GANDA ASIA HEALING FILM PROJECT
Mindscapes Of Women, Island Grassroots Story Telling With Film
A project with Japan Foundation Manila and National Commission for Culture and the Arts

PROJECT INFORMATION:

GANDA CINE PROJECT is a story house of women of stories from four corners… We bring women film makers from Japan and Philippines to collaborate to make more films together. The film making project is a playground for healing the past between Japan and the Philippines. Understanding the pain of each other past and present, shall give birth to a new relationship of women in Asia.

The grassroots women have limited voice and engagement concerning the global issues. A film project involving the grassroots women is a powerful vehicle to show their relevance in the local and global issues. Their stories captured in a film is a powerful medium as they engage in the discourses that affects the community indirectly or directly. The film is a dialogue and an important space to discuss, provoke and engage that can attract interest from other women to share their voice on certain relevant issues.

Women are the storytellers, the weavers of cultures and the keepers of the knowledge of communities. They give birth to the next storytellers and culture-bearers. Women have intrinsic creativity that give birth to many ideas in the household and in the community. The very humane experience of giving birth to children and taking care of a family drives women to embrace multiple roles that sustains a demanding cycle of reproduction. Given a venue to express their ideas, women loves to interact and share their stories. With such curiosity women are good researches, for they naturally observe their surroundings and so they end up gathering stories of people and keep them sensationalized. That is a trait of a good marketing person in the grassroots. These are the people who can lead us to good informants in the community in the film research. We need this kind of collaboration in the community to make women involved.

The grassroots cinema can provide a venue where women can channel their natural curiosity into professional story telling that can expand their opportunities and sense of pride and dignity. We need to make women discover their power as storytellers to be able to create powerful stories that can create positive change and influence their own communities.

These are some of the cultural sensitivities that can only be experience if people have the chance to stay in these communities. Grassroots women are bound in a certain cycle of multiple roles equivalent to multiple intelligences. The grassroots women center can provide space to create something original. The process of self discovery is more powerful if shared with other women of many cultures.

The power driven women can help challenge other women to discover their potentials in their own context to find their own sense of power and free themselves from their own self-defeating circumstances such as poverty.

In the multi-cultural group, it will be interesting to study the different women archetypes, as one experiences them in the everyday and ordinary. Creating stories together is a synergy of minds and hearts that facilitates healing beyond the cultural differences such that breaks the culture of violence in perceptions, generalizations and steteotypes.

Art empowers people to transform memories and experiences into works with cultural and private significance. We believe that the development of a sense of worth and importance through artmaking will assist women to participate in dialogues and actions which may eventually lead to the transformation in grassroots communities in Philippines.

Mindscapes of women is full of emotions. This is a platform to tell stories of grassroots community from the eyes of women. Stories which speaks about the Island environment. Stories related to the sea, the mountain and the volcanoes. How these stories transform women’s life.

The suggested theme may include dialogues on particular issues around several subject of interests:
1. the life of a woman in the island struggling with poverty
2. life of a Muslim woman in the island market selling products that reaches different houses
3. the women rediscovering their traditional medicines so they do not have to buy commercial drugs
4. young women involved in ecotourism and exploitations involved
5. the old women who knows the history of the island that survived to tell about volcanic eruptions
6. a karaoke tradition and how women are exploited in media even in the farthest rural areas
7. a girl learning about coral reefs, shells and giant clams in one of the marine protected areas
8. Women Peace Stories

Type of Project:

This project is a combination of different kinds of art genre merge into a film, captured in everyday lives as stories and voices of women. The films are their inner voice which transforms into narrative and creative forms of emancipation to project everyday lives in the island as related to its landscapes and environment.

February 2010: Workshops and location shoot


Location where the project is to be carried out:

Enigmata Creative Circle in Camiguin Island for workshops and grassroots film showing