The Call , 2022.

"In tuning in with the forces of a life event, a form is attained only to manifest the formless". - Trinh T. Minh-ha.

An ethnographic fiction set in the 1960's on the steps of the Fisher Fine Arts Library at the University of Pennsylvania, The Call imagines a convergence between my mother, a young nursing student from Iloilo Philippines, and composer Maryanne Amacher, who studied composition with Stockhausen at the time. UPenn marked my mother’s first home on American soil, a beginning of what she discretely said were her first memories of happiness. She never spoke of her childhood in the Philippines.

In the absence of those stories and within the impossibility of fully knowing her, The Call listens to friendship, migration, maternal silence, and interior life as intertwined forms of transmission.

Credits

Lauren Tosswill, MaryAnne Amacher

Germee Ronirose,  mother (Rena Borromeo Villamil)

Conceived, filmed & scored by Grace Villamil

With support by:  Eugene Lew, Director of Sound & Music Technology, UPenn &Mindy Solis, artist.