You dreamt you saw yourself but couldn’t see your face, You Dreamt You Saw Yourself But Couldn’t See Your Face

This film came about as I was asked to make a film about a place, and to find this place, I felt the need to follow the river — from where it meets the lake and flows inwards. I also felt I needed to move by bicycle and to find a way to get closer to the water. These things seemed to be telling me that this would be a film related to my father, who passed away in 2024, quite suddenly. He had asked to be cremated and that his ashes be scattered in the river in Arizona where he retired and the river where he grew up in his hometown in the Philippines. I remembered, after we scattered his ashes in the Philippines, surrounded by my father’s siblings and their own children and grandchildren, my aunt said she saw my father’s face in the water. I asked her what he looked like. She said he seemed to be smiling. It was only later on that I realized that the image of my father that she saw in the water was probably the reflection of a framed photograph of him which I was holding as we scattered his ashes in the water. 

I found that around the river here in Evanston, just north of Chicago, where I am currently based, there are fences which prevent you from getting close to the water. So I was continuously moving alongside the water but still quite separated from it. I remember asking a woman jogging and a man carrying a fishing pole, how I could get closer to the water. They all said to go south. When I finally got close the water, it was quite amazing but also kind of disappointing. The water was moving very slowly, actually almost still. A rower came with her kayak and glided into the river. That created more movement. I remembered how my aunt saw my father’s face in the river as we scattered his ashes and they drifted away. I wondered how I could project or reflect images onto the water. Since it was already late fall and getting colder, my teacher, Christina Nguyen, suggested I do some experiments at home. I ended up making a mini river in my bathtub and reflecting still photographs of my father onto the water. I layered this 16mm footage onto the digital footage I shot of the actual river.

When I first shot the actual river, before realizing the film was related to my father, it was with a Bolex and 16mm. It was so much fun, despite the physicality of the camera. I shot the mini-river in my bathtub on both 16mm and digital, and when I ran out of film, I returned to the actual river with my family to shoot on digital. I thought the only times we could shoot was while my kids were both in school or late at night when they’d be asleep so we would have less things to worry about. But in the end, we needed all the hands we could get. I realized I needed to involve them in the shoot somehow. It turned out to be a lot of fun shooting together. When reflecting images onto the water, we played with the angle of the printed photographs, the distance, and also the duration of the reflections. I wanted the images of my father to be fleeting, while the river keeps moving.

For me, it’s a lot of trial and error and finding a rhythm that feels right. I also go back and forth between working with the image and working with sound, so they end up very much informing each other. 

I really love working with sound, and sometimes it takes me a long time to work because I am not very good at the technical aspects. But perhaps because I don’t know so much about sound, I feel it is where I am truly free to play. As soon as I realized the film was related to my father, I dug through my hard drives and found some footage of him, which I juxtaposed with the sound of him whistling while he was in the shower. I had recorded this whistling maybe twenty years ago; it was my first time using a sound recorder. I tried copying his whistling, and recorded myself. Then there was a day last fall when the wind was very strong — so strong that it was howling and the door to our apartment made a kind of banging sound which was quite haunting. I felt this sound was like the past barging in on the present. I wanted to play with this sense of wind, both human and of nature, and how it can activate memories. I also wanted there to be a distinction between the outside world and the world within. In terms of the image, we don’t really see which images were shot indoors in my bathtub. Through sound, though, I wanted to move inside, not just indoors but towards an interior. The sound of water was another element that carries us inward and outward, and back and forth through time. 

My father was a man of few words. When I was a child, he once told me about a recurring dream he had in which he saw himself but couldn’t see his own face. That was a driving force for the still photographs of him that I decided to use — his face is never clearly visible. This echoes my own experience with my dad; as much as I knew him, he was also very much a mystery. One driving memory of him that influences my own ways with my kids was going to him to ask for help with something, and instead of doing it for me, he would reply: “Experiment!”