Premiere, Camden Interational Film Festival
Exhibited at Field Works Gallery NY
In Dispatches to and from the Diaspora curated by Irene Soriano at Garel Fine Art, Los Angeles
Reverberations of US military occupation through three generations of women in the Philippines and US, contemplated through archives of wartime and family pictures.
This film is a response to and an elegy for the women whose lives were taken at three Atlanta spas in Spring 2021. I thought about ‘R&R’, military slang for ‘rest and recuperation’, or using the body of a woman to combat the emotional and physical fatigue of battle. And how war shaped the bodies of my grandmother, mother and mine. The family survived by hiding these atrocities from the children they raised in the US, genuinely wanting to protect us from a past which continues to affect the generations that follow.