Billed as a “coming of rage” story, writer/director Paris Zarcilla’s genre-bending debut feature, Raging Grace, arrives in limited theaters today. The gothic tale leans into psychological and the supernatural, but all of it is deeply personal to the filmmaker. And it’s only the beginning of a planned “Rage” trilogy.
The film follows “Joy, an undocumented Filipino immigrant who is struggling to do the best she can for her daughter when she secures the perfect job: taking care of an extremely wealthy but terminal old man. The new position pays well and guarantees a roof over their heads. But very soon, Joy and her daughter Grace start to realize everything is not as it seems. Something is festering beneath the surface, threatening all they have worked for.”
Bloody Disgusting spoke with the BIFA-nominated filmmaker about his feature, where he candidly discussed the personal inspiration behind the film and plans for a thematic trilogy.
Zarcilla’s debut isn’t easy to categorize as it dabbles in a variety of genres, from gothic horror to drama. That stemmed from both the story’s reality-based horrors and his interests as a filmmaker.
He explains, “As much as I love horror, one of the things that I’ve always loved, say, for instance, about Asian cinema is how blended genre it is. I consider myself an Asian filmmaker, for sure. Of course, I was born in London, but that has been a huge influence for me in my life and in my work. It felt very natural for me to be playing with more than one genre. Of course, horror was something I could not ignore just because of the nature of the story; the nature of so many immigrants’ experiences is so often horrific.
“But I felt also that blended genre affairs are so reflective of real life. I really felt like it gave me access to be able to explore the nuances of the story that I wanted to tell. Especially one of an undocumented worker and her daughter, a British-born daughter, who both desperately want to belong to British society but find themselves at odds at every turn. It felt like it would be too confining for me as a writer to try and stick to one genre, so I used them all, like the infinity stance.”
No matter the genre, Raging Grace is an intimately personal film for Zarcilla. He poured every bit of himself into making it and candidly shared how his life informed his debut.
Zarcilla passionately tells us, “It is a film that I gave an enormous amount to. I feel like I had to break an old version of myself to make this film. I needed to get to that place to make something that felt authentic, both to me as a person and as a Southeast Asian who grew up in London and has had very specific experiences growing up here. Ones that were not just myself, but my friends, my family, my mum, and my dad had been on the receiving end of so many microaggressions and macroaggressions. I used to have to accompany my mum to some of her jobs, who used to be a cleaner for a lot of middle-class houses. And it was in that place where I saw my mum basically being dressed down.
“This is a person who was the most powerful being in my universe, and it had the most profound effect on me to see someone talk down to my mum like that. She had a far tougher skin than I did. Maybe, to some degree, she knew what was going on but never really had the language to sort of articulate the discomfort of these things. So much of this film is about finding that language and putting it into a medium that allowed me to communicate something that often doesn’t have a language around, and be done in a way where not just anybody who has gone through these things may feel seen and heard. But to put a lived experience on screen so that other people who are not aware of these things can know that they exist. Even though it has been told through the fantastical lens of horror, a lot of these things are real. What happens in that film is real. It may not have happened singularly to one person, but I am aware of a Filipino domestic worker who had to hide her daughter in a closet because she had nowhere else to go.”
Those memories and anecdotes of the worker who hid her daughter in a closet took Zarcilla even further back in history.
“The Gloria in the box,” he expands. “This is a thing that used to happen back in the day where we’ve had people who were kidnapped from the Philippines during the early 1900s and carted around the UK and the US in a box, a glass box to be gawked at. That’s what that was inspired by. There’s a famous story, well, it’s not famous, it’s pretty well-buried actually, of a prince who was kidnapped by the British and was toured around the UK. They didn’t take care of him. He got sick and eventually died in a pub in a cage. He had beautiful tattoos that told the story of his tribe and also of his status, and he ended up being put in a glass box. His body and his skin, I know it’s horrible, was eventually taken and put in a frame. Used to belong in a museum here in the UK, but it’s now gone into a private collection. So yes, these things are real. And as so many people have thought, ‘This is far too ridiculous.’ I often have to say, ‘You are absolutely right. The things that happened to these people are ridiculous.’ And yet, it feels so unreal to so many people.”
Raging Grace is only the beginning for Zarcilla, who has envisioned his debut as the first entry in a thematically connected trilogy. The filmmaker shares more on what to expect.
He teases, “It’s a rage trilogy. It’s a thematic one that, in the same way that Park Chan-wook explored revenge from very different perspectives in some ways, but the context was always very similar for me. The context is always about continuing to challenge the structures of colonialism in history and in the modern world. It is confronting new and old white power in ways that have often been very insidious. But the thing that’s so important to me is being able to address incredibly important subject matters in a way where it’s still palatable for the people that need to hear it and entertaining, first and foremost, for anybody who just wants to watch a film for a film’s sake.
“And be a cathartic spectacle for unheard voices, unrepresented cultures. Well, even though it has very specific cultural elements to it, for instance, just being Filipino, there are so many crossovers because colonialism went far and wide across the world, and the damage and its hurt have been felt by so many cultures. This is where I feel like people can bond over that trauma of so many things that they may never have had the language to articulate. This is what I hope my films can continue to do in a way that has a commercial edge but with arthouse sensibilities.”
Brainstorm Media & Doppelgänger Releasing’s acclaimed horror film released in select theaters on December 1 and On Demand on December 8.
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