Private Movie

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

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 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

The film tells the story of its own making.

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.

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