Ukrainian Time Machine + Milking & Scratching: FIlms by Naomi Uman

About This Screening

Shot and presented entirely on glorious 16mm, Cinema Project is excited to bring to Portland the work of hands-on filmmaker Naomi Uman. With Uman in attendance to present and discuss her films, career, and methods, the two-night event focuses on her most recent projects on bucolic Ukrainian life. Retracing the steps in reverse of her great grandparents’ emigration from Eastern Europe, she documents the colorful village of Legedzine, Ukraine, where she still lives today. Working at the intersections of documentary and experimental film, Uman’s aesthetic is both delicate in approach to its subjects and bold in its images and processing.

My work consistently participates in creating a living history. I focus on customs that are about to disappear. I live with people who continue to milk cows by hand; who plant, harvest, and preserve their own food. I, too, engage in these practices. In this way, I experience history, as it slowly becomes just that: HISTORY. Seeing the past before it vanishes prolongs the present and makes it more profound. Working in sixteen-millimeter film is a way of holding onto the beauty and delicacy of a format and a practice that are becoming obsolete. Like hand sowing a field or knitting a sweater, this is not the easiest or most practical way of working. It is often simpler and more practical to have large, industrial farms, to purchase already manufactured clothing and to shoot and edit on modern, electronic media. Yet the food, clothing and film produced in this manner has another layer of significance, a value added due to the limitations, difficulties, intention and emotion implied in their production. –Naomi Uman