CONTACT
Maria Estela Paiso
밖에는 개구리 비가 내린다 It’s Raining Frogs Outside | 2021 | 14’
Courtesy the Artist
Courtesy the Artist
Synopsis
Ampangabagat Nin Talakba Ha Likol (It’s Raining Frogs Outside, 2021) unfolds beneath the spectre of an approaching catastrophe. As rumours circulate that the world is nearing its end, Maya returns to her childhood home in the coastal province of Zambales. There, the intimate space of memory becomes unsettled as frogs begin to fall from the sky outside, transforming the landscape into a site of quiet disquiet. The unsettling phenomenon recalls the biblical plagues, moments in which nature appears to rupture the perceived order of the world. Such imagery situates rainfall within a longer cultural history in which storms, floods and other atmospheric disturbances have been read as signs, warnings, or expressions of forces beyond human comprehension. Presented within Scene I: Heavy Rain, the work considers rainfall as a climatic event and a planetary process that unsettles systems of meaning. The raining frogs echo ancient cosmologies while resonating with contemporary anxieties surrounding ecological instability, where the hydrological cycles of the Earth increasingly reveal the fragile boundary between natural order, myth, and climate crisis.
About the artist
Maria Estela Paiso is a filmmaker from the Philippines whose work moves between memory, folklore, and the potential of rage to alter lived experience. Drawing from personal histories and the landscapes of her hometown in Zambales, Paiso often approaches filmmaking as a way of navigating the porous boundary between dream, recollection, and storytelling. In 2021 she directed her first short film, Ampangabagat Nin Talakba Ha Likol (It’s Raining Frogs Outside), a mixed-media work that reflects on local mythologies and everyday life. She followed this with Kay Basta Angkarabo Yay Bagay Ibat Ha Langit (Objects Do Not Randomly Fall From the Sky, 2024), which continues her exploration of place through layered narrative and experimental form. In this recent film, Paiso interweaves stories from her mother’s childhood with interviews from fisherfolk confronting territorial aggression from China in the West Philippine Sea. Through this juxtaposition of personal memory and geopolitical reality, her work reflects on how coastal communities experience shifting environmental and political conditions.