BIOGRAPHY
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​Kamila Kuc is a Polish-born filmmaker based between London and Seattle. Her work brings together performance, movement, and hybrid nonfiction. Working through improvisation and collaboration, she creates films that attend to what exceeds language: gesture, sensation, and the body's capacity to carry experience across generations. Her practice examines memory, ancestry, and womanhood as sites of inheritance, resistance, and transformation.

Her award-winning films have been shown in over 26 countries and at over 100 film festivals, galleries and art venues including Slamdance, San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Videoex, BFI London Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, the National Gallery of Art, and the University of Boulder. She is also the Founder and Director of Own Story - a trauma informed therapy and expressive arts practice, where healing and creativity belong in the same room.
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FRAMES OF REFERENCE, FALL 2026
KAMILA KUC
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PROGRAM : Wednesday, September 30th - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

Batum (2016, UK/Georgia, 8 mins)
Batum begins with an experience of nearly drowning in the Black Sea in Batumi, Georgia, unfolding as an auto-ethnographic exploration of memory and identity. The film weaves together personal and prosthetic memories, drawing on historical and cultural references, including the poetry of Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Stalin. It examines how memories become fiction through the act of recording, how the camera acquires its own agency, and how personal and collective memories complicate social and political constructions of identity. Ultimately, Batum reflects on film itself as a technology that not only preserves memory but also creates it.

I Think You Should Come to America (2017, Poland/UK/USA, 21 mins)
In I Think You Should Come to America the correspondence between two young and naïve penfriends serves as a vehicle to explore the dangers of seeing cultures different from our own as ‘other.’ A young Polish woman (myself), coming of age in the dying embers of Communist Poland, seeks escape in the re-imagining of a romance with the American Dream through her correspondence with a young Native American man. Using only his letters sent to her, she presents her penfriend’s own need to escape, voiced to a montage of poetic imagery, presenting multiple views of both Poland and America at pivotal points in their history. What results is a nuanced and often contradictory picture that is left to the viewer to disassemble. In I Think You Should Come to America cultural conditions in which memories are created are exposed through the medium of film, as the viewer is asked to question the politics of cinematic representation.

noonwraith blues (2020, UK, 3 mins)
Ominous cinegrams of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia print intercut, like cascading scythes, with depictions of a woman in a field, evoking repetitions that exist in harvest rituals, as well as in gestures of madness. A pastoral horror.    

uchronia, no.1 (2020, UK, 4 mins)
Past time, suspended time. Macro vision serves as a tool to experience what has long been known. Perceptual tension between the in and out of focus, between enquiry and observation, abstraction and representation persuade the body to look and experience more intently. At once disturbing and nostalgic, the soundtrack lures the viewer into a claustrophobic and apocalyptic space as we have to find new ways of being with the world. Filmed and recorded during the Covid-19 lockdown in Waterlow Park, London and Guilden Morden, Cambridgeshire.

Her Plot of Blue Sky (2022, UK/Morocco, 23 mins)
Fused with the poignant words of a Moroccan human rights activist Rachida Madani’s poem, Tales of a Severed Head, Her Plot of Blue Sky is a relational glimpse into the joys and struggles of a group of Amazigh women in a care home in Sefrou, Morocco. While the women engage in creating visual diaries of their everyday lives, many of their experiences of abuse, alienation, loss and poverty, are captured in one particular resident’s story.  Like other women in the care home, Fatima too struggles to survive in a society that, more often than not, undermines women’s existence. By taking their own images, the women reclaim their power to be themselves. The images they create - of themselves and others - are playful yet harrowing, they point to the invisibility of women, non-hetero normative, neurodiverse, functionally diverse and elderly people in media more general.

I Was There (Poland/UK/USA, 2025, 12 mins)
I Was There is a haunting exploration of familial bonds, intergenerational memory, and the enduring impact of shared narratives. Filmmaker Kamila Kuc steps into the emotional stream of inherited family history as the lines between documentary, testimony, and fiction blur. She performs acts of bearing witness not just for herself but also on behalf of her grandmother. Together, they testify to their experiences and the reverberations these stories have over time. I Was There is a palimpsest - a layered tapestry where past and present intertwine in the intimate process of activating memory and vulnerability as forms of resistance. I Was There honours the testimonial object inherited from ancestors and the living connection that binds generations in the shared pursuit of justice and healing.


PROGRAM : Thursday, October 1st - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

What We Shared (2021, UK/Abkhazia, 69 mins)
Seven inhabitants of Abkhazia, a de facto state on the Black Sea, unfurl a web of stories about loss and displacement through the re-imaginings of dreams and memories of the 1992-93 war with Georgia. To question the unstable distinction between fact and fiction, these re-imaginings are interwoven with auto-fictional narration and archival materials that have been processed through an AI technology. The Black Sea permeating the film’s world acts as a metaphor of both an idyllic holiday destination of utopian happiness; as well as a perilous force, a place of conspiracy and death. What We Shared employs emotive soundscape and imagery to produce a sensory reflection on artistic practice as a powerful binding force and an act of resistance to dominant power structures.