AN INTRODUCTION
I’ve been collecting anecdotes from my lola, my mother and my aunts since I was a child. Ones that particularly stand out include the girls’ trips to Indonesia and the Philippines in order to visit relatives and attempt to connect with their heritage. They were so excited to leave New Jersey and embark on what they envisioned as a grand homecoming, only to find that they felt so estranged from the places they expected to feel most at home.
The portraits below are character studies of my mother and her three sisters-- existing as fractals of their mother, mirrors of one another, echoes of ancestors they have never met. This short film is the smaller scale portion of a longer project, which revisits a series of memories from a formative summer vacation. These intimate vignettes explore a broader narrative of first generation mixed race women in the throes of defining home, community, and identity-- through a deeply personal lens, rooted in the vivid reality of my own lineage.