The Filipino-American creative and 2023 Gen.T honouree discusses how she wants to break the limits on stories that filmmakers of colour get to tell
A comedy film set in San Diego: this is what won Kayla Abuda Galang the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. It’s funny, it’s loud—and it’s very Filipino.
When You Left Me on That Boulevard is Galang’s attempt at recapturing adolescence in Paradise Hills. Set in 2006, the short film revolves around Ly and her cousins as they “get high” before Thanksgiving dinner.
Here, we ask the 2023 Gen.T honouree about her creative process as a filmmaker and why she believes artists of colour in the United States need more freedom to tell fun stories.
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What do you hope to achieve each time you create or write a new short film or story? What kind of stories do you like to tell?
Kayla Abuda Galang (KAG): I’d say the stories I like to tell are microcosmic love stories. I love exploring familiar, universally felt experiences of love, heartache, joy and stupidity. I think, at all angles, I’m really obsessed with finding the truth: in character behaviours, motivations and wants, and in the worlds that I’m building. I really try to achieve this because I think within truth, there is specificity, immersion and empathy. I respond to films that build honest bridges with people.
Why do you think you won the Grand Jury Prize?
KAG: I don’t really know. I think it was just a beautiful coincidence of the film, the jury and what they were ready to receive and feel in watching all of this year’s films. There were so many great films at the festival this year, so I was pretty gobsmacked by the decision.
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What was the process like in ideating, creating, and filming When You Left Me on That Boulevard?
KAG: The process of creating When You Left Me on That Boulevard was very communal and generative. It started out with me kicking ideas around in December 2020 and meditating on the first feature I had written a couple of years prior. I initially knew I wanted to capture adolescence and girlhood specifically in Paradise Hills in the mid-2000s, which is where and when I grew up. I played with a few scenes from the feature, but I always came back to these brief Thanksgiving vignettes that I had written. I gravitated towards these vibrant textures of food, family and karaoke, and the experience of waiting for the day to end as a teenager.
We were really intentional and careful about how we built our team and our community. We adapted community agreements and values from organisations and groups we were a part of. We upheld transparency, open communication and generativity as our collective values and identified ways to move through conflict.
What mattered to me was making a film incredibly specific and reflective of the community that I was portraying. So it couldn’t just be anyone on camera and it couldn’t just be anyone behind the camera. We were persistent in hiring locally and finding people who understood the cultural and geographical specificity of what we were making.