Naomi Uman’s Three Sparks, screening in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam, is a highly personal, hand-processed record of what transpired when she journeyed into the mountains to film life in the north of Albania, a region notorious for its ferocious dogs, but whose people (both Muslim and Christian) live side by side relatively peaceably. The American experimental filmmaker, who is very much in the frame, claims that she would scarcely have been able to carry out her project in the village of Rabdisht were it not for “besa”, the pledge of honour and duty to look after guests that is a cornerstone of Albanian culture, and which allowed her to feel safe as a solo female traveller and a Jew (the protective emphasis of “besa” led to the Jewish population expanding there during the German wartime occupation, as nearly two thousand were saved from Nazi persecution.) Uman’s potentially intrusive presence as an outsider, and the way power dynamics play out with a camera, are concerns that, with self-aware sensitivity, she explores, producing a fascinating ethnographic portrait of rural Albania and a meditation on documentary filmmaking as a craft with its own sacrifices, customs and consequences. Festivals giving space to documentary on the more creative end of the spectrum should snap up this intimate, beautifully textured record of the work of women, and the stories that define them.
The credits list is short, because Uman (who runs handmade filmmaking workshops in Mexico City, where she now resides) took care of almost all aspects of the production herself. A real respect for film material and processes comes through in grainy black-and-white 16mm footage and intricate layers of sound and song, craft that forms an interesting parallel and dialogue with the handwork — baking bread, and knitting — that the women in Rabdisht are highly skilled at. Divided into three parts, with beautifully lettered inter-titles that describe (in both Albanian and English) customs and recount legends, the impression created is of a travelogue or research notebook lovingly compiled as if in pre-globalised times. Uman, who declares that she was inspired by Edith Durham, the British artist and adventurer known for her anthropological accounts of life in Albania in the early twentieth century, is very much positioned as a participant in her environment, rather than pretending omniscient objectivity.
A legend is recounted about a woman bricked up as a sacrifice in a castle wall, who requested that parts of her body be left out so she could continue to nurture her baby. Milky liquid still flows from the wall to this day, according to the tale. Men are excessively valued by custom; women are deemed useful only in relation to how they can care for them. Eking out a subsistence in the rocky and steep location is tough, and tending the fields is done with little machinery. The men of the village often leave to find more lucrative jobs in Greece or Italy, leaving newly married women, in the absence of their husbands, tied to their mothers-in-law. The camera settles on the faces of elderly women, as if honouring their significance in village life (the young women do not want to be filmed, in case it upsets husbands present or future.) Also very present are the curious local children, who tell Uman, to her amusement, that they thought she was a man, because she smokes cigarettes. Traditional laws set down in the Kanun, a set of ancient codes that still determine life in the region, determine that daughters cannot inherit land or property. Families without sons will sometimes raise their daughter as a male, getting her to take a vow of chastity. Urban also credits this phenomenon of “burrnesha” and the gender fluidity this normalises in the heavily patriarchal space, for her acceptance as a lone woman. This is a sensitive, multi-layered and poetic vision of identity construction and creation through work of the world.
Director, Writer, Producer, Cinematography, Editor, Music: Naomi Uman
Sound Design: Naomi Uman, Homero Glez
Sales: Kino Rebelde
Venue: Rotterdam
In Albanian and English
95 minutes
