By Kilian Melloy

An “empire of attraction,” a safe space for Filipina lesbians, and a community of shared experience, mutual support, and “daisy-chaining lovers” — such is the description offered by filmmakers Desireena Almoradie (she/they) and Barbara Malaran (they/them) in Because of You: A History of Kilawin Kolektibo ( https://kilawinfilm.com/ ).

The doc traces the history of Kilawin Kolektibo, “a pioneering collective that came together in NYC in the mid-nineties,” as the film’s press notes explain. “Having experienced marginalization in Filipino culture because of their queerness and in mainstream gay culture because of their race, language, and gender, the members of the group sought political empowerment and increased visibility,” the notes add.

Malaran and Almoradie were very much in the middle of things as the collective coalesced, pulsated with energy, and swirled with passions personal and political. Malaran went on to compile a lengthy resume as a video artists, with their work being featured at a number of museums; they have also been honored with the Open Initiative Artist Fellowship at The Kitchen, NY, as well as winning an NYSCA grant, a Barbara Hammer Experimental Filmmaker Grant, and a Prism Foundation Grant for Because of You. Almoradie worked on the PBS series In the Life, for which she bestowed a GLAAD Media Award and nominated for an Emmy. “Most recently,” the doc’s notes add, “Desireena was awarded a NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Prism Foundation Grant, the Barbara Hammer Experimental Filmmaking Grant, and the New York State Council on the Arts grant.”

Both a look back and a follow-up on the lives of the filmmakers as they reconcile after a quarter century, Because of You recalls a remarkable moment that lives on in the present day and speaks to the joy of the greater queer community — and especially the community that was this collective. Almoradie and Malaran joined QulturVultur for a chat recently to discuss the collective, the long arc traced by the documentary from its origins to its completion, and, now, its impending inclusion at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and its streaming premiere at Open Television ( https://www.weareo.tv/vision ).

QulturVultur: It feels like this documentary is a mission to transmit cultural knowledge as much as to document a collective or a movement.

Desireena Almoradie: You could say that. We came at it from a very specific viewpoint: Filipinx, queer, mostly lesbian, although some do not identify as lesbian within the group. But we knew that we had a universal story. The reason to do this story is to connect this very specific milieu to something that’s much larger. And that’s what we’re finding when we’re showing at festivals, in educational settings, in community settings; people are coming up to us and saying, “This is really what’s happened in my life,” whether it’s a young queer Filipina organizer or a white, gay young person who’s trying to fight for their rights.

Barbara Malaran: We did this to address something very specific, and we are still discovering and learning a lot from viewers who offer other ideas in terms of what they’re finding about themselves. It’s really about that storytelling power [that] has just been amazing to experience.

QulturVultur: It was so interesting to see how many of the people speaking in the movie are identified with the last name Kilawin, as if it’s a family more than a movement or a collective.

Desireena Almoradie: That’s a really great point. Some of us have not connected in decades, and once we started making this film and started reaching out to people — we wanted to make sure that they were okay with what we were doing; I mean, this footage is from the ’90s, and who knows if people even remember that we filmed them? We certainly didn’t get releases from anyone. But once we were committed to creating a film and getting it seen, we went to the people we had talked to years before and asked permission and asked for their buy-in. And when we contacted them, it felt like we had seen them yesterday, especially [since] we were working with all this archival material. It was like old friends coming back together, and it was like we never lost a beat. We still kind of understood each other.

Some of us are back in the Philippines now. Some of us have kids now. It’s really moving to think about how that’s a connection that’s transcended space and time and divisions. We’re across oceans, and we’re just a chat or call away. So, yeah, it’s really about a family — a dysfunctional family.

[Laughter]

QulturVultur: The only kind! Speaking of the archival material, what was it like to be working with that material now, both in terms of the technical challenges, but also the emotional experience?

Barbara Malaran: I think that’s a very deep question to ask, because there was a lot of untouched emotions going back through the footage again. I had a camera with me everywhere during that time, and I kind of put [the footage] away, not thinking that it could turn into anything. When we had this opportunity to bring out the footage, I found myself [spending] hours and hours kind of reliving all of those moments, all the good and the bad, and addressing things that I struggled with when I was in my younger years. I found that very cathartic. Des, what did you think of when you were going through your footage?

Desireena Almoradie: We’ve been living with this project for many years, and it’s been out on the festival circuit for about a year now, so it’s hard to think of a time when it was a fresh thing for me looking at this footage. It’s surprising how much younger we were, and how full of energy we were, but in looking back at all that footage I feel like we’ve changed so much, and yet we’re still the same people. I’m very happy that I never got rid of those tapes, and that Barb never got rid of those tapes, because there was definitely pressure from living in small New York City apartments, having a child. It’s like, what do you need these tapes for? They’re accumulating dust. What are you going to do with them? So, we did something with them.

QulturVultur: What was it that crystallized so that you decided to put it all together and make this film after all these years?

Desireena Almoradie: There’s a group called Filipino American National History Society ( https://www.fanhs-national.org/ ), and their New York City Chapter wanted to do an event about the history of Filipino American activism in New York City. One of the groups they talked to were like, “Well, you can’t do that story without Kilawin,” so they contacted us. Our archivist, Panday Banale, was an amazing photographer. You see her photographs in the film. I did a presentation on Zoom, and there was just so much response to that. The chat was lighting up. People were really interested in this story, and some of them lived the story. And I was like, “I’ve always wanted to do something with this footage,” right? So, that was the spark for me to be like, “Okay, we need to really make this a thing, instead of just one PowerPoint presentation.” I’d been estranged from Barb, but, through Panday, we reconnected. It was twofold: Knowing that this history was really important and needed to be told, but also reconnecting with an old friend I’d had a falling out with and working on our issues through the making of the film. 

QulturVultur: You two reconnecting is such a powerful moment in the film.

Barbara Malaran: We were both vulnerable — in the middle of nowhere, right? That was unscripted. Many of the events that we lived through during that time were very vulnerable moments. I think part of that led to the way we created the stories in our pieces — from the first part, “I Love You”; second part, “I Hate You”; [and] the third part, “I Forgive You” — to give some kind of resonance to the vulnerability and that power of storytelling.

QulturVultur: The film covers so much ground — personal, social, political. How did you decide what to include?

Desireena Almoradie: There’s a lot of footage that was embarrassing — like, how much of this should we put in, all the sexy dancing at the at the campaign, whatever else went on at the campaign. We alluded to a lot of that stuff. I mean, we made sure to edit it in a way that’s dignified and not insulting or compromising to anyone who didn’t want to be seen in a certain way. [And] a lot of the footage was actually unusable.

Barbara Malaran: I feel like a lot of my stuff evokes a lot of feeling. I like to call it the B-roll tapes. Dez brought a lot of the structure in through her tapes, because she was working on a separate project of interviewing folks around that time, and so we blended our footage together to give more of a rounded-out story. 

Desireena Almoradie: I think an important part of the creative process was the writing. You never really think about writing a documentary, but we needed to figure out what story we were telling, and once we decided on the structure — this kind of coming together, falling in love, breaking up and then reconciling — that determined what footage we were going to use, and what footage we needed to add. Some of the footage, obviously, we had to shoot in the present day to be able to tell a cohesive story. Once we got out of the idea of, “Oh, this is a documentary, we’re supposed to tell what happened through the footage that we have,” once we decided that we would do a fairly experimental way of telling the story, then it kind of fell together and determined what footage we needed.

QulturVultur: Did you have a sense at the time that inevitably people would move away, there would be breakups, there would be fallings out, things would fade?

Barbara Malaran: I’ll be my eternal youthful self and say, No, we never change. But the beauty about that is life transforms, right? There was so much joy, that I felt together, as a group, we could do anything. I felt like I can do everything in my life forever, because I was getting very good at it, and I felt so supported and loved. As I look back at it, I’m like, “That’s amazing to see this happen with other folks, the joy of experiencing the love.” Life gives those curve balls. We found our way of working through stuff.

QulturVultur: The doc explains that the Pinay were migrant workers, and it references trafficking. Can you tell me a little more about that?

Desireena Almoradie: When we were starting the group, we had come from what you might think of as much more overtly political groups like GABRIELA Network ( https://www.gabrielausa.org/ ), which was a group of Filipinos. They’re a feminist group based in the Philippines, but there was also a network all over the world. One of the major issues that we were facing then, as Filipino migrant people who emigrated from the Philippines or are children of immigrants, was trafficking. A lot of women were being pretty much sold in these mail order bride catalogs; basically, you could pick a woman and have a mail order bride come to you, and there were a lot of issues with abuse. All over the world, white men were buying Filipinas to be their brides, and that was something that we fought against. There was a lot of violence in Australia — we mentioned that [in the documentary] regarding that film Priscilla [Queen of the Desert]. The film was kind of making light of this really horrible thing. It was really offensive. And then [there was] what happened in Seattle with a man who killed his wife because his mail order bride was trying to divorce him. We tried to connect that with our struggle as queer women, as queer people. There was violence against queer people at the time, and there was violence against Filipinas at the time, and there still is, obviously.

QulturVultur: This may be a little frivolous, but is there really a secret Kilawan handshake?

[Laughter]

Desireena Almoradie: Of course there is, and if you ever get inducted as an honorary member I’ll make sure to show it to you.

This interview has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.

Because of You will have its streaming premiere on Friday, June 5^th on the streaming platform Open Television (OTV) https://watch.weareo.tv/  More info on OTV: https://www.weareo.tv/vision