Bakit Dilaw Ang Gitna Ng Bahag-Hari?

A unique collaboration between Tahimik and his eldest son Kidlat Gottlieb Kalayaan, Why is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow? is a long-form collage film exploring a decade of American neocolonialism in the Philippines and the US. Inspired by a trip to Monument Valley and the Navajo Nation while en route to the Telluride Film Festival, the two Kidlats use the “spaghetti machine” (Tahimik’s nickname for his Bolex camera) to make their own “spaghetti western.” The decade-long path of the film encompasses the assassination of Benigno Aquino and the subsequent Yellow Revolution that brought Corazon Aquino to power, the decommissioning of the US air base Camp John Hay, and the younger Kidlat’s trajectory through school, all shown through a Third World Projector salvaged from a junk pile on Navajo land. Filtering a wide range of political and cultural concerns through an intensely personal and familial lens, Why is Yellow – is the central film in Tahimik’s cinematic cosmology.