Exploring Spanish and American Colonialism to Post-Colonialism: A Filipina American’s Creative Process

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Filmmaker Angel Velasco Shaw will screen her first two experimental documentaries and discuss the creative process and relationship to her own on-going interest in exploring the effects of Spanish and American colonialism, and empire building on Filipino/American experiences from a transnationalist perspective.

BALIKBAYAN (Return To Home): Super-8 film mastered on 3/4.” 13 minutes. 1988.

Documentary about the filmmaker’s journey back to her ancestral homeland as a young adult. The piece examines the contradictions of some Filipino realities: i.e. poverty, religion, political upheaval from a Filipina American’s perspective. The images were manipulated in a pixillated style in a homage to Impressionist movement, emphasizing the transient yet profound nature of her experience. (producer, camera, writer, editor)

NAILED: Documentary 1992. Video 8 mastered on 3/4.” 50 minutes.
Distributor: Third World Newsreel. Collection: Museum of Modern Art, New York Film & Video Archives and  Casa Asia film archive, Barcelona, Spain.

A poetically woven montage of images, sounds, stories and performances. Questions about “faith” are raised in relationship to Catholicism, Spanish and American colonialism from the artist’s perspective. The piece examines how, why and what Filipinos worship and its effects on our continuing national, cultural, and personal identity struggles. The project was inspired by Lucy Reyes, a woman who re-enacted the crucifixion every Good Friday for 21 years. (Producer, Director, Camera, Writer & Editor)

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Author Bio

Presented By:

Angel Velasco Shaw is a film/video maker, writer, cultural activist, curator, and educator. Videos screened nationally and internationally include “The Momentary Enemy,” “Blowback,” “Umbilical Cord,” “Asian Boys,” “Nailed,” and “Balikbayan/Return to Home.” She is co-editor along with Luis H. Francia of the anthology, “Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream: 1899-1999” (New York University Press, 2002).

Velasco Shaw is currently an adjunct lecturer at Hunter College teaching in the Asian American Studies Program. She was a core faculty member in the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program at New York University where she taught media, cultural, and community studies courses from 1995-2006. She has also taught at Columbia University, The New School For Social Research, and Pratt Institute.

In 2009, she completed producing a series of cross-cultural exchange project called “Trade Routes: Converging Cultures: Southeast Asia and Asian America.” It consisted of artists residencies, artists’ talks, workshops, exhibitions, performance, and film screenings in the capital city of Manila and three provincial cities in the Philippines with women artists from Indonesia, Singapore, the U.S. and the Philippines.