1/16/19 // Naomi Uman’s Mala Leche and Unnamed Film
Posted January 3rd, 2019 in Events and Screenings, News / Events
Naomi Uman’s Mala Leche and Unnamed Film
Wednesday, January 16th, 2019 // 7:00 PM
Little Roxie Theater // 3117 16th St, San Francisco, CA
Facebook Event
Each of these films by Naomi Uman are more typically presented together with other works from her oeuvre. Mala Leche is often paired with her thesis film, Leche, which preceded it. Unnamed Film is one of the longer pieces in Uman’s Ukrainian Time Machine cycle. Viewed together these two films function as community portraits, woven around stories of immigration. Daily life, work and play, of both a small agricultural town in California’s Central valley, and a rural village in the Ukraine are portrayed though an interplay of image, sound and text. Mala Leche was made in Pixley, California, when Uman was living with the extended family of the ranchers of Central Mexico featured in Leche. Unnamed Film was made in Legdzine, Ukraine, during a time when the filmmaker returned to live in the village her Jewish ancestors had left more than a hundred years prior, escaping persecution.
Unnamed Film (2008 | 55 minutes | COLOR | SOUND)
This film is presented in chronological order, revealing the world the filmmaker is discovering in her quest to become an immigrant in the land her great grandparents abandoned over 100 years ago.
Mala Leche (2003 | 47 minutes | COLOR/B&W | OPT)
A sequel to Leche, this film follows members of the same Mexican 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.
Born and raised in New York City, Naomi Uman is a filmmaker, visual artist, farmer and adventurer. She works alone, often accompanied by a small dog, exploring the worlds of others and her own. The treasures found on these expeditions are manifest in small films, paintings, handmade clothing, home harvested and cooked meals and video projects. Uman’s films have been exhibited at venues including Sundance, Rotterdam International Film Festival, The New York Film Festival, The San Francisco International Film Festival, The Guggenheim Museum, The Smithsonian, and Whitney Museums as well as Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno and Museo El Chopo and Laboratorio Arte Alameda. She has received grants from the Creative Capital, Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations as well as the National Endowment for the Arts.
Canyon Cinema’s co-presentation of this event is made possible through the generous support of the George Lucas Family Foundation, the Owsley Brown III Philanthropic Foundation and the Zellerbach Family Foundation’s Community Arts Program.
