Bontoc Eulogy

This film is a critical look at the exoticizing gaze of Western anthropologists by means of a fictive recounting of the true events that took place at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. By creating a faux-biography of his grandfather’s real-life inclusion in an exhibit on natives of the Philippines, filmmaker Marlon Fuentes shows how these approximately 1100 people were treated as scientific specimens. A combination of rare archival footage, sound recordings, and scripted sequences is used to construct a documentary on the outsider’s perspective of the American social sciences.