I am an experimental filmmaker. My non-fiction films draw from personal experience. I live with my subjects for long periods of time, often waiting to film or record sound until I have become integrated into a community or a family. I had lived with a family of immigrants, both documented and undocumented, for a period of almost a year before making a film that was unflinching in its portrait of their lives. This film, which turned a critical eye on the subject family and the situation which creates this separate and unequal world in which they live within the United States, caused the public to question my right as a filmmaker to criticize people whose status as immigrants was a status that I had never experienced myself.

Taking this to heart, I decided to embark on my own immigration. I decided to make the journey in reverse that my relatives made more than a hundred years ago. All of my great-grandparents left Eastern Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, fleeing pogroms and hatred toward Jews. I have returned to live in a tiny village, thirty kilometers from the city of Uman and two hundred and fifty kilometers from the city of Kyiv. I came here in search of my own family's history, hoping to find traces of what their lives were like. I do not know exactly where my family lived or what their name was. I did not come here to find lost relations. What I have found is a sort of time machine that has allowed me to go back into history and live with a community of people whose lives remain relatively unchanged, who live and work as my relatives did a century ago.

I am currently in production on a series of sixteen-millimeter films addressing a variety of subjects, all through the lens of this elasticity of time. The Ukrainian Time Machine consists of four distinct films that will work together to describe this place and my relationship to it through the focus of time, its passage, and patterns of repetition in history.

My work consistently participates in creating a living history. I focus on customs that are about to disappear. I live with people who continue to milk cows by hand; who plant, harvest, and preserve their own food. I, too, engage in these practices. In this way, I experience history, as it slowly becomes just that: HISTORY. Seeing the past before it vanishes prolongs the present and makes it more profound. Working in sixteen-millimeter film is a way of holding onto the beauty and delicacy of a format and a practice that are becoming obsolete. Like hand sowing a field or knitting a sweater, this is not the easiest or most practical way of working. It is often simpler and more practical to have large, industrial farms, to purchase already manufactured clothing and to shoot and edit on modern, electronic media. Yet the food, clothing and film produced in this manner has another layer of significance, a value added due to the limitations, difficulties, intention and emotion implied in their production.

In village society it is the babushky (grandmothers, old women) who hold the key to surviving in the absence of economic wellbeing. It is their practical thinking and preservation of what might be considered trash that enables them to survive on pensions of less than eighty dollars a month. In immersing myself in this culture, I have needed to create a life in a foreign place without the luxury of regular access to stores, a car, or the ability to communicate easily with my neighbors. I have learned from watching the babushky how to live simply and practically, wasting absolutely nothing. This economy will be manifest in my films. Each frame, each shot, each fragment of sound is considered. This age-old creativity of making something out of nothing, or strictly out of what one has at-hand, can be applied to the creation of media. Scarcity requires a different kind of resourcefulness. The films in this cycle are small and intimate, repeating age-old stories in as few words as possible.

My time in Ukraine has truly felt like an ambassadorship. I have been teaching video production to young people in the village, providing them with small digital cameras and conducting the classes in English to give them an opportunity to practice and perfect their language skills. It is this close contact with people of different ages which has enriched my experience. I am constantly asked to compare life in Ukraine with life in America. I often find myself trying to tell people in Ukraine that we in America have paid a high price for our economic well-being. I have explained that in my eyes Ukraine has been able to hold onto certain values and practices which have been lost forever in the United States. The sense of community and family that can be found in small villages has all but disappeared in America where we have so few rural villages and where farms have all become huge, industrialized business enterprises.

I am deeply grateful to the Fulbright Foundation for opening this door for me.