Filipino City, American Time Documentary Film

As a companion to my capstone project at Yale-NUS College, I have produced a documentary film from footage taken during fieldwork in Cebu IT Park. The film aims to capture the lives of business process outsourcing (BPO) workers working in IT Park, and how they navigate night-shift work, a fragmented housing market, and temporal and spatial separation from the rest of the city.

It is often difficult for outside observers to understand how the IT Park is spatially and temporally suspended from the rest of the urban fabric. Indeed, attempts to explain the nature of Philippine BPO-oriented urban enclaves through academic language do not sufficiently give readers a sense of what it’s like to work there as night-shift BPO employees. By allowing viewers to see how workers interact with the space of IT Park, the film gives them a level of access to the study site that is difficult to achieve through words.

The film first introduces Cebu IT Park and the notion of IT parks more generally. It then shows viewers a ‘day’ in the life of the IT park workers, from their 6 PM “morning” commutes to work to their 6 AM breakfasts over coffee. Lastly, through a re-enactment produced with the help of Yale-NUS students and alumni, I introduce viewers to the life of Mariel – an interlocutor in the paper – and how she navigates issues with housing, commutes, and health that BPO night shift workers face as a result of having to live near the office.