A half-hour documentary, “Settling St. Malo,” offers a glimpse of how some of the earliest migrants from the Philippines lived in the coastal fishing village of St. Malo, Louisiana.
The film, to be screened Nov. 21 at the 2026 Southern Screen Festival in Lafayette, Louisiana, uses poetry, narration, archival footage and reenactments to trace the familial roots of New Orleans-based poet Dr. Randy Gonzales.
READ: Explore Filipinos’ history in Louisiana as told by a Fil-Am author
Directed by Virgile Beddok, the film had its world premiere at the New Orleans Film Festival in October.
The in-person screening at the Acadiana Center for the Arts will be followed the next day, on Nov. 22, by an online screening of the film. Tickets and more information are available online through Southern Screen.
Gonzales, an associate professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s College of Liberal Arts, blends heritage and history in the film which he describes as a poetic documentary that follows his award-winning poetry collection of the same name.
The documentary begins in 1930s New Orleans, where Gonzales discovers that his great-grandfather was a leader in the city’s Filipino community.
The poet then revisits St. Malo, the first Filipino settlement in Louisiana and the US’ oldest Asian settlement. The village had been wiped out by storms in the early 20th century.
It’s been “a forgotten story” even for him, Gonzales said of Louisiana’s earliest immigrants from the Philippines. But “the story continues to be written,” he said in the film.
On social media, the Philippine Consulate General in Houston wrote: “Long before most Filipino Americans today arrived, Filipinos were already building lives along the Gulf Coast. The film affirms that the Filipino story has been part of the American story for nearly two centuries, and that new generations continue to recover and share it.”
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