LEARNING TAGALOG WITH KAYLA
DIRECTED BY KAYLA ABUDA GALANG
UNITED STATES // 2020
4 MINS
In this Tagalog lesson, Kayla will teach you conversational phrases, common expressions, and what it's like to feel sad and trapped inside your own home.
Reflective Encounters
“The widespread confinement during the pandemic lockdowns led to an attendant rise of internet celebrities cheerfully exhorting the virtues of diversionary activities as forms of radical self-care. Learning Tagalog with Kayla’s eponymous character, setting about initiating her viewers into her second language with a stilted perkiness, seems like another such enthusiastic instructor, though the film’s retro-styled cable access TV aesthetic might not initially appear to be situate it within the present times.
However, as Kayla’s sunny façade slips, the film carefully slides into a more phantasmagorical register and unexpectedly becomes her Covid confessional. The disjuncture between her initial composure and her interior ennui as she details the less-than-perfect aspects of her domestic situation speaks of the social masks we all at times feel obliged to wear. So too is there a sense of the acuteness of this obligation for a young Asian-American woman. At the film’s conclusion, Kayla snaps out of her distractedness and her mask returns, but rather than a deception or an admission of defeat it now feels like a quiet triumph: she’s okay with not being completely okay.”
— Jonathan Bygraves
Director's Statement
I made this at a time when I was feeling bored at home. 2020 had more moments of stillness and sitting with myself than I was used to. I wanted to give myself the permission to be dumb, vulnerable, and honest about my love of Final Fantasy IX and occasional disdain for my cats.
So, I wrote, shot, and edited Learning Tagalog With Kayla in roughly a week with the help of my roommates, Will and David. I created a slightly different world where my name is pronounced the way my grandparents’ church friends mispronounce it. I created a world where a fictional version of myself speaks, teaches, and experiences sadness in Tagalog.
On a personal level, the film is a dramatized time capsule of the home I built during a time when we were all asked to stay home, and I’m happy to have given myself and my roommates that. As a second-ish generation immigrant, I’ve also always wanted to see people who look like me flail in their own mundanity. The journey of self-actualization for people who look like me can be boring and sad as hell, and it’s totally okay. It can also be pretty funny.
Filmmaker Bio
Kayla Abuda Galang is a second-ish generation Filipino American making films rooted in nostalgia, absurdity, and girlhood. Her short films, Joan on the Phone (2016) and Learning Tagalog With Kayla (2021), have premiered at SXSW, the latter receiving the Audience Award in the Texas Shorts Competition.
Her directorial and editing works have also been official selections at Atlanta Film Festival, Aspen Shortsfest, Austin Film Festival, and Palm Springs International ShortFest.