Organizer: Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU, Espacio de Culturas at NYU, and NYSEAN
Type/Location: In Person / New York
Description:
Join NYSEAN, Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU, and the NYU Espacio de Culturas for an evening of film shorts by women and gender-queer filmmakers that have won recognition as winners and/or finalists in festivals in New York, Manila, and elsewhere. Featured filmmakers include Marion Aguas, Ara Chawdhury, Ida Del Mundo, Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler, Margarita Mina, and Maria Estela Paiso.
Featured Films:
MARION AGUAS
Margarita Island (2021, 1m)
A metaphor for diaspora: a Filipinx girl takes a trip to Coney Island and discovers icons of her ancestors on the beach. She retells a story that has been passed down through her family as she recontextualizes ancestral wisdom in her home in New York.
Official Selection 2021, The San Diego Filipino Film Festival
ARA CHAWDHURY
Operation Prutas (2015, 8m)
A man and a woman plot to steal the Sto Nino de Cebu, a 600-year-old religious artifact. Everything goes according to plan – until the man mysteriously loses the statue.
Grand Prize & Best Director at 2015 Sinulog Short Film Festival
IDA ANITA DEL MUNDO
Para sa Kapwa (2025, 14m)
Various histories of Filipinos making new homes and livelihoods for themselves in Canada, from the first known Filipino to migrate there, a fisherman named Ben Flores, to an influx of garment workers, to the families of today.
ANGELINE MARIE MICHAEL MEITZLER
The Bird, the Girl and the Typhoon (2025, 11m)
An elder, migrant Filipino nurse, following the same routine for 40 years, wakes up in her now-grown daughter’s old bedroom. She remembers a farmer from her childhood who once told her that the end of the typhoon season and the arrival of the harvest will begin with the sight of a red-colored bird.
In a subversion of colonial messages which signal that safety, security and prosperity are given in proximity to imperial empires, she transforms throughout the morning into the weather, the bird, the harvest and her own internal force.
MARGARITA MINA
Baby Fat (2025, 11m)
When a stocky Filipino-American tween spills ketchup on a traditional heirloom dress, she must accompany her mother to the laundromat where her attempts to restore it only make her feel more displaced in her own skin.
Winner: National Board of Review Student Grant 2025, Rolling Stone Philippines – Best Filipino Films of 2025
MARIA ESTELA PAISO
Objects do Not Randomly Fall from the Sky / Kay Basta Angkarabo Yay Bagay Ibat Ha Langit (2024, 10m)
A young girl turns into a fish and recounts the struggles of the fisherfolk in her hometown, Zambales.
Winner: Visions du Réel 2025 Special Youth Jury Award, Cinemalaya Film Festival 2025 Special Jury Prize, Rappler’s #1 Best Filipino Film of 2024
YV SALAZAR
Lingkis / Coiling (2021, 14m)
Lingkis / Coiling is the result of the frustration we felt as students as a result of the violence and victims of the Duterte administration. But this was never a new problem. Ever since the 20-year long dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos Sr., we have felt the same violence, callousness, corruption, and carelessness for the Filipino people. Like the subjects of Lingkis / Coiling, we were left in darkness. With our documentary, we wanted to use the myth of the Bakunawa, a Bicolano myth of a serpent who ate the moon and plunged the world in darkness, much like the darkness of corruption and violence that lay over our land. So we sought out those who battled the darkness. We found those in our main subjects: Tina Montiel, a Marcos-era activist who sought justice for her jailed and husband, and Lean Porquia, a current day activist who continues the legacy of his father, an urban poor leader who was red-tagged and murdered.
Curator’s Notes
WILD SCHOOLS begins with a film about the struggles of fisherfolk in Zambales. As economic crises worsen and inter-imperialist contradictions heighten, they are among those who directly absorb the consequences. Their livelihood has become such that, despite working 16 hour or longer days, they are often catching and trading fish at a deficit. On top of this, they contend with multiplying US military wargames and Chinese maritime aggression. Maria Estela Paiso’s Objects do not Randomly Fall from the Sky (2024), a CGI x cyanotype stop motion hybrid-doc bricolage, intersplices interviews with Masinloc Fisherfolk with a personal story of a half-fish half-human family.
Yvonne Salazar and Sita Valenzuela’s stop-motion doc Lingkis, applies the Bicolano myth of the Bakunawa (a serpent) who eats the moon to the rampant government corruption and repression of Filipinos who organize to improve their unlivable conditions. Like Objects, it incorporates real interviews with fantastical animation and imagery from regional myth and folktales.
Due to the intensifying conditions captured in these two films, more and more Filipinos, including fisherfolk, are forced to leave their homes in search of a livable wage. For at least the last two decades, remittances from Filipino migrant workers make up around 10% of the Philippines’ GDP. Marion Aguas’ tiny (in length) Margarita Islandtakes the program from the Philippines to Coney Island, where someone from the diaspora recounts a story passed down in their family about crocodiles who prey over fisherfolk and expect hearty tributes from their daily catch. In fact, the story was crafted by Aguas with the inspiration of various Philippine myths.
Ida Del Mundo’s film Para Sa Kapwa tells the story of the first known Filipino to migrate to Canada, a fisherman named Ben Flores, as well as those who are making new homes and communities in Canada today. Angelene Marie Michael Meitzler’s The Girl, the Bird, and The Typhoon produces a new folk tale from the existential crisis of an elder migrant woman who has retired after working for 40 years in the US as a nurse, while Margarita Mina’s Baby Fat conjures the angst and alienation of Filipino-American youth who stains her malong skirt with ketchup.
The final film, Ara Chawdhury’s Operation Prutas, brings the program back to the Philippines, and is, admittedly, an outlier in theme and tone–a resourceful, gonzo comedy about an attempted heist of the Santo Niño de Cebú, the oldest Christian artifact in the country. Chawdhury recently moved to New York City and is herself making another new home here.
Discussions with the filmmakers will revolve around the worsening conditions in the Philippines that push many people to leave in the first place, and how we reconcile with that fact as we make other homes and creative practices abroad.
— A.E. Hunt
About the Speakers:
MARION AGUAS (he/they) is a queer trans-masc Filipino photographer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. He cut his teeth in the streets, documenting and organizing with the Filipino National Democratic movement and the W.O.W. Project, a women, queer, and trans-led community initiative that uses art and activism to protect NYC Chinatown’s culture. In 2017, he started a portrait project of queer Asian-Americans, which inevitably led him into the QTBIPOC nightlife and drag scenes in New York. Informed by his own experience as a trans person of color, Marion uses his camera to immortalize queer joy as a form of liberation.
He has shown work at The Wing Luke Museum, Red Hook Labs, and The San Diego Filipino Film Festival. He is currently a fellow at Baxter Street Camera Club, for the inaugural “Be Like Water” Fellowship for Asian-Americans photographers.
Catch him at the club.
He’ll dance with you and take your picture too.
ARA CHAWDHURY is a Bisaya Bengali immigrant translator, filmmaker, and theater maker. Her film Miss Bulalacao screened at the YBCA’s 2016 Best of Philippine Cinema program in San Francisco. She staged a devised multimedia play, “Maldisyon” in San Jose for the More Mas Marami company and self published the Cebuano English children’s book, Marichin Marukoy, Mangayo Ko’g Asin (May I Have Salt) which she is currently adapting into a stop motion film.
IDA ANITA DEL MUNDO is a multi-hyphenate Filipino American creative passionate about work that is culturally relevant, with diverse representation. She wrote and directed the feature film K’na, the Dreamweaver, which premiered at the 2014 Cinemalaya Film Festival (Manila, Philippines) where it received the awards for Best Production Design and Special Jury Prize. K’na the Dreamweaver also won Best of Show, the top prize at the 2015 Female Eye Film Festival in Toronto, Canada. K’na the Dreamweaver is the first feature film about the Tboli people of South Cotabato, Mindanao and the first film that uses the Tboli language.
Ida holds an MFA in Creative Writing from De La Salle University-Manila and an MPS in Directing from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Her latest short films Never Forget (Best Ensemble, International Film Festival Manhattan; Best Screenplay, SVA Apple Box Film Festival) and Anna, Greta, Sophie, and the Rainforest (Best Narrative Short, Films for the Forest) have been shown in festivals worldwide. Ida is an active member of the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema and has served on the jury of the NETPAC award at prestigious film festivals.
Ida is currently based in New York where she is a freelance filmmaker, editor, and graphic designer. She is also a documentary film instructor with the Educational Video Center.
ANGELINE MARIE MICHAEL MEITZLER is a writer and experimental 3D animator based in Berkeley, California. Her work utilizes fiction, history and natural phenomenon to engage with the complexities of cultural value. Her chapbook, A Drop of Sun, was published in 2023 by Fauxmoir Lit Press. Her work has been awarded support by Asian Cultural Council Individual Fellowship, Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, The City of Berkeley Civic Arts Program, The Studios at MASS MoCA Fellowship, MAAF & the New York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA), Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA), and Harvestworks. She received her MFA through the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago as a New Artists Society Scholar and is a VONA alum.
MARGARITA MINA is a Filipino filmmaker from Quezon City, currently based in Brooklyn, NYC. Utilizing digital video, film photography, and journal entries, her projects draw from a fascination with the weird intricacies of the female identity, the chaos of growing up, the stories of people on the margins, and the blurring of fiction with non-fiction in everyday documentation.
Her tiny stories have been shown in competition and workshopped all over the world, in the Singapore International Film Festival, Fribourg International Film Festival, Encounters Film Festival, among others.
She takes too many photographs and videos collected in mountains of hard drives.
MARIA ESTELA PAISO sometimes thinks that her dreams are memories from an alternate life she lives when she’s asleep. A filmmaker from the Philippines, she has been in post-production since 2016 and has also been creating hiphop music videos under the alias metromaria. She forayed into directing in 2021 with her first short Ampangabagat Nin Talakba Ha Likol (It’s Raining Frogs Outside), and was part of the 2024 Cannes Fortnight Directors’ Factory. She spends her free time trying to get a 100 at karaoke.
YV SALAZAR works as a creative assistant at a women-led creative agency in Makati, Philippines, but she honed her love for filmmaking during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her directing style is rooted in “protecting the inner child,” as she constantly seeks stories that not only “heal” her from her reserved past, but also explore values and culture that empower and young creatives.
Her directorial debut, Lingkis, a documentary short that tackles the decades-long injustices of the Philippine government through the lens of Filipino mythology, has been recognized by multiple local and international festivals, including INTERFILM Berlin and the Society of Filipino Film Reviewers in 2022. Then, upon graduating from Ateneo de Manila University in 2024, she briefly apprenticed under renowned director-cinematographer Dan Villegas, where she worked as a production assistant and media content creator for Project8Projects and its associated multi-awarded films such as Kono Basho, Sunshine, and Uninvited.
Fueled by her direct experiences, Salazar has since shifted to become involved in projects— not limited to film— in hopes of redefining safer spaces in Philippine production, and creating intentional, integral video campaigns with like-minded lifestyle brands.
ISABEL “SITA” MARGARITA VALENZUELA is an alumna from Ateneo de Manila University. She produces films that address socio-political realities in the Philippine setting. Her directorial debut Lingkis, an experimental documentary that traces the history of impunity in Philippine politics through Filipino mythology, is a multi-award winning short film recognized in local and international festivals such as the 34th Gawad Alternatibo and INTERFILM Berlin.
Her work foregrounds marginalized voices, most notably in Retaso, which follows a trans teenage girl and her mother as they discover acceptance, visibility, and solidarity within and beyond the LGBTIQ+ community. The film screened at international festivals including the Connecticut LGBTQ Film Festival, New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival, and more. Her most recent work, The Blind Man at the End of the World follows a criminal and a blind man journeying up a mountain as a comet looms overhead, framing an allegory about despair, human connection, and the conscious decision to find hope in a world devoid of it.
Valenzuela currently works as a Corporate Communications Associate, where she focuses on viewing sustainability as both a strategic discipline and a creative commitment, creating socially resonant, impact-driven cinema in her corporate practice.
Registration:
To attend the event in person, please register here.