New York's Rockefeller Foundation has announced that Lynne Sachs, a Catonsville documentary filmmaker, has won one of its 2001 fellowships for multimedia artistic work.
The fellowship, one of 14 awarded this week, is a $35,000 grant meant to encourage "diverse cultural perspectives and innovative forms of expression," a foundation press release said.
Sachs recently premiered an all-but-finished version of her newest film, "Investigation of a Flame," at the Senator Theatre. "Investigation" explores the actions of the so-called Catonsville 9 - Baltimore-area residents who were among the first to burn their draft files as a statement against the Vietnam War, and who did it with napalm - and the ways in which their protest has affected their lives since.
Sachs, a veteran documentarian, said the Rockefeller award is the most sizable she has earned, and that its timing is more than handy. "When you cut the negative for a film," she said, "it's very expensive. There are a lot of bills to pay."
The Rockefeller has granted nearly 200 fellowships over its 14-year history, according to the release. Contestants are nominated by a national committee of their peers. Officials at the foundation couldn't be reached for comment.
Sachs, who has made seven films, didn't have to look far for her subject this time. "The story found me," she said. "People kept talking about this radical event that had happened" in 1968. "It was like a performance that happened," she said, "and as an artist that interested me."
Sachs taught a film course at the Maryland Institute, College of Art last fall and will teach at New York's Hunter College next year. She is just beginning work on a semi-fictional film about the war in Sarajevo.
