Bridging Our Stories

“Bridging Our Stories” follows Alma Manabat Parker, a 50-year-old Filipina who has lived in Ketchikan, Alaska, for 50 years, as she confronts a profound question: Can someone who left the Philippines at 8 months old authentically teach Filipino culture to the next generation?

In Ketchikan, where Filipinos comprise 10-12% of the population, arriving primarily through military service and the fishing industry, the community once thrived around a dedicated Filipino Community Center in the 1980s. When that center closed over a decade ago due to a lack of funding, it left behind only an empty parking lot and a generation of youth disconnected from their heritage.

This 24-minute verité documentary chronicles Alma’s transformative journey back to the Philippines after 30+ years away. Struggling with her own authenticity as a cultural bearer, she travels to indigenous communities in Kalinga, Igorot territories, and Lake Sebu’s T’Boli lands, regions most Filipino-Americans never visit. There, she discovers that the dances she’d been teaching (tinikling, pandango, Maria Clara) represent Spanish colonial influence, not authentic pre-colonial Filipino culture.
The film captures Alma’s role reversal from teacher to student as she learns indigenous dances, harvests cassava with T’Boli women, and participates in traditional blessing ceremonies. Most powerfully, she discovers unexpected parallels between Alaska Native and Filipino indigenous cultures, emphasizing connection to land, woven regalia, and intergenerational knowledge transmission.

Returning to Ketchikan with T’Boli instruments and regalia, Alma transforms her community’s cultural education. Without a physical center, she becomes a mobile community space herself, teaching in parking lots, gymnasiums, and borrowed rooms. The film’s climax shows Filipino-Alaskan youth performing indigenous dances with pride, declaring “Hey, I’m Filipino!” rather than hiding their identity.

“Bridging Our Stories” addresses critical questions facing diaspora communities: Who has the right to be a cultural bearer? How do we decolonize our own cultural education? Can culture survive without physical spaces? The film offers a model for second-generation immigrants stepping into cultural leadership despite gaps in their knowledge, emphasizing that authenticity comes from commitment and continuous learning, not from an unbroken connection to a homeland.

Film Advisory Content: Cultural Pain, Belonging, Emotional Pain

Credits
Writer: Rafael Bitanga, Diana Diroy
Producer: Rafael Bitanga, Lailanie Gadia
Director of Photography: Rafael Bitanga
Editor: Diana Diroy
Composer: Denise Santos
Music: Denise Santos
Contributing Producer: Angela Salazar
Mentor: Tadashi Nakamura
Story Researcher & Administrative Assistant: Allyssa Marie Buri
Sound Mixer: Spyros Politis
Key Art by Kelsey Schwanke
Archival Footage Courtesy of Alma Manabat Parker

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BETWEEN THE TIDES

Life exists in the pull between what we owe to others and what we owe to ourselves. Between the Tides explores the resilient, often invisible labor of love.