SELECTED FILMS
House in Pieces (2020)
co-directed with Manuel Domes
Winner Golden Hercules Award at Kasseler Dokfest, Germany 2020
Winner Best Documentary at Mimesis Documentary Film Festival, USA 2021
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/381802682/c118b90875
​A war between government and ISIS-affiliated jihadists in Marawi, Philippines, forced hundreds of thousands to flee from their homes. After the war, residents struggle to rebuild their homes and lives in a deformed city.
The film unfolds as an emotional journey weaving together the stories of its protagonists over a period of two years. Displaced couple Yusop and Farhanna and their children yearn for freedom, income, and comfort after returning to their city. But even to return to normalcy is already a struggle. Nancy, a once wealthy woman, has to cope with her loss of home in an evacuation shelter where she will have to remain for years. An anonymous driver with striking insights shuttles back and forth between places and stories around a city which will never be the same again.
Reviews:
1)https://www.mindanews.com/mindaviews/2020/12/review-the-eighteenth-brumaire-of-rodrigo-duterte/
2) https://www.mindanews.com/mindaviews/2021/06/review-the-figure-of-home-and-the-negative-island-in-a-house-in-pieces/
3) https://www.newduriancinema.com/2021/05/a-house-in-pieces-documentary-as.html​
​4) https://www.spot.ph/entertainment/movies-music-tv/85332/foreign-and-filipino-documentaries-political-a4362-20210221-lfrm?ref=feed_1&fbclid=IwAR0_QRlYF2jPBiWq1DDCgHk-PmF246lKQij1047Qua-jB8uVJcgdsVNSSGE
Walay Naa Diri/ There is Nothing Here (2015)
Duration: 00:08:15
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/569418058
An autobiographical film essay in four parts in the voice of a third-generation Filipino-Chinese about dealing with modern anxieties of having to have a sense of place, a definite national identity. It tries to explore the notions of race and identity by juxtaposing an assemblage of moving images culled from negotiating memories (going back and forth from Southern China, and the “motherland” Philippines), with a voiceover of an essay written about the lifelong journey of attempting to understand oneself vis-a-vis identity in the context of the layered post-colonial realities of being Filipino.
In the end there is a realization that there might be nothing to understand. The state of confusion paradoxically comes with a state of peaceful acceptance of said confusion. Playing with the nonfiction elements in video, this piece attempts to arrive at an inscription that's neither concrete nor certain. It is a space between, a performance of the present, and the present-past.
Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival 2022
A Ritual of Affliction
(experimental essay film, work-in-progress) 2021
grant from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts Cinema
This essay film explores the notion of liminality as a phase artists on standby like myself are caught in the betwixt and between during the pandemic. It also plays with what anthropologist Victor Turner in his discussion on liminality that there are 4 degrees of liminal and one of this is he calls "ritual of affliction" during the a time of massive disease in a community. Among the 14th century Mindanawons, wearing a gold mask during rituals of disease and death was practiced.
Paglubad (2017)
​Duration: 00:27:41
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/227842695
Ligaya, a filmmaker, stays with her uncle Primo in Iloilo, to finish a documentary film about her roots. Motivated by the need to understand why her family in Cotabato resists her plan to marry her Muslim boyfriend Malik, Ligaya is determined to find answers from her uncle. Malik is an orphan whose parents were killed in a fire during one of the massacres perpetrated by the Christian militia known as the ilaga during the war in the 1970s in Central Mindanao.
Ligaya seeks to find answers from her uncle about his past life in Mindanao during the tumultuous 1970s. Armed with her camera, she doggedly observes her uncle doing his rituals, practicing arnis martial art movements, persistently pushing him to answer the questions about the past. Primo, on the other hand, resists Ligaya’s questions. When finally Primo agrees to a video recorded interview, Ligaya is faced with the weight of the wartime secret she unwittingly unravels.
Nominated for Best Short Film, Salamindanaw Asian Film Festival Mindanao shorts category,
​Nominated for Best Short Film, Sharjah Film Platform, UAE, 2019
Weft and Warp
(documentary film, work-in-progress) 2021
Despite the surge in COVID-19 transmission, the Philippine government has chosen to focus on curbing communist rebel insurgencies. Indigenous communities are the most vulnerable groups victimized by red-tagging, with reports of indigenous leaders being branded as communists and killed by the military. In the T'boli town of Lake Sebu located in the south of the Philppines, Jenita Eko an indigenous leader who has been tagged as one of the most wanted "rebels" by the Philippine National Police in her area, struggles to keep her community afloat. With the pandemic affecting the weaving business, which is the only livelihood of the women in her area, Jenita who formed the Lake Sebu Women Weavers Association, perseveres by organizing projects for women to improve their finances. Jenita's group devised a way to still sell their products through other platforms. But through these endeavors, Jenita has to stay cautious as the police and military are still accusing her of being a rebel leader. Like the shuttle that in her hands deftly flies across her loom, Jenita has to weave her way through the weft and warp of daily living amid the threats to her and her community’s survival.
In the end close of a long day when she said to herself time she stops (2015)
Duration: 00:06:14
​Excerpt: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/154146962
​Inspired by Samuel Beckett's monologue "Rockaby", this video is a performance piece that explores the concept of female monitoring or self-talk --the internal dialogues we often do to ourselves which indicate that monitoring happens inside of us, but involves the perspectives of others we have imported into our own thinking. It is my self-interrogation of an existential dilemma: there is a fear of getting old and alone, yet there is also a felt liberation in being different, free, living a life of the mind. The struggle is to convince through self-talk as in repetition that time is a state of mind, subject to interpretation within the boundaries of what constitutes one's space, one's memories, one's own identification.
Pagrara Sang Patipuron (2017)
A Stories Beyond Production
Produced by Jean Claire Dy and Lendz Barinque
Directed by Jean Claire Dy and Manuel Domes
Pagrara Sang Patipuron follows a group of Aeta women weaving artists in Nagpana, a sitio up in the mountains of Barotac Viejo, Iloilo. The film explores their artistic processes and products, reflecting negotiations between tradition and modernity. The Nagpana community is home to weaving artists that traditionally make crafts (purses and bags) that answer to a saturated market of woven crafts. These circle of women weaving artists are going beyond the products the Aeta are known to churn out by weaving jewelry with designs inspired by their environment and the people they live with. For these women, to weave from the center, to weave a circle, is to weave a life confronting realities of lack and insecurities brought about my poverty. But with the help of two well-meaning young artist entrepreneurs in the community, the women were empowered to explore their artistic imagination and extend the limits of their design process in the hopes of transcending their present realities. The Aeta are considered the first inhabitants of the Philippine archipelago, but they are also one of the most marginalized indigenous peoples in the country.
Nominated for Best Documentary at the 2017 Sinay Maynila Film Festival
A Memory of Empire
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After 53 years, Visayan Christian settler Norma Limoso returns to the place in Mindanao where she married a Muslim rebel leader. She confronts her memories of the so-called Muslim-Christian war in the Southern Philippines.
Supported by National Historical Commission of the Philippines, Film Development Council of the Philippines, and Sinesaysay.
The Sea is History
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I came to Panay Island with no idea of its history. It was an impulsive move to follow a documentary subject. But I never expected that I would stay longer to discover more about the island. In the course of my discovery, I learned that much of Panay history has a connection to the sea or water in general. The mobility of people in the past was made possible through rivers and other bodies of water that connect to the sea. The island has a long maritime history that perhaps may have contributed to the proliferation of present-day seafarers. In the Maragtas legend, the ten Bornean Datus sailed the seas to escape a cruel ruler. This legend rooted in folkloric tradition speaks of the fabled arrival of the ten Bornean Datus in the 13th century at the mouth of Sirwagan River located in what is now the town of San Joaquin . The sea is connected to major shifts in Philippine history as well, such as the opening of the of the Philippines to World Trade that was made possible by the opening of the Port of Iloilo in 1855. A boat-building industry was once alive in Oton, where the galleon trade started, a tradition that has since died down with no clear vestiges of the industry in the present. A traditional method of salt-making in Miagao is still alive with a few families carrying on despite the threat of extinction by more modern day production processes.
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This project should not be taken as a historical documentation but rather as an exploration of the places where history as connected to the sea took place and how these spaces are now as I experienced them whether they still contain monuments or vestiges of their historical importance. This project should be treated as like personal travel narratives of someone who is discovering the island as a newcomer.
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The Sea is History is an interactive documentary that allows an immersive experience of these spaces through 360 degrees videos and a series of meditative documentary short videos. As viewer, you are encouraged to play with the 360 degrees video to explore the spaces that are being visited in this journey. You can also watch the meditative short videos to catch a glimpse of these locations and treat them as lyrical vignettes or odes to the spaces that occupy memories that the sea is a part of in one way or another.
