Batum

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.

Direction/Editing: Kamila Kuc
Cast: Genie Kaminski
Second camera: Nina Zabicka
Sound: Rob Godman
Voice: Genie Kaminski
Still photography: Kamila Kuc/Daisy Rickman

• https://www.kamilakuc.com/batum
• https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/...