Profile: Naomi Uman

23 March, 2012 - 13:30
KASKCINEMA

“I am an experimental filmmaker. My non-fiction films draw from personal experience. I live with my subjects for long periods of time, often waiting to film or record sound until I have become integrated into a community or a family. I had lived with a family of immigrants, both documented and undocumented, for a period of almost a year before making a film that was unflinching in its portrait of their lives. This film, which turned a critical eye on the subject family and the situation which creates this separate and unequal world in which they live within the United States, caused the public to question my right as a filmmaker to criticize people whose status as immigrants was a status that I had never experienced myself. Taking this to heart, I decided to embark on my own immigration.” (NU) 

Kalendar

Naomi Uman
,
US, UA
,
16mm
,
colour
,
11'

“I began taking Ukrainian lessons with the school- teachers in the village of Legedzine. It was very difficult for them because they did not speak any English and my Russian was rudimentary. When they taught me the months of the year, they would point at stuff. It was the month of July and they were drying Leipen, which are Linden flowers. They told me the name and pointed at the flower. Then they went through all the months, teaching me what the names meant and I instantly had an idea for a movie.“ (NU) 

Videodiary 2-1-2006 to Present

Naomi Uman
,
US, UA
,
2011
,
video
,
colour
,
83'

In contrast to her exquisitely measured film Kalendar, Naomi Uman’s Videodiary gives us the stories and struggles of her self-imposed migration. Here we have the artist’s search for a sense of belonging in the land her ancestors deserted a hundred years before. She shares the depths of alienation and regret, unbidden acts of generosity, her joyful friendship with local babushky. We start to understand how the camera is part of Uman – both prosthetic and companion. This relationship becomes scathingly manifest in an encounter with Hasidic pilgrims: she confronts their leering eyes and flashing guns with the gaze of a camera she refuses to put down. Videodiary 2-1-2006 to Present is a work in progress, never finished – less delicate than the Ukrainian Time Machine (of which Kalendar is one of four 16mm films), it is extraordinary because it is flawed, honest, human.