Dear you,
Some big news. My short film “We kept warm” premieres at the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival this week. You can buy tickets to PAAFF’s Are We Alone? shorts program here and watch anytime between November 4 (7PM EST / 7AM the next day PHT) and November 14 (11:59PM EST / 12:59PM the next day PHT).
You can also watch me talk about the film with the other filmmakers in the same shorts program at the live Q&A on November 6 (11AM EST / 11PM PHT).
I feel like I usually know how to talk about my work, but a satisfactory explanation for “We kept warm” has been elusive. It was a film that shapeshifted at every stage of production, that took me to the point of madness several times over. And now that people can see it, I’ve been struggling to find the words to tell you how I made it, figuring out what parts of this messy, overwhelming process are pertinent to someone viewing the work it produced.
In the film, you will meet Nemo, a woman who whiles away the hours alone in her apartment. She cooks her meals, she does her laundry, she knits and knits and knits a sweater. As she does all this, she staves off what feels like the world collapsing outside her four walls.
Perhaps it’s worth saying that “We kept warm” began because I wanted to write a bad poem. The form that had once felt so natural to me had long become a foreign language I knew enough of to decipher if someone else was speaking it, but, on my own, could only form stilted, broken phrases in.
So I thought, what if this character only had these awkward phrases and trite rhymes to reveal this emotional weight, this interior world of mourning. The poem was the backbone of the early versions of the script and, while the words never made it to the film itself, I think the poem’s spirit lingers in it. Which is to say that grief is a language we are struggling to learn. Which is to say that sometimes surviving grief means breaking and remaking our language for it—means making minutiae a vehicle towards the true.
I was so profoundly affected by the isolation, the stillness and the doom from the first several months of lockdown and I wanted to work towards a visual lexicon for its strangeness—to unravel this grief by learning to play games with it. I was also drawn to the idea of knitting: its patterns of repetition, the way that you can knit a sweater that never ends, the way a sweater insulates you but also makes you more flammable.
Somehow we got to cast Cindy, whose work in Tanghalang Ateneo plays like Sintang Dalisay I had found so spellbinding. Somehow we pulled together a team of people willing to shoot a film in two days in lockdown and bear with a director who felt insane the entire time, who sat with me through Zoom calls about what this film was at all.
For two days, we holed up in Vince’s apartment to shoot the film, and I think everyone came in with new ideas and elements to build Nemo’s emotional world. Cindy and I learned how to knit1 and had long conversations about the feeling of disappearing. I told Sasha I wanted to shoot on just phones and webcams to capture the visual quality2 of how we saw our worlds in lockdown. Whammy did his magic and pulled together this entire world of knits and color. He even found a ceramic cat tangled in yarn. Her name is Bernadette and she stays with me to this day.
Slo had this clear vision of what Nemo’s makeup looked like: sparkling, bright and melancholy3. Meanwhile, in between running logistics and putting out fires4 and asking me very hard questions about the shape of this film, Tony basically held me together for the entire period of making “We kept warm” and I could not have done it without her.
I did a first cut in a couple of days and Paolo came in to refine my very raw edit and turn it into what it is now. We added music from BP and Jorge before AA filled out the film’s sonic spaces with sound design. Miko colored the film and Augie worked on the trippy visual effects.
Making “We kept warm” was, itself, a game that I had to learn to play, whose rules I had to abide by, whose caprices I had to open myself up to, and I’m so glad to have made it through all of that to this new part of the film’s journey.
But even now, this film continues to elude me. I’m certain I’m not done talking or thinking about this same sorrow; I am mourning something new at any given moment. But I hope the film helps chip away at all we still carry from the last year and a half. I hope it feels warm and strange and becomes a way for you, too, to play a little game with grief.
We kept warm in a hopeless place,
Apa
The scarf she made at home was way nicer than mine.
A phone is probably the camera that feels most like an extension of your own eye.
There’s one look Slo created that I can’t wait for all of you to see.
Figuratively and literally.