How do you find your way to a place you’ve never been?
Total run time: 03:43
HD video, stereo, color
2022
Processes of migration can be found everywhere, part of the history of the land. As the monarch butterfly undergoes an innate, intergenerational migration every year, displacement feels like a birthright within Filipino families, passed down through generations, and with it, a complicated sense of obligation to a larger narrative of survival. This essay film explores the spaces of Little Manila in New York City as havens, remnants, proof of existence of these ephemeral journeys, exclaiming in a moment of rest: we are still here.
Screening history:
Transforming Horizons: Stories from the QTAPI Community — Web & API Equality-LA, 2022
room 208
Total run time: 02:44
16mm to HD video, stereo
2021
After injury — a rumination on routine and mundane, bodily betrayals.
Myopia
Total run time: 04:20
16mm to HD video, stereo, color
2020
The act of doing laundry, in its habitual, cyclical mundaneness, reflects a deep longing for a cultural heritage under the strain of constant, quiet erasure. Invoking two voices, mother and daughter, Tagalog and English, I choose to render this immigrant experience through the insecurities surrounding language, and its intimate relation to generational relationships. As both acts offer clarity and exhaustion in tandem, this lived reality reveals a duality in my experiences of belonging, ones I can view as my own often only by squinting at them.
Screening history:
Virginia Film Festival — Charlottesville, 2020
Artistic Tradition: A Celebration of Community — Newcomb Theater, 2019
Awards:
(Re)present competition, film category, 1st place — 2021
Madison Lane Charitable Trust Visual Arts Prize Finalist — 2020
Eden
Total run time: 04:20
16mm to HD video, stereo, color
2019
A move to understand an ephemeral "Eden" through the (re)production of cultural artifacts as depicted by vastly two different perspectives: from colonizer and colonized people.
Change My Mind
Total run time: 02:27
HD video, stereo, color
2019
Music video for American folk singer-songwriter Kate Bollinger’s single, “Change My Mind.”