Since I started this blog several months ago, I’ve mostly created posts about my parents (Oscar & Lucila Dypiangco) and my experiences becoming actively involved within the Filipino-American community. Both of these subjects are very key to my ongoing search for my personal home unknown. However, I thought it was time to finally write an update on production of the Home Unknown documentary and where it presently stands.
Making a feature documentary is no easy task, and it is especially difficult when you’re trying to do all of the work by yourself. From the moment I started planning Home Unknown a few years ago, I envisioned this as a personal documentary I could make with little outside help. Because my background from NYU film school is in independent filmmaking and because this project has almost no budget, I knew that I would produce it, shoot it and likely edit it myself. Although I was able to successfully plan and shoot the film alone, I’ve found editing to be a much bigger challenge than I anticipated. Because the material is so personal and I’m one of the film’s main characters, it’s very difficult for me to understand how others might be viewing the scenes I’m cutting together. This has taught me time and time again that finishing this movie alone is a fool’s errand and that I need outside help. Lots of it.
The Home Unknown trailer that is currently on this website was completed in June of this year. It was the result of months hard work and lots of a amazing input from a fellow documentary filmmaker named Stephen Deline. While I am proud of all of the work I put into this trailer, I know deep down that it can be a lot better. So that’s why I’m currently working on a new version that highlights, clarifies and deepens a few critical points such as my relationship with my mom, the scope of our travels within the Philippines and my struggle to understand why I was making this film in the first place.
About two months ago, I wrote this new synopsis for Home Unknown that I feel better explains what the movie is about. My goal is to adjust the trailer, so it matches more of what I describe here:
A twentysomething Filipino-American who has largely ignored his cultural heritage, grad film student Stephen Dypiangco documents his first trip back to his parents’ native land since he was a scrawny, apathetic, pimply-faced teenager. Although he’s drawn to connect with his far-flung relatives and a homeland he’s never truly known, he doesn’t fully understand why he’s making this film. It just feels right.
Without any personal ties to his aunties, uncles or cousins in the Philippines, he heads out across the Pacific with his emotionally guarded mom Lucila and always supportive dad Oscar, who both turn out to be surprisingly quirky. As they proudly introduce him to his own family, show him places they no longer recognize and reminisce about their nearly forgotten former lives, Stephen realizes something. His home unknown isn’t just the Philippines. It’s also his parents, whom he’s never bothered to truly know. With the trip winding down quickly, Stephen tries to figure out who his parents are and to finally think of them as real people.
Fast-forward three years. Stephen still isn’t done with the documentary. His Filipino identity is still a mystery. And he and his pregnant wife are now living with his parents. It’s at this embarrassing low point that a breakthrough occurs. He realizes that the reason he’s still making this film is to unite the two things he loves most in life, which are inconveniently at odds – his family and his career. As he redoubles his efforts to finish his film, begins connecting with fellow Fil-Ams and tells his mom how he really feels about her, Stephen nervously preps his next project – parenthood.
Thanks for reading this and your interest in Home Unknown. Finishing this movie and getting it out into the world is going to be an incredible challenge, but I know that I can do it with your continued support!
- Steve
Steve von Maas
November 15, 2010
I think you’ve hit upon more great insights, some which are universally resonant. Hardly anyone gains the courage to really try to understand his or her parents as fellow human beings, and most people start far too late. And I think most healthy people would like to reconcile what one does with who one was in his original family, to perform at one’s best for one’s parents, to “sing for one’s father and mother.”
Doing those two things at once can be fundamentally incompatible, however. At least that is what we fear:
Trying to understand our parents means opening ourselves to the potential of confronting some very uncomfortable things, perhaps including these: losing the illusion that some “grown-ups” are still in charge of our lives–seeing our parents as vulnerable just like us; discovering our parents’ failures and lost chances and regrets; learning about their hopes and aspirations for us, and all we represent to them by way of potential or achievement or self-expression.
Meanwhile, performing for our parents means exposing ourselves to some even scarier possibilities: the chance we might disappoint them; the likelihood they won’t understand who we are; the fear that instead of closing a gap in understanding we might learn that they always knew a great deal more about us than we realized they knew, but that articulating this knowledge–laying it bare–might just end up being awkward; the fear that they could still change us, or re-mold us, or shatter our dreams in some way; the possibilities of other fears we can’t even bare to consciously entertain.
I’m not sure you have to sort out what your movie is about in order for it to be truly great art. I strongly suspect it will be all the better even if you “abandon” (finish) it before you are sure whether you have even told the story you want to tell. It may even be the greatest art if it doesn’t really ring “true” to anyone in the movie, including you. Some movies are good because they effectively tell an important story we never knew before, but they aren’t great art. Some movies are good because we can’t stop thinking about them, and their meaning changes over time to us, even though we still scratch our heads over what the story was.
Whether one is a general, a schoolteacher, a politician, or an artist, it is relatively easy to do stuff. But no matter how carefully one plans, or how certain one is of one’s goals, it is practically impossible to control the ultimate outcome of the immediate result we achieve. Man proposes. God disposes. So just do your thing as best you can at this stage of your life, is my advice, and be comfortable with the fact that all kinds of people will view your work in all kinds of ways, maybe including you, as you pass through the major phases of your life.
dypiangco
November 16, 2010
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Steve. It’s definitely a lot easier to read your comments here than it is on facebook.
You are right, there are always a lot of potential problems when you start examining your relationship with your parents. My parents have always been super supportive of everything I’ve done, and I know that they will continue to support this project, even if it does reveal parts about their own lives and our relationship that are potentially embarrassing or difficult. I’ve been totally surprised every step of the way how easily my parents can laugh at themselves on screen. They understand that I’m just making a movie and that sometimes the events depicted may not be exactly how things happened in real life. But I get the sense overall that they are happy their story is being told and that I’m going on this journey of self-discovery. And so am I.