33 minutes / Color
Release: 2015
Copyright: 1994
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. To Americans for whom "Vietnam" ended in 1975, WHICH WAY IS EAST is a reminder that Vietnam is a country, not a war.
The film has a combination of qualities: compassion, acute observational skills, an understanding of history's scope, and a critical ability to discern what's missing from the textbooks and TV news. (—The Independent Film and Video Monthly)
"Captures the Vietnam experience with comprehension and compassion, squeezing a vast and incredible country into an intriguing film."—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 cliches, 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."—The Chicago Reader
Select Accolades
An intimate look at the Catonsville Nine who on May 17, 1968 walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and incinerated them with homemade napalm.
Lynne Sachs | 2001 | 45 minutes | Color | English
A portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and ran.
Lynne Sachs | 2015 | 37 minutes | Color | English
Profiles Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Baptist minister and inspired photographer / filmmaker who documented the fabric of black American life prior to the civil rights movement.
Lynne Sachs | 2004 | 29 minutes | Color | English
The core of this haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank.
Lynne Sachs | 2015 | 63 minutes | Color | English
