Film Screening and Talkback
Diwata: Locating Ecotransfeminism in Precolonial Philippine Mythology
Duration: 75–90 minutes
Audience capacity: 40–60 people
The program begins with a screening of the experimental film Diwata by RAM Botero and Giulia Casalini, which explores precolonial Philippine cosmologies in which the divine is understood as immanent—present in land, body, and community. The film introduces an ecotransfeminist perspective in which the feminine divine is not located in distant heavens, but resides within forests, rivers, and landscapes.
Following the screening, the artist leads a conversation on myth as a living archive and ritual as a form of epistemic justice. Participants are invited to reflect on how ritual practices shift perception, enabling the recognition of relationships between body, land, and community that modern systems often obscure.
The discussion also situates trans experience within this framework, emphasizing transformation and becoming as forms of embodied knowledge.
Ram Botero is an artist, writer, cultural worker, community facilitator and filmmaker from Mindanao, Philippines. In 2019, she directed the film Pamalugu (In Limbo), which has been screened internationally (Fukuoka Independent Film Festival, 2021), and at several national film festivals – earning accolades at the 2019 editions of the Ngilngig Asian Fantastic Film Festival and Festival de Cine Paz Zamboanga. She is currently in the production stages of her forthcoming films Eksotik (2025), Diwata (2024). Ram is one of the artists behind the photographic project ‘Diwata: Queering Pre-Colonial Philippine Mythology’, commissioned by the 2021 Southeast Asian Queer Cultural Festival, and exhibited in Fukuoka, Japan, later that same year. Ram’s essay ‘Of Myths and Goddesses: The Trans Voice in Art and Feminist Spaces’ was published in Archival Glitch, a collection of lectures by feminist artists in Asia and the Pacific. She has recently produced the performance for camera ‘Siren’s Song’ for the European Capital of Culture (Elefsina, Greece, 2023).
