37 minutes / Color
Release: 2015
Copyright: 2009
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 Rome.
Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones-small and large-of dead American soldiers.
Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of A. A. Milne's classic children's book, Winnie the Pooh, into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame.
Sachs' essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children's performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.
"A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story … a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy."—George Robinson, The Jewish Week
"Exquisite…Sachs reclaims (Lenard's) dignity and purpose using letters, newsreel footage, and recreations of his environment as if to channel him back from the past."—Todd Lillethun, Chicago Filmmakers
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
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
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 Sachs | 2015 | 33 minutes | Color
