LOS ANGELES, USA – Nurse Unseen, an independent production on the stories of Filipino American nurses and the legacy of Filipinos in nursing for over a century, competing as Best Feature Documentary in next year’s Oscar’s Academy Awards is directed by Filipino-American filmmaker Michele Josue who has roots in Negros Occidental.
The film began its series of For Your Consideration screenings at the Culver Theater on Dec. 3 with a red carpet event attended by cast and crew of Nurse Unseen led by Josue and Executive Producer Filipino-American Jokoy as it continues to deliver its underlying message of anti-Asian hate and representation, and of having our voices heard.
Josue, who was born and raised in the US, is the daughter of Jack and Frances Josue of Bacolod and Sagay cities. She said that her mother immigrated to the US in 1969 and her father Jack followed a year after.
The family moved to the US after Josue’s aunt Dodo Cueva had lived in Philadelphia as a foreign exchange visitor nurse in 1968. Nurse Unseen started out as a tribute to Cueva who passed away. It tells the story of what it was like to immigrate to the US in ones 20’s and start all over away from family and home.
Josue who comes from a family of nurses, from her great grandmother, grandmother and aunties, believes that the story couldn’t be centered on one voice. “It should feel like a love letter or a tapestry of many voices because nursing, and the Filipino nurses in our community they’re everywhere and they are multi-generational. So I wanted it to feel like a collection of beautiful and compelling voices,” she said.
The making of the project has been very personal to Josue who said that “there are many instances where the film explores the Filipino American experience in a super genuine way, I got to know the history and got closer to my aunt”.
Josue said she came from a long line of nurses, and was expected go into nursing along with her siblings but none of them did.
Her sisters Karen and Ana Josue are also involved in the film project and were present during the event. Ana speaks Ilonggo while Karen said she only understands it. They both recalled their family ties with the late former Negros Occidental governors Alfredo and Joseph Marañon who were their godparents.
Josue said that it is really inspiring, empowering and encouraging to bring home this film, which is unapologetically Asian or Asian American, let alone-Filipino with only Filipino voices centered.
Nurse Unseen is not the only film that Josue directed about Filipinos and the Philippines. The first one is “Happy Jail, a Netflix documentary released in 2019 which is about the inmates with Michael Jackson dance moves at the Cebu Rehabilitation Center, which went viral in 2007.
Josue’s latest “Food Roots” was released in 2023 and brings audiences to the journey of restaurateur Billy Dec to his mother’s home in the Philippines, discovering his family heritage and their versions of the Filipino cuisine.
But Josue is more known for her award-winning film “Matthew Shepard is a Friend of Mine” which won 10 Best Documentary and Audience Choice Awards and a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Class Special, which has a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
At the red carpet event, Jokoy, said he wants to clearly deliver the message of representation. “We see you, we appreciate you and your voices are heard”, he said.
He lately got on board organizing public screenings and in actively supporting Nurse Unseen.
“A lot of people don’t understand it, but a lot of these people are in my family and they feel invisible, that they feel they are not even part of this country. One thing that I have always said is expressing how there is no representation, it is when something like this hits our voices out there, more representation is going to happen,” Jokoy said.
During the red carpet event, Jokoy was acknowledged for helping amplify voices and celebrate frontline heroes by Assemblyman Mike Gipson of the 65th district, who is also chair of the state assembly committee on arts, entertainment, sports, and tourism and internet media. The certificate was handed over by Gipson’s field officer Jun Agiipay.
The film starts with a history lesson during the American colonial period when the US, through President William McKinley began its “benevolent assimilation” campaign, which among others, established schools of nursing in the Philippines to train Filipinos nurses with an Americanized nursing curriculum.
Prof. Anthony Ocampo said in the film that when the US became involved with World War II, “their home base in the Pacific was the Philippines and you can just imagine soldiers getting injured, getting hurt, getting maimed being taken cared of by nurses in the Philippines”.
He added that the US was the most unwelcoming place in the 1920s-1960s, the whole country was essentially closed to immigration. The US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 altered the situation because of the need of skilled workers.
Dr. Catherine Ceniza-Choy said that with the new law US hospitals and other health care institutions could recruit nurses to immigrate on a more permanent basis and there was an incredible increase in the migration of Filipino nurses after 1965.
“There was such a tremendous economic investment by Filipino families to send their daughter or son to nursing schools in the Philippines and one way of getting a return on that investment was to work abroad and earn foreign currency,” she narrated as the film panned the expanse of the sugarcane fields of Negros Occidental with a nursing student on a tricycle.
The film also pointed out the labor export economy espoused by then dictator Ferdinand Marcos because the export of human labor brought benefits from the billions of dollars in remittances.
Writer-activist Ninotcka Rosca also said that nothing was more profitable than selling your workers “who sent money back home because we have this huge sense of obligation”.
When Covid-19 hit in 2020, Josue said that narrative of the film shifted “when the report from National Nurses United came out that really tragically outlined how vulnerable our community was to the virus and had to integrate the history and data. Statistics showed that the Filipino nurses comprise 4 percent of the total nurse population in the US, yet, they accounted for 30 percent of the total nurse deaths due to Covid-19”.
The integration of the Covid-19 impact on Filipino nurses into the film was for the better, as described by Josue, after the collaboration with Arlene de la Peña and Joe Arciaga, both nurses who became co-producers.
The Emmy-award winning director said that with the film, maybe we can inspire people to understand and change things, and want to fight for our nurses. During the pandemic the film showed how Filipino nurses not only suffered exhaustion, fatigue and burn-out due to long hours – a limited supply of personal protective equipment as hospitals were scrimping on them exposed Filipino nurses to the virus.
It was learned that the first Covid-19 death was that of Rosary Celaya Castro-Olega, a nurse who retired in 2017. She had returned to nursing and contracted the virus during the pandemic because of lack of protective equipment when she tended the needs of her patients in a local Los Angeles hospital.
There were interviews where the mental health of the Filipino nurses had been impacted just to be on survival mode, having experienced so much Code Blues and seen Covid deaths in the wards that some had suffered anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
With the Covid-19 originating from Wuhan, China, and the rhetoric spread by then President Donald Trump, this led to the rise of Asian hate. “A big theme throughout this film is the backdrop of Anti-Asian hate” and Josue said that by humanizing the Filipino experience, people can empathize and have more compassion “that might help combat some these ideas of intolerance, fear, anxiety of people who are different than yourself”.
There were instances in the film that described how Filipino nurses coped with uncertainties in the US and uncertainties of loved ones, with family get-togethers and nurses reunions and gatherings, and the Balikbayan box.
Josue said that in making the film, “speaking closely and intimately with so many Filipino nurses of our generation, I now know what, I truly know firsthand, how honorable nursing is, how integral and instrumental it is to the fabric of our country and its history and that makes me so proud”.*