Across fiction, video essay, and genre play, Shireen Seno’s films revisit Philippine history through intimate, unexpected vantage points. Whether filtered through the quiet imaginative world of a child, the colonial reordering of landscape through archival images, or the playful subversion of genre staples, her works interrogate the formation of memory and identity. Moving fluidly between personal memory and historical critique, her films offer tender yet incisive reflections on colonial aftermaths and the possibilities of reclaiming marginal narratives.

Nervous Translation (2018, Shireen Seno)

Director: Shireen Seno
Runtime: 90 mins
Country: Philippines
Language: Tagalog with English Subtitles
Rating: PG

Synopsis

Shy yet quietly observant, 8-year-old Yael spends her days cooking miniature meals, watching television, and listening to cassette tapes her father sends home from Riyadh. When she discovers a pen that promises to translate the thoughts and feelings of nervous people, Yael is determined to spend all her savings on it.

Set in 1987 during the aftermath of the People Power Revolution, Nervous Translation captures a time of political and cultural precarity through the naive yet perceptive eyes of a child who longs to be heard.

To Pick A Flower (2021, Shireen Seno)

Director: Shireen Seno
Runtime: 17 mins
Country: Japan, Philippines
Language: English with English Subtitles
Rating: PG

Synopsis

“My mother used to tell me that our dining table was as old as I am. I wonder how old the tree was when it was cut down to be turned into our table.”

Centred on Kolambugan, a town established by an American businessman, To Pick a Flower confronts the colonial exploitation that reshaped both lands and lives in the Philippines under American occupation. Drawing on early 20th-century archival photographs, the film exposes the mechanisms of extraction and commodification that transformed nature into a means for profit and possession.

Shotgun Tuding (2014, Shireen Seno)

Director: Shireen Seno
Runtime: 13 mins
Country: Malaysia, Philippines
Language: English, Tagalog with English Subtitles
Rating: PG13

Synopsis

Tuding, a young woman, rides into the town of Bacayan on horseback, toting a shotgun. Her quest: the man who left her younger sister pregnant.

A loving homage to the Pancit Westerns of 1960s Philippine cinema, Shireen Seno’s 16mm film subverts the genre by casting the lone gunslinger as a woman navigating a hypermasculine world, reworking the conventions of frontier justice through a distinctly female perspective.

This screening is part of the programme Prasasti / Inscriptions: Unearthing Intertwined Legacies. For more screenings of this programme. Please click here. 

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