“Our endless impossible journey home is our home”
David Foster Wallace
In Berlin, there are over a hundred different film festivals from all over the world. However, even in 2015, there wasn’t a single festival solely dedicated to showcasing Filipino films. We wanted to change this. Thus, we started the first and only festival of Filipino films in Berlin. I partnered with Rosa Cordillera Castillo who headed the Philippine Studies Series Berlin and Trinka Lat, a production designer, filmmaker, and producer, who, like me, are Berlin-based Filipinos eager to not only create a platform for emerging Filipino filmmakers and artists, but to also—in parallel— showcase the presence of a significant, diverse, and underrepresented community in Berlin as well as films that would feature fragments of a complex, oft-misunderstood, and evolving culture. In short: the festival, which we would later call “The First Reel”, was about making Filipino voices heard.
To reach out to Filipinos, I would visit the Bayernallee church every Sunday. The church was the epicenter of the traditional Filipino meeting place for Filipinos in Berlin. The Bayernallee community recently celebrated its 30th Anniversary in Berlin. Although I identify as an agnostic, I knew that religion was important to most Filipinos. Although there are small pockets of other Filipino communities in Berlin, often composed of people who, much like myself, are a multi-hyphenated mix of artists, students, and vagabonds who never quite felt at “home” even at home, the older generation of the Bayernallee community was different. Having been based in Berlin for several decades, they were steadfast and grounded in the lives that they had built in Europe. Their feet were planted solidly in Germany, while their hearts still, in many ways longed for the Philippines. I often visited people in their homes and more often than not, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in between cultures and in between eras. Even in the most German of neighborhoods, some people would decorate their spaces with a halo-halo of items: on one corner, a Sto. Niño statue, while on the other, a smiling Buddha icon, and on the wall, a German adventskalendar. For many of them, most of whom had come to Berlin even before the wall fell and before Berlin was the ‘multi-kulti’ hub it is now, they were eager to bridge the gap between what non-Filipinos—and sometimes, even Filipinos who had not been back for generations—imagined about the Philippines. In some cases, these foreign perceptions ranged from the country as a simple island paradise to the nerve center for terrorism and violence. They, like myself, wanted to counter these views. But in the simplest of terms, they also wanted to escape the harsh Berlin winter and immerse themselves in a darkened theater where the images and sounds and situations of home were screened back onto them. They wanted to see Filipino stories made by Filipinos. And most of all, perhaps they also just wanted to have a piece of home abroad.
* This post was originally written for The Manila Bulletin in 2016.
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