NERVOUS TRANSLATION – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

Eight-year-old Yael (Jana Agoncillo) has long, lazy afternoons to fill when she is home alone after school, a daily reverie that writer-director Shireen Seno depicts with a delicately observed melancholy and a charming whimsy reminiscent of the films of Miranda July. A remarkably imaginative and self-contained child, Yael is often left to her own devices: her father is away working in Saudi Arabia — though the audiotaped “letters” he sends home, which she listens to over and over again, help fuel her daydreaming, even if she cannot quite understand the adult longing he expresses in them; and when her mother (Angge Santos) returns home from work each evening, she demands “30 minutes no talking” from the child. The heart breaks for Yael.

It is the late 1980s here, in the Philippines after the ouster of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and so it’s a very specific a moment of upheaval in Filipino history that Seno is grappling with. But everything in Nervous Translation we see through Yael’s eyes, and she of course has no idea what’s going on beyond the screen door of her house. Continue reading…