TA ACORDA BA TU EL FILIPINAS? (Sally Gutiérrez Dewar)

Ta Acorda ba Tu el Filipinas? (Do You Remember the Philippines?) is a non fiction film seeking to explore the traces of overlapping waves of globalization from the past and the present.
In a multi-layered dialogue between Spain and its former Asian colony, the Philippines, shadows of former world empires and current post-colonial cross-hatchings emerge through the pluralism of language itself- language understood both in terms of the labyrinthine complexity of multilingual identities in a fragmented archipelago, and also as formal experimentation in cinematic discourse.
Through non-linear narration, the project intertwines the lives, the memories and the spaces of different speech communities: Members of the Spanish-speaking Community who still speak the Filipino Spanish, which is unique to the Philippines, and Chabacano-speakers from Zamboanga in the island of Mindanao.
Chabacano is a Malay-based Creole language that originated 400 years ago and shows a mix of elements from European and Mexican Spanish as well as from Indigenous Latin American languages, all of which were brought into contact by the world-spanning trading routes of the Spanish Empire. The structure of Chabacano itself thus bears witness to the earliest wave of globalization.

Ta acordaba Filipinas? Also explores the function of language as both a vehicle and a re-shaping of memory, personal and collective. As the off-voice puts it in Chris Marker´s Sans Soleil “I have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its reverse. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.”

Dirigida por SALLY GUTIERREZ DEWAR producida por GABRIELA GUTIERREZ DEWAR escrita por SALLY GUTIERREZ y GABRIELA GUTIERREZ DEWAR dirección de fotografía RAQUEL FERNÁNDEZ NÚÑEZ montaje ANA PFAFF