Directing
A funeral. A cremation. An attempt to articulation. To (fail to) purge. Flipping the image on the burning, destruction and violence decades ago, the filmmaker documents a funeral and cremation she held for the ethnic hate still spoken to her 20 years later. Can memories be erased? What can we choose to forget? What continues to haunt us?
A woman visits all the different places of worship to ask all the gods for revenge. After many rounds of whispering her secret wishes, desires, prayers, and pleas, she comes to an epiphanic realization.
Notes from Silences gathers fractured memories from Vieques and Bali, two islands on opposite ends of the world that seem like "paradise fantasy" on the surface, but conceal a common buried history. Unplanned footage, photographs, and snippets of voice recordings intertwine with the sounds of nonhuman kin that bore witness when humans choose to forget. Beneath what seems to be banalities of everyday life, lies the loudest echo of violence: the silences people continue to keep.