Video Palaro: The Video Diaries of Kidlat Tahimik Kidlat Tahimik, 2008

Between 1992 and 2006, Kidlat Tahimik made five video diaries commissioned and produced by the JVCsponsored Tokyo Video Festival, which was discontinued in 2009. They are usually screened under the umbrella title Video Palaro: The Video Diaries of Kidlat Tahimik as an interrelated body of work, while they are not dissimilar thematically and formally to the mediumlength films Japanese Summers of a Filipino Fundoshi (1996) and Banal Kahoy (2002) which were created in parallel and produced by the Japan Foundation. These shorter, essaylike works shot in the nineties and the noughties mirror each other in that there is invariably a real or symbolic journey that at once sets the theme and the narration in motion; each of these videos has a very different and often idiosyncratic thematic anchor, upon which Tahimik weaves his associative network.