The Call is a short ethnographic fictional film set in the early 1960's on the steps of the Fisher Fine Arts Library at the University of Pennsylvania. It imagines a quiet convergence between my mother—a young nursing student from Iloilo, Philippines and composer Maryanne Amacher, who was studying composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the time. UPenn marked my mother’s first landing place on American soil and the beginning of what she later 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 ever fully knowing her—the film works through speculation, sound, and absence. Through this condition, The Call listens to friendship, migration, maternal silence, and interior life as intertwined forms of transmission.

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

Credits

Lauren Tosswill as MaryAnne Amacher

Germee Ronirose as my mother (Rena Borromeo Villamil)

Conceived, filmed & scored by Grace Villamil

With support from Mindy Solis (artist) & Eugene Lew, Director of Sound & Music Technology, UPenn.