Wet Dreams (2024) is a silent, double-channel experimental film following Kerel, a recurring fictional persona of a queer Filipino sailor, as he strums a guitar atop a rock in the open sea. The black-and-white imagery drifts between dream, memory, and premonition, evoking the mutable nature of maritime space and queer temporality.
The film interlaces original footage with archival materials, including scenes from Badjao (1957) and early maritime documentaries. These fragments converge with surreal sequences: Kerel floating amid submerged plants, mirrored seascapes, shipwrecks, and coral reefs. Guided by Mussel Thinking, the film treats each element as a filtering agent, a site that accumulates, holds, and transmits traces of labor, memory, and ecological resonance, allowing histories, affects, and material presences to cluster like mussels on a rock.
Political rupture enters through found footage of Chinese patrol boats harassing Filipino fishermen, revealing geopolitical fault lines of maritime sovereignty. The narrative then drifts into a mystical cave, zooming into microorganisms, suggesting an ontological meditation on life’s entanglements.
The film concludes with the mirrored image of a solitary seafarer’s helmet marooned on a rock, poised between disappearance and witness. Through archival layering, experimental montage, and Mussel Thinking, Wet Dreams continues my exploration of the sea as a queer, ecological threshold, where soundless gestures, sedimented histories, and ephemeral presences demand attentive, relational, and multispecies modes of sensing and imagining.
