Nervous Translation

Three people start a strange therapy to escape their agonies. Each attempts to process those they lost during the Marcos dictatorship while examining their own grief.

Sarah is a debt collector who lives among the inhabitants of the village of Guimbal on the island of Panay. She wants to find the young man who appeared to her in a dream and goes to the island of Negros. Here, as she interacts with the inhabitants, Sarah continues her search, gathering memories of life and war, dreams, myths, legends, songs and stories that she takes part in and at times revolve around her. She is the daughter of an ancient mermaid, a revolutionary, a primordial element, a virgin who was kidnapped and hidden away from the sunlight. “The film is a retelling of fragments of the American occupation. Dialogue, shot in the Hiligaynon language, is not translated but used as a tonal guide and a tool for narration. Using unscripted scenes shot where the main character was asked to merely interact with the villagers, I discard dialogue and draw meaning from peoples’ faces, voices, and actions, weaving an entirely different story through the use of subtitles and inter-titles.”

A culmination of several years of shooting, editing, relocation, and reflection—acclaimed experimental filmmaker Miko Revereza forges a personal and profound portrait of immigration, disillusionment, and the elusiveness of home.

A grieving detective finds himself increasingly ensnared while investigating a case involving a sinister navigation app causing physical and psychological debris.

Tuding sets out on a journey to a distant town to track down the man who got her youngest sister pregnant, and she’s not going home without him. A pancit western set in the late-1940s.

BIG BOY is a coming-of-age tale about a boy and his family in 1950s Mindoro, Philippines, and how he is groomed into becoming the poster boy for his parent's home-based business. The film is an experimental portrait of a family amidst change -- an experience that will engage audiences in something strange but familiar.

'Seeing Machines' documents three important arteries in Toronto: the Spadina streetcar line, the National railroad, and the pedestrian tunnel connecting the city's two main subway lines.

Trunks are the parts of trees that we relate to on a face-to-face basis. In Little India, human trunks have sprouted out of concrete.

After a series of unpleasant events in her life, Pascalina receives news that her Aunt Taba is dying but cannot do so unless she passes on a curse. Pascalina visits her dying aunt thinking that the news is only a big joke. But Pascalina begins to experience changes in her life that will push her to the edge of madness and monstrosity.

A short, hand-processed film by Shireen Seno.

Originally exhibited as a six-channel installation, this ongoing work is comprised of a series of studies of the migration of birds in and out of the Philippines, a kindred project to a feature-length film inspired by memories of my father’s migration to the United States in the early 2000s. Birds, and ducks in particular, are like role models for humans— they find ways to survive by various means across varied terrain. I hope to bring together a mix of local birds and migratory ones, migrating across different generations of moving image media.

Shireen Seno’s video essay explores the transformation and commodification of nature through archival photographs from the American colonial occupation of the Philippines in the first half of the 20th century. These images testify to what the voiceover calls “the sticky relationship between humans and nature and their entanglements with empire”—an ambivalent dependence on natural resources that drives the colonial project and implicates photography, with its concurrent processes of preservation, transmutation, and destruction.

A quiet whistling returned from childhood; the calm of a sky and a river dissolving into one another, from which emerges the image of a loved one. For the duration of a reflection, the water reveals memories and offers the delicacy of a glimpse into the course of a life.