Director's Chair

The filmmaker Marissa Aroy ’95 is the creative force behind a collection of acclaimed documentaries, including the 2008 Emmy-winning Sikhs in America and The Delano Manongs: Forgotten Heroes of the United Farm Workers, which was nominated for an Emmy in 2014. Now Aroy is getting ready to debut her latest project, an ambitious new multimedia exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, that picks up on her work with the manongs, a Filipino term that means, roughly, “older brother" and has been used to refer to the generation of Filipino men who came to the US in the early twentieth century on their own. The exhibit, which has the working title “Unpacking Filipino America,” is scheduled to open next fall. It tells the stories of Filipino immigrants in the Little Manila neighborhood of Stockton, California.

The exhibit will feature videos that Aroy created out of photographs and interviews she filmed through her film production company Media Factory, which she cofounded in 2006 to produce documentaries, dramas, film festivals, and exhibits. The company has created videos for clients as varied as Wired magazine, the Wall Street Journal, UNICEF, and the National Endowment for the Arts. And while the subjects may vary, the sensibility behind them is always Aroy’s. “I like looking at how people push past social barriers to find their way to live as happily, freely, and securely as they can,” she said.

Aroy’s circuitous path to filmmaking began in the Peace Corps, which she joined after graduating from BC with a degree in psychology. She traveled around South America and eventually found herself in Arequipa, Peru. While visiting the Museo Santuarios Andinos there, she became riveted by a short National Geographic documentary about the discovery of a famous Incan mummy. “I was intrigued by the idea of incorporating this love I had of movies with the real world,” she said. In 1999, she enrolled at the University of California–Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she specialized in documentary film.

From there, Aroy began teaching video and documentary production at Berkeley City College. It was there that she met her husband, Niall McKay, and in 2006 the couple founded Media Factory. In 2007, they were hired by the PBS affiliate in Sacramento to create the Sikhs in America documentary, which examined the increase in discrimination that Sikh people faced in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “We felt a great responsibility to the community to understand their stories as well as outsiders could,” Aroy said.

At the time, McKay and Aroy were living in the Bay Area, and Aroy, who is Filipina American, began working on a documentary about the history of Filipino immigrants in the region. The resulting short documentary, Little Manila: Filipinos in California's Heartland, aired on PBS and explored the 1930s Filipino immigrant community in Stockton, California. The project inspired her next documentary, The Delano Manongs, which told the story of the manong workers who joined the Delano Grape Strike of 1965 that led to the creation of the United Farm Workers union. While many people are familiar with Cesar Chavez’s leadership in that era, Aroy’s film highlights the significance of Larry Itliong, a leader among the manongs who played a major role convincing Mexican workers to join the Filipino workers on strike.

In 2018, Aroy and McKay moved to Ireland, where McKay is from. Aroy, who became a citizen last year, said she has embraced the Irish concern for one’s neighbor. “The culture of caring for one another is here,” she said. What hasn’t changed, she said, is her desire to tell the stories of the world’s underrepresented groups, particularly her own. Her current project at the Smithsonian Institution is giving a voice to the manong workers through interviews she created. “I want someone to see our brown faces on the screen and feel proud of who we are as a people,” she said. “To see all the challenges we’re faced with in the world and to know that there are Filipinos who speak up, who fight for justice, who are heard and who are seen.”