becoming | Cтановление (2016) is my first attempt at making autoethnographic time-based work about my own immigrant uprooting. In it, I represent my negotiations of assimilation, loss and adaptation, ableit without attention to my own whiteness and documentedness (an oversight, and a marker of where I was in my process). Framed by Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of centripetal/centrifugal forces and told through archival and personal footage from the Soviet Union, Russia and the U.S., the film engages with the generative tensions of external, homogenizing forces coming up against the internal drive to maintain connection to one's roots.

Honorable Mention, Eisner Award, UC Berkeley (2016)