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PHOTO/MEDIA ART EXHIBITION



WEB SERIES



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Experience the vibrant celebration of love, diversity, and unity at the Seattle Pride Parade 2024 in this colorful and energetic video!







Evergreen Goodwill kicked off Pride Month 2024 by participating in White Center Pride, celebrating with love, empowerment, and community strength, and highlighting the spirit of unity and inclusivity that defines this vibrant community.







Evergreen Goodwill's 100th anniversary celebration was a momentous event, filled with gratitude for a century of transforming lives through sustainable retail and free job training and education.





filmmaking







Life-world Series (dir. Joni Gutierrez, 2017, 118 min.) is a collection of ten short film episodes that capture the essence of everyday life across various locations such as Hong Kong, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, mainland China, and the USA.

  1. Hong Kong: Study One (7:35, Hong Kong) — Visual and aural environment of Hong Kong taken from the continuum between the human masses to the non-living elements of the life-world.
  2. Study Two: Young Filipino-Hongkongers (13:49, Hong Kong) — Portrays the subjectivities of young Filipino-Hongkongers in two parts namely, direct cinema coverage and shots from interviews on their aspirations.
  3. Study Three: Floating Notes (13:15, Japan) — Interplays simultaneous interjections of titles, still photographs and asynchronous sound - all drawn from empirical perceptual experience - to cinematically render the modern condition.
  4. Study Four: Resilient Textures (20:15, Vietnam) — Contemplation on the shared patterns and textures between nature and spiritually inspired art.
  5. Study Five: 雨 (Rain) (14:01, Hong Kong) — A cinematic meditation on rain, this piece poignantly follows the arrival, presence, departure and aftermath of a storm in the city. Inspired by Regen (Joris Ivens, 1929)
  6. Study Six: Return Home (14:00, Indonesia & Hong Kong) — Quotidian travel footage interweaving with still shots outside the main route complicate the rational concept of final destination.
  7. Study Seven: The Street (7:12, Hong Kong) — Simultaneously playing multiple screens highlight the cinematic medium's affinity with movement and – as seen in this panoramic mosaic form – the flow of life.
  8. Study Eight: Intercity (12:16, Mainland China & USA) — Alternating shots taken from two cities thousands of miles apart and sequenced from the mundane to the transcendent invoke a trance-like unpacking of the essence of city life.
  9. Study Nine: Yard Life (6:00, USA) — The wind, which is invisible but cinematic, invokes the animated life-world without having to show humans and animals - only their artefacts, which also 'breathe life'.
  10. Study Ten: Under the Bridge (9:04, USA) — With an evocative piece by Beethoven in the background, this cinematic experience of meaningful formations in nature fosters insight on the ever-expansive life-world in which conceptual rationality is only one of the many elements.

This anthology was part of my Ph.D. dissertation. Even after completing my doctorate, I have remained dedicated to the Life-world Series Project, continually creating new short films under its umbrella. These films, which expand on the themes and perspectives explored in the original series, are available on YouTube. I hope they provide viewers with moments of reflection and a renewed appreciation for the beauty within the ordinary aspects of life.







In the experimental film, Twelve Hundred Miles (dir. Joni Gutierrez, 2015, 44 min.), I juxtapose scenes of Hong Kong and Beijing shot in 2014. It exhibits my perspective as a foreign postgraduate student who is faced with a strong need to understand the intricacies within Hong Kong and mainland China relations. Interacting with the poetry of Kristian Agustin, the HK-Beijing binary is made complex and nuanced by an interspersion of thematic photo-montages from Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Macau, Zhongshan, and Suzhou. The film consciously suspends the adversarial attitude between the two to allow the collective unconscious - invoked by cinematic visualizations of culture and history - to present alternative and more inspired ways of understanding.


This film was featured in the Twelve Hundred Miles Apart / 千里之遙 似曾相識 exhibition at the Koo Ming Kown Gallery, Hong Kong, in June 2015.







In this observational documentary, Green (dir. Joni Gutierrez, 2013, 69 min.), I used the direct cinema style to refamiliarize myself with my family who immigrated to the United States eight years before the time that I was able to start visiting them. As a result of this process of behavioral study through filmmaking, this documentary intimately portrays a phenomenology of Filipino-American experience as well as my personal perspective as an outsider looking in.



"... a full-length cinema verite docu, part-travelogue, part memory piece, that is so honest in its rendering, so emotional in its delivery, GREEN stands as a signature work for documenting Filipino immigrant life in America. Bravo!” - Mauro Feria Tumbocon Jr, Filipino American Cine (FACINE) Festival Director


In the same year that this film was released, my article "Philippines, Migration, 1948 to Present" was published in The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (2013), edited by Immanuel Ness, Blackwell Publishing. It includes a significant section on Filipino Americans. Please feel free to read the article.