While weaving a t’nalak, Sanay, a dreamweaver, suffers from a heart attack. After Sanay goes into a coma, her daughter, Ruya, is faced with the daunting task of finishing her mother’s next design to make ends meet. To do this, she needs to overcome the two obstacles standing between her and dreaming: her anxiety and her insomnia. When she starts dreaming, her subconscious manifests as nightmares about being overwhelmed with her responsibility, leading to sleep disruptions again. Frustrated, Ruya tries remedies to stay asleep long enough to dream (and dream well). It isn’t until she works through her crippling anxiety and self-limiting beliefs that she’s finally able to get in touch with who she thinks is her mother in the dream. It turns out to be Fu Dalu–the Spirit of abaca who communicates designs to the T’boli women.

Director Biography - Nicole Mairose Dizon

Nicole Mairose Dizon is a first-generation Filipina-American writer/director/producer from Baldwin Park, CA. Growing up around mines, her work explores class, strivers, and the overlooked through genre and surrealism. She worked at Scott Free and various scripted and unscripted shows. In 2022, she was featured in Ava DuVernay's Array Crew for Filipino American History Month for her work as a Showrunner's Assistant on Amazon's Blade Runner 2099. She did Project Involve, Kundiman and the California Arts Council fellowships. She’s in the Recording Academy’s GRAMMY U. Dizon's producing work was recognized by the NAACP and The New Yorker. Her short, Morena, opened Gold House and UTA's 2023 Filipino/x American History Month Showcase. She completed the 2025 Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award Fellowship with Fifth Season and Ghetto Film School. She’s currently a Script Coordinator on Netflix’s thriller, Trinity. Her latest short, Ruya, recently won Best Narrative Experimental Film at Urbanworld Film Festival and Best Cinematography Panavision Grant Award at Rehoboth Beach International Film Festival. Outside of work, she loves music production, baseball (Go Dodgers!) and F1.

Director Statement

RUYA is a personal reflection about purpose, self-limiting beliefs and creating in the face of self-doubt and fears. It shows a Filipina in her late 20s figuring out how to carry on her tribe’s tradition of dreamweaving when her anxiety and insomnia stand in her way. When Ruya’s mom goes into a coma, she feels the pressure of living up to her mom’s sacrifice after moving to the states. As she desperately tries to dream of the design for a timely order, she’s forced to examine her anxieties head-on throughout the night. Her fears of losing her mom, failing and diving into the unknown grew. It was only the subsiding of her anxiety that allowed her to move forward.

During the 2023 strikes, I thought about my purpose in art and my relationship with my creative self. I was recovering from a long bout of insomnia, burnout, undiagnosed (at the time) anemia that interfered with my sleep. It had been 2 years since I directed anything outside of work. I didn’t recognize myself in the midst of my anxiety and all of the external factors I had no control over. I wanted to remember: Why does art matter to me? Could I still create? With time away from work, I stayed up late that summer obsessing over finding the perfect idea–only to worsen my insomnia in the process.

But the answer lied in those sleepless nights—I revisited an idea I shelved about the T’boli dreamweavers in Mindanao. Though I don’t identify as T’boli, I was drawn to the idea that we can stand in our way even for a communal dream and calling we’re born into. As the granddaughter of an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW), I’ve never seen a story about a T’boli dreamweaver as an OFW pursuing their dream of dreamweaving in modern America. While the T’boli face different pressures and challenges than Filipino Americans, I learned they would struggle to dream and weave from time to time. The quick, disorienting archival image sequence in my film implicitly reclaims some of the forgotten legacy of Filipino Americans before my generation. Though the film isn't centered on our history in America, this nightmare shows Ruya's subconscious and her experience of crippling anxiety from the weight of her mom and ancestors' sacrifices.

At a time when many of us feel lost about our direction in life, I hope this film reminds people that we can always come back home to ourselves and dream.