In Bontoc Eulogy, Martin Fuentes addresses a relatively unknown chapter of American history through a mock-documentary search for family history. This fictionalized account of the search for roots takes viewers back to the Philippine-American war, which as the narrator states, comes across as a “dream muted by the dailyness of life’s events” (Fuentes). The disappearance from history is the subject of the eulogy referenced in the title, and Fuentes capitalizes on early film and photographic documentation of the time to emphasize the forgetting. By centering his camera on archaic representation, Fuentes pulls off the shroud surrounding the treatment of Filipinos in the United States during the earlier part of the twentieth century.
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