Rituals of the Diaspora: Lyn Pacificar, Katuuran

by Kayla Sotomil
38 min, English
Program: Focus on the Arts, Saturday, June 3, 2023, 12pm
Seattle Center Armory Conference Room

Rituals of the Diaspora (2023) follows Lyn Pacificar as she navigates her daily life as a katuuran and albularya, Philippine shaman and folk herbalist, in Los Angeles. From performing ancestral rituals, harvesting plants for medicine, and educating the Filipino American community about indigenous healing traditions to keeping her wellness business running and raising her children, the film showcases what it means to be a traditional healer in a modern world. Working against the colonial erasure of indigenous knowledge and the loss of cultural practice due to migration, Lyn manages to reinvigorate Philippine ancestral practice while paying homage to the land she now calls home. Strongly supported by her tight-knit family, Lyn is able to create containers for different types of ritual, both public and private. In these sacred spaces, Lyn helps connect diasporic Filipinos to their heritage and puts them in communion with their ancestors, mobilizing deep individual and collective healing. Structured in the form of a ritual, this short film weaves together three significant events that depict the essence of Lyn’s healing work – the public memorial of a community member, the private summer solstice ritual of the Pacificar family, and an intimate, one-on-one consultation with a cultural practitioner at the beginning of their journey. “Rituals of the Diaspora” invites viewers into the world of Filipino traditional healing and allows them to witness the feat of holding onto old ways in a place where new ways prevail. This work presents the extraordinary in the ordinary and asks for its audience to consider the role of ritual in their daily lives.

Kayla Sotomil is an independent ethnographic filmmaker and mananalaysay, storyteller. Her work focuses on ancestral ritual, cultural practitioners, ethnic and regional foodways, and diasporic communities. She is currently in post-production for her film Rituals of the Diaspora: Lyn Pacificar, Katuuran about a Filipina shaman and folk herbalist practicing in East Hollywood. Kayla’s first short film The Modern Mambabatok: Lane Wilcken and Filipino Tattooing in the Diaspora won the award for Best Short Documentary at the DisOrient Asian American Film Festival 2020 and was selected for the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival, University of Pennsylvania’s CAMRA Scholarship Festival, and the SCA/SVA Distribute Virtual Film Festival. Kayla received an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Southern California, an MA in Food Studies from New York University, the Grand Diploma in Culinary Arts from the French Culinary Institute, and a BA in Linguistic Anthropology from Brandeis University. Kayla’s filmmaking practice archives the rich stories of diasporic peoples and the ways through which they maintain connection to their native culture and practices. It is her intention to explore the relationships between ancestors and descendants, while simultaneously creating documents for future descendants. While her work is heavily influenced by anthropological method, it is rooted in cultural practice, following the tradition of folk storytellers and historians. Prior to filmmaking, Kayla worked in food education and cooked professionally in New York City. She now divides her time between Los Angeles and Chicago.

Register for free access to Diwa 2023:
https://bit.ly/3Lf2QOe