specters and bones

In the twilight of the American Frontier, Dr. William Jones, a Meskwaki anthropologist journeyed to the Philippine highlands in 1907 to study a tribe of headhunters. His tragic death on the field two years later became buried under the U.S. Constabulary’s lies. Gabi Delson (Bontoc Igorot) stars as Paloniya, a young Ilongot woman Jones romanticizes in his field notes, whose ritual dance is conjured on 16mm film against the silences and distortions of the archive. Archival disintegration tells a story of spiritual reckoning and historical refusal, connecting the shared afterlives of colonial rupture within Filipino and Native American histories across oceans and empire.