Thursday, March 25, 6pm | Naomi Uman in person!
- Still from “Unnamed Film” (Naomi Uman, 2008), part of the Ukrainian Time Machine, 2008. Courtesy the artist.
In 2006, experimental filmmaker Naomi Uman retraced her great grandparents’ emigration from Eastern Europe in reverse, settling in the tiny village of Legedzine, Ukraine, where she still lives today. The result of her adventures is the quietly picaresque quintet of 16mm films, The Ukrainian Time Machine. In capturing the joys and hardships of her neighbors’ centuries-old way of life– traditions that are eroding with the encroaching pressures of modernity–Uman creates a new kind of living history, fresh with curiosity and verve. In this evening’s program, Uman will present Unnamed Film, her keen documentary about life in Legedzine, cataloging its inhabitants’ various strategies of labor and resourcefulness necessary for survival; Kalendar, a poetic collection of shots, one for each month of an entire year; and Coda, a black-and-white epilogue encapsulating the themes of the series as a whole. Naomi Uman, 2008, Ukraine, 16mm, ca. 70 min (plus discussion).
NAOMI UMAN (b. 1962, New York, NY) received an MFA in Filmmaking from California Institute of the Arts in 1998. Her experimental documentary films have been exhibited widely at the Sundance and Rotterdam International Film Festivals, The New York Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival, among others. She has also screened her work at The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Smithsonian, and Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, Tribeca Media Arts, and she was a 2007-8 Fulbright Scholar.