Video Palaro: The Video Diaries of Kidlat Tahimik - Kidlat Tahimik, 2008

Between 1992 and 2006, Kidlat Tahimik made five video diaries commissioned and produced by the JVC-sponsored Tokyo Video Festival, which was discontinued in 2009. They are usually screened under the umbrella title “Video Palaro: The Video Diaries of Kidlat Tahimik“ as an inter-related body of work, while they are not dissimilar thematically and formally to the medium-length films Japanese Summers of a Filipino Fundoshi (1996) and Banal Kahoy (2002) which were created in parallel and produced by the Japan Foundation. These shorter, essay-like works shot in the nineties and the noughties mirror each other in that there is invariably a – real or symbolic – journey that at once sets the theme and the narration in motion; each of these videos has a very different and often idiosyncratic thematic anchor, upon which Tahimik weaves his associative network.