By José Sarmiento Hinojosa & Mónica Delgado

Over the course of four years, the perspectives over the thinking process of filmmaker extraordinaire John Gianvito have remained solid, but it’s fundamental to read his ideas through the passage of time, contemplating the current moment of the first part of this interview, in 2017 (amidst the Trump administration), and the second one, in 2021 (in its aftermath), on the making of his latest documentary Her Socialist Smile (2020), about the activist, socialist side of Helen Keller. Our 2017 interview was meant to be included in a cinema and politics dossier that never saw the light of day, but nonetheless, perfectly articulated Gianvito’s political ideas and filmmaking ethos as a catalyst of the problems he saw of post-colonialism issues, the exercise of capitalism and American imperialism and its aftermath in its own history and the history of countries as the Philippines.