Naomi Uman

three sparks is an intimate picture of village life in Albania, crafted in gratitude by a guest. Mexican/American artist Naomi Uman lived and documented life in rural Ukraine. Inspired by having seen her experimental non-fiction films portraying village life, she was invited to create a portrait of life in rural Albania. This took her to Rabdisht, a village perched high in the mountains, where people farm the rocky, vertiginous land.

three sparks is an intimate picture of village life in Albania, crafted in gratitude by a guest. Mexican/American artist Naomi Uman lived and documented life in rural Ukraine. Inspired by having seen her experimental non-fiction films portraying village life, she was invited to create a portrait of life in rural Albania. This took her to Rabdisht, a village perched high in the mountains, where people farm the rocky, vertiginous land.

three sparks is an intimate picture of village life in Albania, crafted in gratitude by a guest. Mexican/American artist Naomi Uman lived and documented life in rural Ukraine. Inspired by having seen her experimental non-fiction films portraying village life, she was invited to create a portrait of life in rural Albania. This took her to Rabdisht, a village perched high in the mountains, where people farm the rocky, vertiginous land.

three sparks is an intimate picture of village life in Albania, crafted in gratitude by a guest. Mexican/American artist Naomi Uman lived and documented life in rural Ukraine. Inspired by having seen her experimental non-fiction films portraying village life, she was invited to create a portrait of life in rural Albania. This took her to Rabdisht, a village perched high in the mountains, where people farm the rocky, vertiginous land.

three sparks is an intimate picture of village life in Albania, crafted in gratitude by a guest. Mexican/American artist Naomi Uman lived and documented life in rural Ukraine. Inspired by having seen her experimental non-fiction films portraying village life, she was invited to create a portrait of life in rural Albania. This took her to Rabdisht, a village perched high in the mountains, where people farm the rocky, vertiginous land.

three sparks is an intimate picture of village life in Albania, crafted in gratitude by a guest. Mexican/American artist Naomi Uman lived and documented life in rural Ukraine. Inspired by having seen her experimental non-fiction films portraying village life, she was invited to create a portrait of life in rural Albania. This took her to Rabdisht, a village perched high in the mountains, where people farm the rocky, vertiginous land.

three sparks is an intimate picture of village life in Albania, crafted in gratitude by a guest. Mexican/American artist Naomi Uman lived and documented life in rural Ukraine. Inspired by having seen her experimental non-fiction films portraying village life, she was invited to create a portrait of life in rural Albania. This took her to Rabdisht, a village perched high in the mountains, where people farm the rocky, vertiginous land.

The director turns the camera on herself, chronicling her decision to relocate (and the accompanying doubts and anxieties), her friendships with the village babushkas, and her undercover attempts to enter the cloistered world of the local Hasidic community.

This tiny film is a poem which recapitulates many of the ideas presented in the earlier films and serves as a tiny song/verse to remind the viewer of the things that have come before and the things which will continue in the future.

This film explores the idea of the consistency of land use over time. In the exact location of where the filmmaker is living and realizing this project, trypillian people lived over 5,000 year ago. A modern day, post soviet brick factory in the village uses the exact same process to make bricks that the trypillian people used to make pots. Through this same process, and the unexplained burning of the trypillian homes, we have fired clay remnants of their presence in this village in very large numbers. A reknowned local archeologist talks about these people and their relationship to land, clay and black gold.

While exploring her Ukrainian family roots, American filmmaker Naomi Uman made a series of documentaries about the people living in the small village of Legedzine.

Kalendar obliquely tells the story of language acquisition. The filmmaker, struggling to learn a new language, comes to understand that the names of the months of the year have concrete manifestations.

A three-dimensional narrative enacted at the California Poppy Reserve. It’s part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series of commissioned shorts (made for the cost of a lunch between Plante and filmmakers, Naomi Uman and Lee Lynch).

Another kind of utopia is presented in the films of Naomi Uman, whose search for her family roots in the Ukraine led her to move to the small village of Legedzine. In "Unnamed Film", she shoots the old bubushka ladies as they expertly prepare pickles, pick vegetables, and sing odes to vodka. Shot on 16mm with non-sync sound, it has an intimate, handmade quality, only heightened by the use of explanatory inter-titles in place of subtitles. Uman’s Ukrainain was weak, so she wanted the viewer to have the same experience as she did, just getting the gist of things. As with Uruphong’s work, there is a nostalgia for the old ways, which were self-sufficient but took an incredible toll on the body. The bubushkas complain about their aching backs and the never-ending poverty, spiking any drift towards romanticization.

A sequel to Leche, this film follows members of the same family now living in California's agricultural Central Valley. Through economic struggles and familial growing pains, the family relies on traditional values to navigate a complex environment of immigrant working life and cultural alienation.

The film tells the story of its own making.

This love story in three parts recounts the amorous journeys of one woman, in love with places, pets, men, and nostalgia.

Starting with a piece of vintage porn, filmmaker Naomi Uman painstakingly removed each female figure from the footage using nail polish remover, leaving a striking absence where there's usually a fleshy presence. Uman's celebrated film is a smart retort to pornography's obsessive gaze at the female body.

A collection of experimental shorts by female directors curated by Rita Gonzalez and features the shorts Bathing the Baby by Semefo, Taxidermy by Eva Aridijis, I, Bear by Helen Mirra Self Dial by Caroline Koebel, Removed by Naomi Uman, Deep Creep by Kate Haug, and Hawi by Ximena Cuevas.

Examines details of the lives of a rural Mexican family. The film was hand-processed in buckets to dry on the clothesline.

This film was made for the site specific screening Fleur Power, created by Melinda Stone. She planted a screen of sweet alyssum (also called "carpet of snow") on a mountainside and asked artists to make work for this one-time event. This short film attempts to replace the grass which she pulled up in order to create the screen, while playing with concepts of scale and time.

In this naive first film, the love of a woman gives fruit color and life which her amorous attentions eventually destroy and consume.