Working, Weaving, Filming

WORKING, WEAVING, FILMING

(Naomi Uman & Laura Huertas Millán, 1998-2017, 16mm & digital)

Introduction by Cordelia Rizzo

RSVP 

Films:

HAND EYE COORDINATION (2002, 10 min, 16mm, Mexico/USA) Naomi Uman

LECHE (1998, 30 min, 16mm, Mexico) Naomi Uman

LA LIBERTAD (2017, 30 min, digital, Colombia/Mexico) Laura Huertas Millán

About the program:

“Working, Weaving, Filming” is a selection of three short films by Mexican/American experimental documentarian Naomi Uman and Colombian/French filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán that use nonfiction practices expansively to portray people's daily labors. The central films of the program, LECHE (1998) and LA LIBERTAD (2017), situate themselves within the working lives of two different families across Mexico. Naomi Uman’s interest in agrarian ways of living, women’s work, and the blurred cinematic practices of ethnography, portraiture, and self-representation come together in LECHE, an intimate look at the life of a family of dairy farmers in Aguascalientes. Shown alongside her short film HAND EYE COORDINATION (2002), which “tells the story of its own making,” the pair advances a manually-processed, hand-crafted vision of artist’s cinema.

Laura Huertas Millán’s LA LIBERTAD is a sensorially rich portrait of a community of matriarchal weavers working with pre-Hispanic techniques and seeking economic freedom through practices of craftsmanship near Oaxaca. Recording traditions of weaving with a backstrap loom shared within several indigenous communities in Mexico, LIBERTAD opens up a discursive space for the weavers to ideate about their artistic practices, economic situations, and visions of freedom.

About the speaker:

Cordelia Rizzo ( Ph.D. in Performance Studies at Northwestern University) is an activist-scholar from Monterrey, Mexico. With a background in Human Rights and Philosophy, her current research project is looking at embroidery as a form of performing resistance against the dehumanizing apparatus of the current War on Drugs in Mexico. The production of textiles is a way of preserving an archive of women’s voices implicitly resisting the idea that war and violence are inevitable. She is also interested in the political aspect of the performance of touch and other everyday rituals.

16mm prints of Naomi Umani's films courtesy of Canyon Cinema. LA LIBERTAD courtesy of Light Cone.

Presented with support from the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at Northwestern University.


This screening is part of the WORKING IMAGES: LABOR IN LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA BY WOMEN series. Additional information is available here.