Appeal for Barbara Hammer Award Endowment
Published 3/7/2022
Dear Friends,
In the last few months of dear friend Barbara Hammer’s life, she asked me to come to her home to discuss something she needed to say in person. I immediately faced a complicated set of emotions. I knew that this tête-à-tête would involve some kind of good-bye, but I had no idea that she had decided to share a part of her personal archive, and thus a part of her being on this earth, with me. She invited me to make a film with some material she had shot twenty years before. Soon afterward, Barbara died. A few months after that, I completed A Month of Single Frames.
In 2020, the film won a prize at the Oberhausen International Film Festival in Germany. I decided to use funds from the prize to start the Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, a festival that celebrates short and experimental films and a place that Barbara and I both held in high regard. Here is a description of the award:
Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival
Barbara Hammer was a filmmaker with a profound commitment to expressing a feminist point-of-view in her work. In 2020, filmmaker Lynne Sachs received the Oberhausen Film Festival Grand Prize for a film she made with and for Hammer. With funds from the prize, Lynne created this Ann Arbor Film Festival award for a work that best conveys Hammer’s passion for celebrating and examining the experiences of women. Qualifying work by artists of any gender will be considered.
In partnership with the Ann Arbor Film Festival, we are beginning a campaign to increase the endowment for the $500 annual award from its present $5,000 to $15,000. Recently, a member of the AAFF Board of Directors gave a much appreciated gift of $1,000, and, alongside many other generous donations, we are now only $7,150 from our targeted number.
If you would like to be part of this effort — and help us to secure the sustainability of this unique project that looks both back at Barbara’s legacy and towards future creation of new feminist work — you can make a tax-deductible gift at the button below. Learn more here: https://www.aafilmfest.org/barbara
Wishing you so many good things,
Lynne
Identify your donation by acknowledging "Barbara Hammer" in the "Sponsor/donor acknowledgment" field.
See the trailer for Silver Femme by Nico Reano & Jimena Lucero, which became the first film to win this $500 cash award at the 2021 59th AAFF
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