EP. 22 - Navigating Filipino Storytelling and Filmmaking with Care featuring Joella Cabalu

Filipino Fridays

In celebration of Filipino Heritage Month in Canada, we are back with another episode featuring Filipino-Canadian filmmaker Joella Cabalu. The award winning director and producer joins us to talk about her new short film, 'Ode to a Seafaring People' featuring spoken word artist Sol Diana. A story that poetically reveals the often-hidden world of Filipino seafarers, and in doing so celebrates the resiliency of the Filipino community. Produced by Lantern Films, the film is one of the collection of stories featured in 'Behind the Facade', airing on Knowledge Network.

According to the Global Maritime Forum, about 400,000 of the world's 1.6 million seafarers are Filipino - contributing $6.14 Billion to the Philippine economy. Filipino seafarers are lauded to be the unsung heroes in the shipping industry and world trade.

Upon the development of the film, Joella wanted this film to be rooted in community and reach out to the Filipino Canadian arts & literary community to be a part of telling the story. Sol Diana was able to convey a moving story about the life of a Filipino seafarer. "It's a marvel how we make ghosts out of the living" - a compelling line that illustrates how Filipinos are often forgotten, overlooked and invisible. Even as major contributors in many sectors and industries, we find ourselves as living ghosts fighting for our representation to be known. We discuss at length on the great imbalance and disparity of our representation, along with the other factors that affect our ability to have conviction in our presence; internalized racism and identity insecurity where we find ourselves 'gaslighting' or second-guessing ourselves in what we are able to do. These are the results from colonial influence, capitalism and white supremacy - a reality we are still working through today. We talk about celebrating Filipino excellence in the arts and filmmaking, storytelling with care and the ongoing learning process of exploring our Filipino cultural identity.

Joella Cabalu is a Filipino Canadian documentary filmmaker based in Vancouver, BC. Her films lay bare narratives about intimacies, identities, and relationships.

Her first mid-length documentary, It Runs in the Family (2015) — a personal exploration of acceptance and what the modern queer family can be in the Filipino diaspora — won the Audience Choice Awards at the Seattle Asian American Film Festival and Vancouver Queer Film Festival and a special jury mention at CAAMFest for the Loni Ding Award for Social Justice Documentary. In 2021, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the DOC BC + YT + NWT Breakthrough program, Joella is developing Nakabingwit: First Comes Love, a feature-length documentary that follows four Filipino Canadians and their white partners as they navigate race and romance against the backdrop of Canadian multiculturalism. Nakabingwit is Joella’s first feature documentary as a director.

Joella is an alumni of the Langara Documentary Production Program (2015), the BC Arts Council Early Career Development program (2014-2015), Hot Docs Shaw Media Diverse Voices program (2015), and CBC Development Workshop for Diverse Creators (2016).