Format: Super8 transferred to HD
Duration: 8mins15secs
Direction/Editing: Kamila Kuc
Cast: Genie Kaminski
Second camera: Nina Zabicka
Sound: Rob Godman
Voice: Genie Kaminski
Still photography: Kamila Kuc/Daisy Rickman 

Batum takes as its starting point my experience of near drowning in the Black Sea of Batumi, Georgia. As such, the film is induced with a desire for an auto-ethnographical self-interrogation. Images that feature in the film are a constellation of personal and prosthetic memories, acquired through historical and cultural knowledge as exemplified by the poems of Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Stalin, among other cultural tropes. While making Batum I was set to explore a certain displacement of identity that emerges when we encounter past experiences. I sought to experience how memories become fiction once recorded and how in this process of recording, the camera itself holds a mysterious agency. The film also investigates how the complex relationship between personal and collective memories often subverts the social and political identity constructions. I am, above all, always interested in ways in which film, as one of the technologies of memory, can be seen as an innovative creator of memories themselves.

Award Nominations
Bucharest Shortcut Cinefest, Bucharest, Romania. Nominated for Best Experimental film.
Creative Arts Film Festival, New York City, NY. Nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Experimental Film.

Screenings:
Anthology Film Archives, New York City, NY
The Horse Hospital, Visual Chorus, London, UK
Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor, MI
BEAST International Film Festival, Porto, Portugal
Montreal Underground Film Festival, Montreal, Canada
The West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival, Morgantown, VA
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Hawick, Scotland
ICA, London, UK
London Short Film Festival, London, UK
Creative Arts Film Festival, New York City, NY. Nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Experimental Film
London Experimental Film Festival, London, UK
Austin Polish Film Festival, solo screening with I Think You Should Come to America and Fluchtpunkt, Austin, TX
Genesis Cinema, London, UK
Museum for Human Achievement, Austin, TX
Grand Illusion Cinema, Seattle, WA
Experiments in Cinema, Albuquerque, NM
Bucharest Shortcut Cinefest, Bucharest, Romania. Nominated for Best Experimental film

For an essay about the themes explored in Batum, see 'Ciné, ma vérité: Memory as a Creative Force in the Process of Constructing Subjectivities', Experiments in She-ness: Women and Undependent Cinema (Albuquerque: Basement Films, 2016).

See also Filming Batum.