This Filipino-American Director's Short Film Won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival
Filipino-American filmmaker Kayla Abuda Galang's When You Left Me On That Boulevard just won the Short Film Grand Jury Prize after its premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival last January 21.
Written and directed by Abuda Galang, the film tells the story of teenager Ly and her cousins, set in 2006. They get high just before Thanksgiving at their aunt's house in San Diego, where they are treated to a Filipino-American feast in more ways than one. It's a deeply personal film to the director and an intimate portrait of the life of a teenager and a small community of Filipinos in California.
"The film is a hazy observation of a Thanksgiving holiday in 2006 through the eyes of a teenage girl with a big crush, a big family, and a big willingness to learn new things," she said in her artist feature with Sundance. "I shot it in Paradise Hills, where I grew up, in tribute to my younger self and her mom and her cousins and her aunties."
Some stills from her latest film
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She added: "It's a collective tribute to a time and a place and the warm and suffocating embrace of family when you were a teenager."
With the prize, the film could very well be on its way to qualifying for the 2024 Oscars. The Sundance Film Festival is one of the Academy Awards’ qualifying festivals for short films.
The Olongapo City-born director is best known for stories that explore themes of diaspora and Filipino identity. Some of the other notable short films that she's made are Joan on the Phone in 2016 and Learning Tagalog With Kayla in 2021. Some upcoming projects lined up for Abuda Galang are the feature films ’06-’07 and On Earth as it is in Heaven.
