Film Screening + Artist Talk: "Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso" (Philippines)

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Photo: Stephanie Comilang, Director of "Lumapit sa akin, Paraiso" (2017).


Film Screening + Artist Talk with the film's director, Stephanie Comilang

Thursday, January 12, 2017
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Experimental Digital Arts, 1250 Broad Art Center
UCLA Campus
Los Angeles, CA 90095
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voidLab presents a screening and artist talk on female domestic labor, gendered migration, and science fiction. We shall show "Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me Paradise)," and have invited the film’s director, Stephanie Comilang to give an artist talk.

"Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me Paradise)" is a science fiction documentary by Stephanie Comilang that uses the backdrop of Hong Kong and the various ways in which the Filipina migrant worker occupies Central on Sundays. The film is narrated from the perspective of Paraiso, a ghost played by a drone who speaks of the isolation from being uprooted and thrown into a new place. Paraiso’s reprieve comes when she is finally able to interact with the women and feel her purpose, which is to transmit their vlogs, photos, and messages back home. During the week she is forced back into isolation and is left in an existential rut.

The film uses Hong Kong’s dystopian maze like structures that the Filipina migrants reimagine and focuses on the beauty of care-giving but also explores how technology is used as a pivotal way for the women to connect - to each other but also to loved ones. Raising questions around modern isolation, economic migration, and the role of public space in both urban and digital forms, the film transcends its various component parts to offer a startling commentary on the present, from the point of view of the future.

Screening 002 of the Decentralizing the Web project which cultivates critical evaluations of online presence through an intersectional feminist lens. Panels aim to untangle the psycho-social implications of identity politics on the global web, examining the embedded biases driving dominant modes of representation in digital spaces.


Cost : Free and open to the public.

Sponsor(s): Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Asia Pacific Center, voidLab, Will Davis