Desireena Almoradie + Barbara Malaran
Desireena Almoradie (she/they) PRODUCER, DIRECTOR, CAMERA, EDITOR emigrated from Manila, Philippines at the age of eleven, settling in the borough of Queens, New York with her family. Her works explore collective history with a focus on queer and/or BIPOC lives. She was nominated for an Emmy and has won a GLAAD Media Award for her work on In the Life, the seminal LGBT news magazine that aired on PBS for two decades. She co-founded the Diverse Filmmaker’s Alliance (DFA), a collective of filmmakers from all backgrounds working to diversify the filmmaking landscape. Most recently Desireena was awarded a NYC Women's Fund for Media, Prism Foundation Grant, the Barbara Hammer Experimental Filmmaking Grant, and the New York State Council on the Arts grant for their documentary Because of You: A History of Kilawin Kolektibo, a collaboration with Barbara Malaran.
Barbara Malaran (they/them) DIRECTOR, CAMERA, MUSIC, EDITOR is an interdisciplinary artist exploring autobiographical stories of community through video and audio narratives. Barbara’s artwork takes on an experimental view of travel, specifically with locating ties to imagining homelands, occupational and gender identities, to manipulating time working against memory decay. They were a member of the core group of Kilawin Kolektibo, a Pinay lesbian collective, and spent their formative years in NYC learning the craft of filmmaking by documenting Kilawin Kolektibo’s many actions at marches, protests, and celebrations. Barbara currently lives in Portland, OR. Barbara has a NYSCA grant, a Barbara Hammer Experimental Filmmaker Grant, and a Prism Foundation Grant for their documentary Because of You: A History of Kilawin Kolektibo, a collaboration with Desireena Almoradie. They are previously the recipient of the Open Initiative Artist Fellowship at The Kitchen, NY, and has exhibited their video work at the Leslie Lohman Museum, The Bronx River Art Center, Longwood Arts Project in the Bronx, The Queens Museum of Art, NY, the American Museum of Natural History in NY, among others.
Because of You: A History of Kilawin Kolektibo
The story of queer Filipnxs in NYC who came together in the 90s to create a safe & loving community.
Documentary
As two of the founding members of Kilawin Kolektibo, directors Barbara Malaran and Desireena Almoradie belong to the community whose stories we are telling, having come of age as artists and filmmakers together while documenting Kilawin’s various actions and events.
Working with precious artifacts and deteriorating video, we manipulate the material to craft a narrative where viewpoints converge, diverge, and later reconnect. We intersperse the raw archival footage with layers of tone poems, musical interludes, and original music evocative of the nineties. This cacophony of sounds evokes a moment in our lives that is sometimes vividly remembered, sometimes vaguely misremembered, but always utterly pivotal.
This film is a love letter from Desireena to Barbara and from Barbara to Desireena, but also from Desireena and Barbara to Kilawin, and from Kilawin (as personified in the film) to today’s queer QTBIPOC community, with self-reflection and gratitude.