Long Island native Shari Umansky has her ideas come to life on the big screen

Shari Umansky could not continue to suppress her creative juices. A job behind a desk wasn’t for her. Now, she puts pen to paper and lives her wildest dreams every day.

She started out her career pursuing singing and acting before getting hurt in a car accident which led her to take an unexpected step back. After a decade of working a 9-to-5 job, she knew she wanted to do something else. Since then, she has written several plays and films, and won numerous awards.

The now North Carolina resident grew up in Bellmore before raising her children in East Meadow. She is best known for her film “Immunity,” a 20-minute short set in 1942 Auschwitz, where a deadly game is being played out by a by a young SS officer and his once beloved teacher, a Jew who now finds that her most prized pupil has become her tormentor.

The film, released in 2016, won awards, including Best Long Island Film in 2016 at the Long Island International Film Expo, and Best Short Film at the Fort Myers Beach Film Festival that same year. It stars actress Rena Sofer as the female lead character.

Umansky, who is Jewish, said the idea for the piece came from a nightmare that she had as a child. Umansky said that as she learned about the Holocaust, she started to have nightmares related to what she was learning, and they continued into her adulthood. She decided that maybe she should write them down. So, in 2010, she did.

“As I became a writer, and had this recurring nightmare, I thought maybe if I wrote it down it would stop happening,” she said. “But what happened instead was there was a story, with characters and places and events.”

Before it was turned into a short film, it was a stage play with a sold-out run at the Manhattan Repertory Theater. Now, it has been released in paperback and e-book form, and Umansky has worked on expanding the script to make it into a full length movie.

To learn more about the experiences of Jewish people during that time, Umansky visited the site of two concentration camps— Auschwitz and Birkenau.

“I wanted to walk on the ground and be in the place,” she said. “As soon as I did that I knew exactly what I needed to do, what I needed to write and what I needed to get a sense of.”

Once “Immunity” was all done and released, Umansky said it felt amazing seeing it completed.

“It was exhausting,” she said, “but so incredibly satisfying.”

One of her favorite reactions to any of her works came from when another Long Island writer watched “Immunity” as a play.

“She came up to me afterwards and I really didn’t know her too well, but she asked me if I was the writer,” Umansky recalled. “She told me that she didn’t breathe the whole time she watched it. That was the best.”

In 2017, after meeting Debra Markowitz, Director of the Nassau County Film Commission and executive director of the Long Island Film/TV Foundation (which presents the Long Island International Film Expo) — and also a filmmaker herself, the two collaborated on a short film called “Chosen.”

The short follows a heroin addict who wakes up from a suicide attempt and learns that he is the sole descendant of Jesus Christ. He is urged to take on the roll, but he doesn’t want it.

“It makes me feel blessed,” Umansky said about seeing her ideas come to life. “The majority of people live their life doing what they have to do in order to have a life that they enjoy and I get to live my wildest dreams every single day.”

Umansky’s first time dabbling with filmmaking was when her movie “Why George?” was made in 2009. She had the experience of attending a symposium for a friend of hers that was looking to get ideas from screenwriters. He told her she should come down just to network and meet other creative individuals. Instead, she left with an idea that she wanted to share with him.

“I was just so inspired by what he said,” Umansky said. “All of these writers were hoping that their stories would fit what he was looking for, but I thought, what if my idea was something he was looking for?”

“Why George?” is a roughly 90 minute film that follows the characters Zach and Sam. Zach and his wife Sam live a happy life, but Zach has a desire for his wife to have a lesbian experience as well. While Sam is looking, she falls in love with a woman.

Collectively, Umansky has won roughly 30 awards for her projects, and there’s no stopping her. She already has ideas for future projects, she’s just not sure which genre she wants to focus on next.