UChicago’s Film Studies Center to preserve groundbreaking work by Black and Filipino filmmakers

“These are incredibly vivid films. Aarin’s work was really a revelation for everybody that was there,” said Field, who also taught the films last year in a course on the history of Black women’s filmmaking.

“I was completely blown away by them,” McLaren said. “I ran up to Aarin afterward and told her how much I loved them.” When Burch expressed dismay that the prints were scratched from making their rounds on the festival circuit, McLaren replied, “We could do something about that.”

The National Film Preservation Fund grant—the Film Studies Center’s first—will create physical and digital copies of each film for both the vault and Burch.

“I feel so proud and so honored,” Burch said. “I cannot wait to see these films the way that I first made and intended them—in their purest form.”

Since the festival, Burch has continued getting phone calls asking to screen her films and to make appearances on the festival circuit.

“To have a resurgence has been an affirmation of how relevant these films are. I want everyone to be able to find them and see them,” Burch said. “I took some big risks to be transparent and vulnerable. I hope that's an invitation to others to go: Oh, I could put myself out like that.”

Documenting Chicago’s Filipino community 

In 1986, Estrella Alamar—a self-made cultural historian and lifelong Hyde Park resident—established the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago. Her home on Dorchester Avenue serves as a repository for historical records, photographs and ephemera documenting Chicago’s Filipino community.

When Alamar passed in 2022, collection manager and archivist Ashley Dequilla uncovered over 300 films made by Alamar’s uncle, Nicholas Viernes, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1926. Viernes worked as a migrant farmer until settling in Chicago, where he served as the unofficial Filipino community film historian—capturing baseball games, family beach days, and holidays on 16mm film.

“The film collection is significant because there's very little Filipino representation in the early 20th century that is considered autonomous, meaning representation of Filipino people by Filipino people,” Dequilla said. “Especially in the early 20th century, as we were colonized and indexed by the United States, a lot of our representation in the archive was to reinforce stereotypes.”

After immediate triage assistance by the Chicago Film Society, Dequilla brought the collection to UChicago’s South Side Home Movie Project. Established in 2005 by Prof. Jacqueline Stewart, the initiative of UChicago’s Arts + Public Life collects films and stories tracing the evolution of the city’s South Side.

Five of Viernes’s films, all made before World War II devastated the cultural heritage of the Philippines, were selected by the National Film Preservation Fund. The rare home movies not only expand Chicago’s history, but are also key primary sources documenting the Filipino diaspora.

“For the National Film Preservation Foundation, this collection was a clear priority not only because it shows this underrepresented community self-documenting, but also because of the incredible quality of the films,” Field said.

Both the Historical Society and the South Side Home Movie Project will work together to make the films publicly accessible, through the project’s digital archive and community events. In October, the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago Museum will re-open at Mana Contemporary, an art space in Pilsen, after 21 years of closure.

“The immense size of this collection will not only expand South Side Home Movie Project’s collection of home movies substantially,” said Saroop Singh, the project’s former archivist, “but will also project the immense diversity of the South Side of Chicago and bring new narratives to light.”