Adjani Arumpac

Adjani Arumpac

History

Adjani Arumpac is a documentarist and an assistant professor at the University of the Philippine Film Institute. Her directorial works include: Walai (2006); a documentary about Muslim women in Mindanao, Philippines; Nanay Mameng (2012) a biopic of beloved octogenarian urban poor mass leader in the Philippines, Carmen Deunida; and War is A Tender Thing (2013), an essay film on the war in Southern Philippines told through her family’s memories of struggle. Her works have been shown in various local and international festivals, as well as reiterated in visual art exhibitions. She is convenor of DoQ, a platform that aims to give agency to independent and regional documentarists, students, and alternative media workers by providing a regular screening space, with support from partner theaters. She was awarded a British Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Chevening scholarship in 2018 through which she finished her MA on Digital Media and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University of London.

Profile

Adjani Arumpac

Movies

Count
Director
Count is a short essay film that plays with the idea of internalized historical misalignment. It is a probing into the unseen discrepancy that has exponentially grown throughout the centuries. It starts with the author's sons, as they start their online distance learning, in the context of a pandemic raging in the midst of a Drug War, both with fatalities miscounted and uncounted.
Docwomentary: Women Behind the Lens
Herself
A filmmaker explores why women are at the forefront of documentary filmmaking in the Philippines by chronicling their narratives of struggle and victories as they navigate the masculine filmmaking industry. Throughout the film, she discovers her own reflexivity as a filmmaker but most importantly, as a woman.
Porferia
Cinematography
Porferia, who is 9 months pregnant, and her husband Felix, are abducted by the military and wrongfully accused of insurgency. Porferia's wild imagination and unsinkable hope carry them through the ordeal of torture, leading to their eventual escape.
War Is a Tender Thing
Writer
Through her own family's memories of struggle, Adjani unravels the story of war-torn Southern Philippines as an endless attempt at survival and adaptation to state policies that disregard the most basic concept of home.
War Is a Tender Thing
Editor
Through her own family's memories of struggle, Adjani unravels the story of war-torn Southern Philippines as an endless attempt at survival and adaptation to state policies that disregard the most basic concept of home.
War Is a Tender Thing
Director of Photography
Through her own family's memories of struggle, Adjani unravels the story of war-torn Southern Philippines as an endless attempt at survival and adaptation to state policies that disregard the most basic concept of home.
War Is a Tender Thing
Director
Through her own family's memories of struggle, Adjani unravels the story of war-torn Southern Philippines as an endless attempt at survival and adaptation to state policies that disregard the most basic concept of home.
Mother Mameng
Director
Mother Mameng delves deep into the character of a woman who has experienced extreme poverty and domestic violence and rose from from it all to become the beloved personality, well-known to the Philippine mass movement.
Requiem for M
Additional Camera
Requiem for M is an experimental short documentary in the aftermath of the Maguindanao massacre in which multiple journalists were slain. Dalena captured scenes from the funerals and played this in reverse, in the wistful yearning to turn back time to before the tragedy occurred.
Walai
Director
Walai prods on the memories of four Muslim women who once lived in the infamous White House in Cotabato City. The documentary seeks narratives in "places...we tend to feel without history." It traces the past through the women's experience of what has happened inside the wrecked home-nostalgia and fear, loss and love, and birth and death.