Vivi, a third-culture Filipina-American, travels to the Philippines to reconnect with her roots, but falls in with a group of Western eco-volunteers. When they scorn the customs of a remote mountain village, an ancient evil comes knocking.

Director Biography - Jill Sachs

Jill Marie Sachs is a mixed Filipina-American writer-director who uses genre storytelling to challenge oppressive narratives and amplify voices too often overlooked. Her folk-horror short Taga, shot in the Philippines, is a 2025 CAPE Julia Gouw Short Film Award–funded project and an Official Selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Taga was honored with the Wes Craven Award for Best Horror Short at the Catalina Film Festival, and Jill recently won the Minerva Award for Female-Identifying Writer-Director-Producers at FilmQuest. Jill earned her MFA in Directing from the American Film Institute, and her BA from the University of Chicago. Her films and music videos have screened at festivals including HollyShorts, Hawai‘i International Film Festival, BendFilm, Cinequest, SLO, and FilmQuest.

When not behind the camera, Jill can often be found backpacking, wandering art museums, or chasing the uncanny—always searching for the strange and the sublime that spark her stories.

Director Statement

TAGA, which means ‘From’ in Tagalog, was born out of the existential urge that propels people to seek the truth in far-flung places… and the cultural conflict that such journeys can create.

The story follows Vivi, a ‘third culture’ Filipina-American, who travels to the rural mountains of Luzon hoping to understand the essence of her origins. Unfortunately, she becomes immersed with the wrong group of Western volunteers who have little respect for the indigenous customs. They trample over tradition on their quest to save the world, and must face the monstrous repercussions of their ignorance.

Like our hero Vivi, I’ve sought out the Motherland on quests to understand my mixed identity. Growing up cloistered in a tiny mountain town in America, far from my mother’s large, boisterous Filipino family, I’ve always felt like an alien, far away from the place where I might make sense. Like many Asian immigrants, my mother fixated on assimilating at all costs, repressing her culture and past for safety. She wanted to protect herself, and me, from being targeted as Other in our white, conservative village, but it didn’t work. We were still Other, just enshrouded by a nebulous gray fog, slowly sinking without a tangible history or culture to hold on to.

Even as an adult, something of this fog still lurks inside me, a question mark at the soul level. I’ve traveled all over the world trying to disperse it, yet there is something inside that remains unanswerable. When I travel to the Philippines, I want to feel whether my body awakens on a cellular level, to know that somewhere I belong. I want to find some nuggets of the essential culture, something that existed before the waves of armies, traders, Colonial invaders altered everything. But the truth is I am a foreigner. The authenticity and belonging I seek might never be open to me. It might be uttered in an ancient language that my brain has never molded to hear. As a traveler my presence is subtly influencing the very culture I’m seeking, which is also pushing, pulling, and acting on me. And that’s terrifying.