Changing Nations, Changing Generations: PJ Raval’s Who We Become

When someone says that they are first generation, they generally mean that they moved to the States. But PJ Raval has a different way of looking at it.

As the U.S.-born child of immigrants, he refers to himself as first generation Filipino-American “because my parents don’t consider themselves Filipino-American. They consider themselves Filipinos who immigrated. ... They have the experience of being immigrants. I have the experience of being a child of an immigrant.” As such, he added, “I have one foot in the United States and an inch towards the Philippines. … So that idea of being part of a diaspora or a diasporic community, in the last several years I’ve really wanted to embrace that.”

In his award-winning 2018 documentary Call Her Ganda, Raval explored that experience as a Filipino-American filmmaker exploring the death of Jennifer Laude, a Filipino trans woman, murdered by Joseph Scott Pemberton, a U.S. Marine stationed in the Philippines. His latest film, Who We Become, follows three young women in Texas – like him, all Filipino-American and the children of migrants – as they navigate the pandemic, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, an increasing tide of anti-Asian bigotry and violence, and dealing with their families in these strangest of times.

The Netflix documentary gets a special screening, complete with Q&A from Raval, at AFS Cinema this Thursday, Jan. 11, and while its stories begin on the first day of the pandemic lockdown, it’s not really accurate to call it Raval’s covid movie. After all, the pandemic caused many filmmakers to reconsider their plans: Some pivoted to a different project, some retooled a script for lockdown, some tried to ride it out. Raval had a different idea: He was going to do what he was already going to do, just faster than he expected.

It all sprang from a realization, he said, “that in my films there’s a scene where there are two people who are very close, and then they end up challenging one another in a conversation. Obviously, it’s a test of the friendship, of the relationship, but ultimately it’s where they see the differences between each other and they manage to work through it.” However, there was a second realization: that the American experience is more often based on avoiding such discussions (“don’t talk politics at Thanksgiving”) while they are a core element of Filipino and Filipino-American culture. The cultural underpinning, he said, “is always remembering that you’re family.”

So even before the pandemic he was developing a documentary about young Filipino-Americans navigating those differences of generation, of being born in America as opposed to immigrating, and he wanted to catch how those divides play out in those unguarded, honest, dinner table conversations. He’d started talking to people who wanted to be involved and explained the project to them “and then the pandemic hit.” However, like any good documentarian he realized the importance of capturing the moment. That was a lesson he had learned as a cinematographer in New Orleans for documentary Trouble the Water only days after Hurricane Katrina. At that time, he experienced what he called "the sense of urgency and the sense of possibility." Just as with his time with Katrina survivors, “it became very clear to me that we were entering a period of change. I think people were just figuring out how to quote-unquote pivot, how to survive it, but it also became these moments of self-reflection, these moments of really thinking about what you’ve taken for granted.”

With the added pressure of lockdown, of people reconsidering the basic tenets of the lives they lived, those kitchen table conversations were becoming more important than ever. So Raval contacted the subjects and got them filming right away.

The result, he noted, reminded him of an episode of Broad City. “It’s a day-in-the-life of them going through Manhattan, and it’s all told through Snapchat. And it’s hilarious, but what I thought was brilliant about that is that it really showed that generation, that is their life. It’s not just walking down the street. It’s walking down the street, documenting their life, having a comment about it, sharing it online. So it’s not only a technique of storytelling, it’s a very authentic technique of telling the story of someone at that age.”

And that’s a big change for Raval. As a self-described mid-career filmmaker, and an award-winning member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, his projects have gotten bigger, with more resources. However, making Who We Become placed him at a remove from the day-to-day filming. Each of his subjects became functionally their own unit director, and that was a change he embraced. “I wanted to remind myself there’s different ways of making films,” he said, and so he observed what younger filmmakers, such as those he teaches in the RTF department at UT Austin, are doing. “A lot of them are already engaging in storytelling in their everyday lives, whether that be Instagram stories or Snapchat or TikTok, and a lot of them have grown up being very public about their lives.”

But that change arguably puts him closer to where the protagonists’ parents sit, having not grown up documenting every moment of their lives. “It’s true, you will not find a high school graduation photo of me,” he laughed. However, he also quickly realized that while the parent, aunts, uncles, and older relatives who his three protagonists interview may not have grown up in front of a phone camera, “the idea of their child holding a cell phone filming themselves or them is not foreign to them by any means. That’s part of their experience, and it opened a level of trust and intimacy that allowed them to open up on camera.”

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AFS Cinema presents Who We Become, Thu., Jan. 11, 6259 Middle Fiskville.
Tickets and info at austinfilm.org.