Nervous Translation
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Beyond Barbie.
Maybe I'm Unlucky Because I Cut My Nails at Night (2022)
A superstition warns that cutting nails at night brings bad luck. In this experimental short, it becomes a lens for reflecting on the erasure of Philippine history under the rule of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and, later, his son. Maria Estela Paiso evokes this historical erasure by making subjects vanish from her personal photos, like ghosts. The film unfolds as a quiet elegy for memory itself — a meditation on what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget.
DCP, color, 5 min. Director/Screenwriter: Maria Estela Paiso.
Nervous Translation (2017)
Nervous Translation follows Yael, an 8-year-old who spends much of her time alone with her imagination: she plays with a miniature kitchen set and secretly records her parents’ long-distance audio correspondence. Blending realism with dreamlike storytelling, Shireen Seno captures the quiet loneliness, curiosity and unspoken emotions of childhood, where understanding and explanation comes in fragments. The New Yorker called it “among the best recent evocations of a child’s life and thought, and among the most sophisticated.”
DCP, color, 90 min. Director/Screenwriter: Shireen Seno. With: Jana Agoncillo, Angge Santos, Sid Lucero, Cocoy Lumbao.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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