While browsing through old footage and photos for a documentary she was making, filmmaker Cha Roque saw her daughter’s old speech at the 2014 Pride Speaks under the (now more commercial – Ed) Metro Manila Pride. The video, she said to Outrage Magazine, made her realize “that for the past few years, I have been sharing my own inconveniences and experiences about being discriminated as a lesbian”, but that while “it has been almost five years since this was filmed, until now there are still instances where children are discriminated for having untraditional families.”
“Kids with LGBTQI parents are still discriminated and that is the most painful part of being a parent for me,” Roque said.
Now – as the world marks the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia – Roque shares her daughter Kelsey’s video as she hopes that “that sharing this will enlighten people’s minds – that we are not a special case, that we are not crazy, that we are not sick, and that we are as much of a family as you are.”
Roque is a filmmaker, educator, and LGBT advocate. She has been teaching audio and video production, scriptwriting, post-production, and multimedia subjects at various universities in Manila since 2014. A grantee of BChange Organization for the Stories of Being Me, representing the Philippines in an Asian documentary series, Roque is a returning fellow of the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum under the Salzburg Global Seminar from 2016 to 2018. She is also a fellow of the Ricky Lee Scriptwriting workshop. In 2018, she was awarded the Art that Matters for Film Award by Amnesty International Philippines under Amnesty’s Ignite Awards. Her recent films “What I Would’ve Told My Daughter if I Knew What to Say Back Then“, and “Slay“have been making the rounds in both local and international film festivals.
