Lynne Sachs Follows a Box of Old Business Cards to Find Forgotten Contacts

Filmmaker Lynne Sachs sat on the jury at this year's Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival, where she judged the First Lights section for documentary debuts. Her own film, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, was shown there in its Czech premiere, according to Variety.

The film starts with a box. It holds hundreds of business cards that Sachs kept over the years, some of them decades old. She picks through them to find the people who once got in touch with her, and then tries to work out how and why those contacts were made.

Her search is not tidy. She has said she hired a private detective at one point. The film also brings in forensic investigators, whose analyses help her follow the leads. Sachs appears on screen herself, and she asks for help from a young niece and nephew as she goes through the cards.

The idea behind the project comes from Edmond Locard, an early pioneer of forensic science. Ji.hlava's festival synopsis says the film rests on his principle that every physical touch leaves some kind of trace. In the film, a business card is that kind of trace: a small object passed from hand to hand, and kept long after the conversation ended.

Ji.hlava has listed the film under its Special Event programme. It runs 83 minutes and is a United States documentary released in 2025, according to the festival's film page and an online listing. The film's own website describes Sachs selecting seven cards from the hundreds to investigate.

Sachs is a filmmaker and poet from Brooklyn, New York, with a career that spans more than 30 years. Ji.hlava's jury page lists her as a juror for the festival's First Lights strand, which is built around first-time documentary makers. Her own history with the festival runs deeper than the jury seat. Before attending in person, she had often screened earlier films there.

For festival-goers, the appeal of the film is in its method. It turns an ordinary stack of paper into a set of questions about memory and acquaintance. For the wider documentary world, it is one more example of a filmmaker who has spent decades making films about her own life, now working in front of the camera and behind the detective's notebook at once.