Creative Direction · Film · Live Experience
Jethro Patalinghug
Creative Director & Filmmaker crafting cinematic worlds across film, installation, portraiture, and live experience.
Available for creative direction, experiential storytelling, film/video campaigns, cultural productions, and visual world-building.
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The full portfolio ecosystem.
If you’re looking for my tech-facing creative producer work, visit jethrocreative.com. If you want my documentary films and film-focused portfolio, visit jethrofilm.com.
Director's Statement
I build felt experiences where identity, memory, protest, and performance become visual worlds.
My practice moves between documentary, sculpture, portraiture, installation, and live production. Across these forms, I create emotionally resonant frameworks that hold cultural complexity without flattening it.
I am interested in how visual language can hold contradiction — glamour and grief, protest and tenderness, the personal and the political — while still making space for awe.
Selected Works
World-building as story, spectacle, and cultural memory.
Installation · Performance · World-building
Manghihilot
Manghihilot is an immersive installation and performance environment that responds to anti-drag and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric by proposing the opposite: queer, trans, and drag performers are healers. Pattern-changing sequins, gel-colored light, used stockings from my drag practice, synthetic hair, bejeweled surfaces, and a central corset create a space of embrace, transformation, and resistance.
The work reframes the language of “grooming” into a vocabulary of care — affective, resistive, honorific, and bold. A projection of Pura Luka Vega appears within the space, grounding the installation in solidarity and situating drag as an act of shapeshifting, survival, and world-building.
Portraiture · Exhibition · Cultural Protest
KAANYAG
A portrait series honoring queer and trans AAPI drag performers in response to anti-drag and anti-trans legislation. The work positions performers not just as entertainers, but as protectors, icons, and living cultural memory.
Life-sized Sculpture
Gabriela Rising
Gabriela Rising is a life-sized sculpture inspired by Gabriela, the militant women’s organization in the Philippines, and the Babaylan — precolonial spiritual and cultural leaders who welcomed queer men and men who presented as women into their ranks.
The work is also personal. My mother’s involvement in Gabriela deeply shaped my activism, and my own queer identity lives within the sculpture’s reimagining of the Babaylan as an expansive figure of ancestry, militancy, care, and transformation.
Sculptural Series
Disco Balling Heads
A sculptural series honoring queer subcultures, performance lineages, and the handmade excess that shaped me as an artist. Built from drag materials, jewelry, beads, mirrors, and found surfaces, the works hold glamour and defiance in the same body.
Documentary · Editorial Storytelling
Documentary Work
Documentary remains the foundation of my creative direction: the discipline of listening, structuring, and finding emotional truth inside complex social histories. The work spans feature and short documentary forms, from community history to migration, activism, and identity.
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Let’s build the world around the story.
Available for creative direction, experiential storytelling, film/video campaigns, cultural productions, and visual world-building.
