Lev Omelchenko
Directing
Biography
Lev Omelchenko is an Emmy Award Winning film director and cinematographer based in Atlanta, GA. He is an Ukrainian-born Brooklyn-raised immigrant. Utilizing both documentary and narrative forms, Lev’s work focuses on telling poetic and cinematic stories of joyful militancy in the American South. His films have screened and won awards across major US festivals including New Orleans Film Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival, Indie Memphis and Prismatic Ground. His work has also screened at UPenn, MIT, Columbia, Emory and Pratt Institute among other higher education institutions. His work has been featured by Al Jazeera, More Perfect Union, Vice and Atlanta Community Press Collective. He is a distinguished fellow at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences.
Known For
When a private police foundation in Atlanta tries to raze an urban forest to build the country’s largest police training facility, a diverse, decentralized, and intersectional movement defends the forest from what they call “Cop City.” A City in the Forest paints a collective portrait of the country’s most urgent social justice story, where a web of activists fight back against environmental racism, political corruption, police violence, and the criminalization of dissent.
A City in the Forest
“Olive” is a short documentary that follows Olive Hagemeier, an energetic woman, on her daily routine of salvaging, repackaging and redistributing food, and occasional other types of “waste”, across Atlanta, GA. Presented in a quiet observational style, this film is both a character study of a committed and enigmatic volunteer, as well as an ethnographic work that places the audience in the heart of a decentralized, volunteer-run mutual aid network in a “post-COVID” American city.
Olive
“Beneath the Concrete, The Forest” is a short experimental documentary that takes us inside an ongoing struggle inside the city of Atlanta, GA between two sides to determine the future of Weelaunee, the biggest contiguous urban forest in the country.
Beneath the Concrete, The Forest
A short dance film about a mother’s relationship to her pregnancy, as she deals with fear and hope about bringing a black baby boy into the world in 2020.
Free Noir Papillon
Set in a speakeasy in Atlanta, “Twenty” is a feature documentary about fifteen young people making it through 2020. The film is an observational time capsule that lays bare the raw reflections of a group of people surviving a year that will be seared into our generational memory.
Twenty
"LIDA" takes place on the day of Lida's 70th birthday. This already special day is made more unusual by the recent arrival of her grandson, Lev, who had immigrated to the United States with his family in 2001. Returning to Ukraine for the first time as an adult, Lev documents his grandmother as she tends to the small homestead and prepares for the birthday celebration in the rural village in Ukraine. By capturing moments of arduous labor, as well as through personal conversation, Lev inquires into his grandmothers relationship to her home, land - and their family.