Signe Baumane

Biography

Signe Baumane’s first film, “The Witch and the Cow”, came out in 1991, and she made it alone: she wrote the script, directed, designed it and animated it herself. She was twenty-six.

She was born on 7 August 1964 in Auce, in the Latvian SSR. Her childhood was spent in Tukums and on Sakhalin Island. She began publishing at fourteen. She finished school in Riga (Secondary School No. 2), then went to Moscow to study and in 1989 graduated in philosophy from Moscow University.

In that same year, 1989, Baumane began working as an animator at the Latvian studio Dauka. The animated commercials she made ran on local television for several years. Then for two years she illustrated children’s books in Moscow, and in 1993 she returned to Riga, where she again worked in animation, illustration and stage design. Two shorts are known from this time: “Tiny Shoes” (1993) and “The Gold of the Tigers” (1995).

In September 1995 she moved to New York, and in January of the following year found work with the animator Bill Plympton, handling production, colour styling and the painting of cels. In 1998 Baumane went back to independent work and over the following years made several films. Two of them, “Woman” (2002) and “Veterinarian” (2007), were made during visits to Latvia; the rest were made in New York. Among her other shorts are “Dentist” (2005), “Birth” (2009) and the series “Teat Beat of Sex” (2007): semi-fictionalised personal stories that deal with sex, pregnancy and depression, where irony and humour make such subjects easier for the viewer. From 2000 to 2002 she taught animation at the Pratt Institute. Together with Patrick Smith and Bill Plympton she became one of the organisers of Square Footage Films, a group of independent New York animators who published and distributed DVDs of their own work themselves. She also curated independent animation programmes. Besides film, she painted, made sculptures and illustrated children’s books. In 2005 she received a fellowship in film from the New York Foundation for the Arts and became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Her films have been shown at festivals in Annecy, Berlin, Ottawa, Venice, Tribeca and Sundance.

She worked on “Rocks in My Pockets” for several years. Money for the film came from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Jerome Foundation and Women Make Movies; in 2013 another 50,000 dollars was raised through Kickstarter. A personal voice-over runs over flat hand-drawn 2D animation, into which papier-mâché and stop-motion intrude. The film premiered in July 2014 at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize (the international film critics’ award) and a Commendation from the Ecumenical Jury. It was then shown at more than 130 other festivals, opened in New York on 3 September 2014, and was later released in 35 US cities (distributed by Zeitgeist Films). Latvia submitted it for the Oscars as its entry for Best Foreign Language Film, but it was not nominated. I think the most interesting thing here is not the awards but the choice of material: depression in a family, told in the first person, with humour and without excuses.

In 2017 Baumane received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her second feature, “My Love Affair with Marriage” (2022), combines a personal love story with music and science: it examines the biochemistry of love and gender, and the social pressure to conform to accepted norms. More than 132,000 dollars was raised on Kickstarter for production, and the animation was made in partnership with the Latvian studio Locomotive Productions. The voice cast includes Dagmara Dominczyk, Matthew Modine, Cameron Monaghan, Stephen Lang and others. Each of the two features won three Lielais Kristaps awards, Latvia’s national film prize.