Foreign funding

Yang Ki: Made in Hong Kong (d. Kidlat Tahimik)

Japanese Summers of a Filipino Fundoshi (d. Kidlat Tahimik)

What does it mean for a filmmaker from the Philippines making a documentary about a young family and their baby daughter (Yang Ki) in Hong Kong with German sponsorship? is a question that isn’t asked in the work. And it’s a glaring issue in the film. Tahimik is clearly sympathetic to their plight by focusing on the poor labor laws that fail to protect vulnerable employees. Yang Ki’s mother was injured in the job while her husband works long hours in the tollway, which Tahimik notes, means breathing toxic fumes all day. The comparisons being made are with Europe and the United States. Why not the Philippines, too? In effect, he becomes a spokesperson for the more progressive West or that the west is positioned as such. For a film and filmmaker that tackles colonialism, isn’t this positioning very much of the westernized colonized? Even the tacked on “economic analysis” (Tahimik reportedly has an MBA from Wharton), isn’t that comical or insightful. Revealingly, he does this act literally (and inexplicably) whitefaced, which goes to show you how unaware he is of his own westernized colonial identity.

The second film is a much weaker work. It would appear that Tahimik has sons from his marriage to a German woman. What he doesn’t realize is the problematic optics of his children wearing Filipino indigenous garb performing traditional dances for a Japanese audience. This is the biggest issue with Tahimik, this carelessness when it comes to appropriating a specific indigenous identity as his own and the permissiveness he gives to his sons to inhabit the same identity. Reportedly, the filmmaker isn’t an Igorot, the tribal identity that he has assumed and continues to do so. I feel that he has adopted this semi-fictional identity as a response to his experiences abroad: if westerners will not accept him as an equal, since he was educated at Penn and in Paris in the 60s, he will outdo them with an identity that the westerners cannot match, the fictionalized version of a native Filipino. In fact his filmmaking career seems like a response to Herzog whom he worked for and appears briefly in a film of his as an “Indian”. Kidlat Tahimik is that “Indian” with the quotation marks. jWe watch them travel to Hiroshima as Filipino performers when their Filipino-ness is already foreign-ified (my invented word). Take a look at one of his sons, who looks thoroughly Caucasian, who creates a rather insightful series of casts of colonized bodies. They have remained white.

#2019 #52 #53