Filmmakers
Meet the filmmakers behind Settling St. Malo.
Virgile Beddok
Director · Producer · Editor
A French native, Virgile Beddok is an independent film director and producer based in Lafayette, Louisiana. He is a Film Production professor and the head of the Moving Image Arts program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Before moving permanently to the United States, he produced and directed the feature-length documentary New Orleans Music Renaissance about the post-Katrina music scene. The documentary was partially funded by a German state grant, broadcast on the French television channel MEZZO from 2009 to 2012, and screened at the New Orleans Film Festival. Beddok later worked as a broadcast producer for Voodoo Fest in 2013 and 2014 and directed and produced the Stanton Moore Drum Academy video tutorial series through 2021. His recent narrative work includes writing, directing, and producing the comedy short The Perfect Day and producing the horror short When The Time Comes. He also partners with regional institutions, including NPR affiliate KRVS, on projects that foreground South Louisiana’s cultural life.
Director’s Statement
My filmmaking begins with immersion in a culture and with attention to the people who embody it. I try to remain behind the subjects, allowing their words, perspectives, and emotional investments to carry the film. In Settling St. Malo, that approach meant following Randy Gonzales’s search for his family’s forgotten Filipino history and allowing his poetry to guide the film across New Orleans and Louisiana’s coast.
The challenge was also visual: much of this history survives only in fragments – in archives, family memory, and landscapes transformed or nearly erased. We bring those fragments together through archival footage, coastal imagery, and dreamlike reenactments. The reenactments are not intended as literal reconstruction. They create a space in which verse and image can help viewers imagine lives and places that the historical record cannot fully restore.
I see the film as part of a continuing conversation about whose histories become visible and whose remain at the margins. By strengthening Randy’s perspective and foregrounding Filipino Louisiana, I hope the film makes this history immediate without letting the filmmaking overshadow the people and communities at its center.
Randy Gonzales
Story · Writer · Producer
Randy Gonzales is a poet and public humanities scholar whose work documents the history and cultural life of Filipinos in Louisiana. He is the author of Settling St. Malo, winner of the 2024 Summerlee Book Award, and wrote and co-produced the lyrical documentary of the same name. His work on the Filipinx diaspora has been featured on CNN, the BBC, HuffPost, HBO Max’s Take Out with Lisa Ling, Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien, and ABS-CBN. His second poetry collection, There No More, is forthcoming, and his current book project, Adobo at Gumbo: Savoring the Culinary History and Food Culture of Filipino Louisiana, is under contract with LSU Press. He is also the creator of FilipinoLa.com, a community media project devoted to archival recovery and public storytelling. Gonzales is Associate Professor of English and Dr. James Wilson/BORSF Eminent Scholar Endowed Professor in Southern Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
