edited.\u201d<\/p>\n

The video epilogue, as well as teasers for The Washing Society<\/em>, can be found on vimeo.com<\/a>. For the film festival lineup, visit viff.org<\/a>. The festival runs Sept. 27-Oct. 12.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Actor Ching Valdes-Aran in a scene from The Washing Society. (photo from The Washing Society) Faced with the challenge of making a documentary for which the voices of undocumented immigrants were crucial, filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker had to push the boundaries of convention. The result is The Washing Society, which will see its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[787],"tags":[8346,8345,1959,1900,1916],"class_list":["post-30029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tv-film","tag-lizzie-olesker","tag-lynne-sachs","tag-tikkun-olam","tag-vancouver-international-film-festival","tag-viff"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}