|
by Lynne SACHS
2009 / 16mm & Video / color / sound / 1 screen / 37' 00
|
The Last Happy Day is a half hour experimental documentary portrait of Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs and a Hungarian medical doctor. Lenard was a writer with a Jewish background who fled the Nazis. During the war, the U.S. Army Grave Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bone – small and large – of dead American soldiers. Eventually Sandor found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of "Winne the Pooh" into Latin, an eccentric task which catapulted him to brief world-wide fame.
Perhaps it is our culture’s emphasis on genealogy that pushes Sachs to pursue a narrative nurtured by the “ties of blood”, a portrait of a cousin. Ever since she discovered as a teenager that this branch of her family had stayed in Europe throughout WWII, she has been unable to stop wondering about Sandor’s life as an artist and an exile. Sachs’ essay film, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of excerpts of her cousin’s letters to the family, abstracted war imagery, home movies of children at a birthday party, and interviews.
2 PRINTS IN DISTRIBUTION
|
distribution format |
Digital file on server (NTSC) |
|
screen |
4/3 (single screen) |
|
speed |
29,976 fps |
|
sound |
sound |
|
translation |
English (Text document) |
|
rental fee |
139,00 € |
|
distribution format |
DCP on server (SMPTE 2K) |
|
screen |
4/3 (single screen) |
|
speed |
30 fps |
|
sound |
sound |
|
translation |
English (Text document) |
|
rental fee |
139,00 € |
