The Cinematheque

“Memories of Overdevelopment transcends categorical boundaries: it’s both epic and personal, diaristic and historical as it slips between registers to tell Enrique’s story and Kidlat’s, as well as the story of its own making.”

Charles Fairbanks, Senses of Cinema

Kidlat Tahimik’s film explores the figure of Enrique de Malacca, a slave of Ferdinand Magellan. Played by Tahimik himself, Enrique was the first person to circumnavigate the world and then return to his point of departure, and so arguably the first balikbayan. In Tagalog, balikbayan refers to a person who returns to their homeland after going abroad as temporary or guest workers. Enrique’s journey gestures towards this Filipino diasporic condition, of travelling and working overseas and learning the cultural codes of foreign spaces. Tahimik depicts Enrique as a fragmented and enigmatic figure, in fictional reimaginings of his time with Magellan and as an old figure who mysteriously appears in doubly exposed photographs across time. All the while, Tahimik self-reflexively narrates and deconstructs Balikbayan #1, a hybrid narrative as well as a document of the film’s own making over three decades (1979–2015).

Introduced by Christian Vistan, co-curator of Hang Out Hang Out Lang.

Film correction: This screening will present Kidlat Tahimik’s Balikbayan #1 Memories of Overdevelopment Redux VI (2017), rather than Redux III (2015) as originally announced.

“A radical statement … Tahimik’s filmic text [is] dynamic, open to the shifting currents of life and history and to changes in film technology, from celluloid to VHS, to Hi8 and MiniDV, to the iPhone’s digital camera, formats that all appear in Balikbayan​’s most recent version.”

Murtaza Vali, Artforum