Angel Velasco Shaw

A documentary film by filmmaker couple Egay Navarro and Rica Concepcion. It focuses on the life of Baguio artist Roberto Villanueva, known for his distinct approach to artmaking that included community participation.

This film is a poetic composition of recorded history and non-recorded memory. Filmmaker Rea Tajiri’s family was among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And like so many who were in the camps, Tajiri’s family wrapped their memories of that experience in a shroud of silence and forgetting. This film raises questions about collective history – questions that prompt Tajiri to daringly re-imagine and re-create what has been stolen and what has been lost.

An exploration of the Catholic Church and 400 years of colonialism in the Pacific region is woven in a montage of images, sounds, stories and performances. Inspired by Lucy Reyes, a woman who has been re-enacting the Crucifixion for 16 years by being nailed to across. The video looks at the implications of worship, national, cultural, and personal identity.

Acting as a 24-minute time capsule of Baguio’s art scene throughout the years 1988 to 1998, the short film presents short snippets of artists’ daily lives through market runs and group gatherings.