FAMILY PORTRAITS: films & video by Charlie Egleston, Philip Hoffman, & Naomi Uman
A selection of works by filmmakers exploring ancestry from places of origin through the language, customs, myths & rituals of hallowed sites and historical remnants of familial lore to personal reflections on immediate members through the voices and faces of loved ones remembered.
Charlie Egleston & Philip Hoffman will be in attendance to introduce their work.
PROGRAM
KALENDAR
Naomi Uman | 2008 | Ukraine | 16mm | silent | 11 minutes
This silent film 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.
ON THIS DAY
Naomi Uman | 2008 | Ukraine | 16mm | sound | 4 minutes
This film explores and shares a secret that the filmmaker has kept from everyone in the village.
FAMILY PORTRAIT CYCLE
Charlie Egleston | 2001-23 | Canada | digital | sound | 25 minutes
An ongoing series of short films spanning from 2001 to the present that explore expanded forms of ‘home mode’ moving image making. The works move from analytical views of familial imaging to the deeply personal, often reworking film and video mediums to elevate emotional and conceptual frameworks.
KITCHENER-BERLIN
Philip Hoffman | 1990 | Canada | 16mm | sound | 35 minutes
“Kitchener-Berlin is a tale of two cities divided by history, language, custom, and four thousand miles of air travel. Their alliance stems in part from a German migration that would settle on the small Canadian town of Kitchener as the locus for dreams of a new world. Before its renaming which followed the catastrophes of WWI, Kitchener was known as “Berlin,” so the film’s title also names a relation between cities separated by an alphabetic recess that secretes history’s hidden postures. Kitchener-Berlin is a naming of recall, a movement into the city’s Germanic traditions, and its rituals of memory, bereavement, and technology. It is Hoffman’s most frankly “poetic” film, employing image phrases across a wordless field of interlocking fragments, gathering the sum of a diary travel in overlapping movements that quietly course through a rectangle of introspection." — Mike Hoolboom
Artist Bios
Working in expanded modes of film and video production, London, Ontario-based filmmaker Charlie Egleston has been making moving images and multidisciplinary work for the past 25 years. His work, whether through photochemical or digital means, is characterized by an approach that considers durational experience, environmental interaction and personal process as a way of presenting or enabling form.
With works spanning nearly half a century, Philip Hoffman has long been recognized as Canada’s pre-eminent diary filmmaker. Since 1994, he has been the artistic director of the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm), a week long workshop in artisanal filmmaking in Mount Forest, Ontario. In 2016 Hoffman received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Naomi Uman is an American-born filmmaker, visual artist, currently living in Mexico City. Former private chef to Malcolm Forbes, Calvin Klein and Gloria Vanderbilt, she traded in her eggbeater and oven mitts for a 16mm Bolex and acid resistant black rubber gloves. Uman's work is marked by her signature handmade aesthetic, often shooting, hand-processing and editing her films with the most rudimentary of practices.