Dirty Kitchen

In the style of Crying in H Mart and Minor Feelings, filmmaker Jill Damatac blends memoir, food writing, and colonial history as she cooks her way through recipes from her native-born Philippines and shares stories of her undocumented family in America.

Jill Damatac left the US in 2015 after living there as an undocumented immigrant with her family for twenty-two years. America was the only home she knew, where invisibility had become her identity—her mother tongue and indigenous roots long buried—and where poverty, domestic violence, ill health, and xenophobia were everyday experiences. First traveling to her native Philippines, she eventually settled in London, England, where she was free to pursue an education at Cambridge University, fully investigate her roots, and process what happened to her and her family; after nine years, she was granted British citizenship.

Interweaving forgotten colonial history and long-buried indigenous traditions, Damatac takes us through her time in America, cooking her way through Filipino recipes in her kitchen as she searches for a sense of self and renewed possibility. With emotional intelligence, clarity, and grace, Dirty Kitchen explores fractured memories to ask questions of identity, colonialism, immigration, belonging, and to find ways in which the ritual, tradition, and comfort of food, can answer them.