Doors 7:00p
Program 7:30p
Tickets $12

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re delighted to welcome Jeanne C. Finley for a special screening of her film A Radical Thread, followed by a conversation with filmmaker Lynne Sachs!

In the late 1960s, hundreds of families seeking an alternative to American consumer culture settled on California’s San Juan Ridge, building a back-to-the-land community around principles of collective living and environmental stewardship. Over the decades, they organized against clear-cutting, river damming, and open-pit gold mining, developing models of sustainability and resistance that continue to resonate today. Now, as climate-driven wildfires threaten the region, the community faces an increasingly uncertain future.

A Radical Thread tells this story through an extraordinary 83-foot tapestry, created over seventeen years by Marsha Stone and a collective of artists and community members. Across twelve embroidered panels, the tapestry traces the Ridge’s history of struggle, survival, and collective action. Bringing together archival footage of poet Gary Snyder, reflections from Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan spokesperson Shelly Covert, and the voices of Ridge residents, Finley explores how a community’s history can be stitched together, preserved, and passed on.

Following the screening, Jeanne C. Finley will join Lynne Sachs for a conversation about collaborative storytelling, the relationship between art and environmental activism, and the possibilities of collective memory in the face of ecological change.

Don’t miss it, come through!

Program

71 minutes, 2025

A back-to-the-land community fights off corporate Goliaths intent on environmental devastation while using the same collective ethos to stitch an 83-foot tapestry that visualizes their story.

Bios

Jeanne C. Finley is a media artist who works in experimental and documentary forms, including film, video, photography, installation, Internet, and site-specific public works. Her work has been exhibited in such international institutions as the Guggenheim Museum.

Ms. Finley’s recent exhibition, “IMPERFECT CITY, IMPERFECT STATE” was created in collaboration with John Muse and opened at the Delaware Museum of Contemporary art in the spring of 2013. Since 1989 Ms. Finley has worked with Mr. Muse on many installation and video projects, including FLAT LAND (2007), CLOCKWORK (2006), and CATAPULT (2005). In 2005 Finley was an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2001 she received an Arts-Link fellowship to Sarajevo to create THE HOUSE OF DRAFTS, a film and website with Bosnian media artists. During 1990 Finley received a Fulbright Fellowship to Yugoslavia where she directed programs for Radio/TV Belgrade. In 1994 she was an artist-in-residence in Istanbul, Turkey, through a grant from the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Foundation.

Finley’s film and video credits include LOST (2006), LOSS PREVENTION (2000), O NIGHT WITHOUT OBJECTS, A TRILOGY (1998) A.R.M. AROUND MOSCOW (1993), INVOLUNTARY CONVERSION (1991) and NOMADS AT THE 25 DOOR. These tapes have won awards at such international festivals as the San Francisco Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Berlin Video Festival, Toronto Film Festival, and World Wide Video Festival.

Jeanne currently lives in San Francisco with her husband, daughter, and son. Her gallery work is represented by the Patricia Sweetow Gallery and her films are distributed by Video Data Bank, Women Make Movies, and Electronic Arts Intermix.

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn. She has produced over 50 films as well as numerous live performances, installations and web projects. Sachs creates cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living and studying in San Francisco. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her body of work ever since. Sachs’s films have screened at MoMA, Wexner Center for the Arts, New York Film Festival, Sundance, Punto de Vista, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at MoMI, Ambulante, Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAFICI, Cork, Costa Rica Int’l Film Fest, Cámara Lúcida, and China Women’s Film Festival. In 2021, Edison and Prismatic Ground Film Festivals honored her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields. Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s book Year by Year Poems (2019) and Punctum Books will publish her book Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process and the Labor of Laundry (2025) written by Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker