The patriarch of the family enters the hospital with COVID-19 and because of hospital protocols his family members are forced to say their goodbyes via video conferencing.

On the day in 1965 that the Pope visits New York and masses of people line the streets in adulation, Artie, a zookeeper living in Sunnyside, Queens, thinks it's time for his life to be blessed, too. He desperately wants to escape his lower middle-class existence and become a popular singer and songwriter, but his life is complicated by an ambitious mistress, a crazy wife and a bomb-making son.

Contact—so tactile, so evocative of the touch of one person on another, physically and emotionally. Trace—a way to get back to an earlier point and a reckoning with the remains of that initial encounter. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs has saved every business card anyone has ever given her. After 40 years of collecting, she recognizes their mnemonic powers. With 600 cards in her grasp, Sachs contemplates the impact of these haptic exchanges. In both real and imagined ways, her essay teases apart their vivid resonances, entwining emotional memory with geopolitical history through visual abstraction, music, and a poet’s sense of introspection.