Now Streaming: HASIK by Mandy Qua & Marissa Mejia
A story from the Philippines of seeds, heritage, resilience, and the farmers keeping traditions alive.
At Ceres, we’re drawn to films that explore the relationships behind our food. Behind what we eat. Through the Ceres Collection, we are creating a growing home for films that deserve a longer life - stories that can be watched from anywhere, at any time.
Dear Friends,
We’re excited to share the newest film in the Ceres Collection: HASIK, directed by Mandy Qua and Marissa Mejia.
Recipient of the 2025 Ceres Spirit Award for Food Justice, jurors recognized HASIK for its thoughtful introduction to the seed savers in the Philippines who are working to protect indigenous seeds and the knowledge, traditions, and agricultural heritage connected to them.
Want a taste first? Watch the trailer.
Film Synopsis
This documentary feature film shares the stories of seed savers from across the three regions of the Philippines - Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. Despite encountering various systemic barriers, these farmers persist in their seed-saving practices as a way of preserving native biodiversity and passing knowledge from one generation to the next.
For these farmers, saving seeds also means preserving languages, traditions, histories, and ways of life that have been cultivated alongside them for generations.
Why We Chose This Film
It is remarkable how much a seed can hold. Within something so small are generations of adaptation, memory, and care.
HASIK is a movie that takes its time, unapologetically. It is all the more remarkable knowing that HASIK is the debut feature from first-time filmmakers Mandy Qua and Marissa Mejia.
Reflecting on childhood memories of gardening with her grandmother, Marissa realized that despite years spent collaborating with nonprofits to tell the stories of conservationists around the world, she had never told an environmental story rooted in her own Filipina heritage. We loved their Director’s Statement and included it in full at the end of this newsletter.
The Ceres Collection is one of the ways we continue our commitment to filmmakers and audiences beyond the festival itself. By bringing these films to our YouTube channel, we hope to make meaningful storytelling more accessible and create opportunities for ongoing learning, reflection, and dialogue.
Watch HASIK, explore the other films in the Ceres Collection, and stay tuned as more films are released throughout the year.
Warmest,
Maayan and the Ceres Team
P.S. We have some exciting things coming this fall! We’ll be gathering for an upcoming Climate focused Ceres event, with tickets going on sale next week. And, to celebrate the season and say thank you to our wonderful community, we’ll also be hosting a giveaway. Stay tuned for all the details, and don’t forget to follow us on Instagram, where we’ll be sharing more about the event and giveaway. 🍂
Director Statement - HASIK
HASIK (“To Sow”) began as a search for connection—to land, to culture, to story. While at university, Mandy Qua, who grew up in the Philippines, joined an inaugural group that launched The Seed Farm at Princeton: an interdisciplinary space where students grow rare, culturally significant crops in collaboration with Indigenous and historically marginalized community partners. It was through this work that Mandy first encountered seed saving and the idea of “seed stories”—ancestral and personal narratives carried through seeds that tie people to land, heritage, and memory. This experience planted a deep desire in her to explore these themes artistically, leading her to create an original dance work featuring a diverse, all-Filipino cast united by a shared desire to uncover their seed stories. Marissa Mejia, one of the dancers, became a close friend—and together, they began imagining how these stories might live beyond the stage.
During rehearsals for Mandy’s piece, when asked to reflect on her personal seed stories, Marissa was drawn back to her grandmother’s backyard—a tropical oasis tucked away amongst the manicured lawns of coastal Virginia. Thousands of miles from her family in the Philippines, Marissa’s grandmother carefully sowed the seeds of plants that brought her the colors, fragrances, and tastes of home. While reflecting on her favorite memories of spending time in the garden with her grandmother, Marissa realized that, despite years of collaborating with nonprofits to tell the stories of conservationists from communities across the globe, she had yet to share environmental stories rooted in her own Filipina heritage.
As Marissa shared these reflections with Mandy, the conversation unearthed a mutual realization—while Marissa had never told the stories of Filipino environmentalists, Mandy knew more about plants in New Jersey than those from her own home country. Together, we began to imagine a project that could help us reconnect with our cultural and agricultural roots. We applied for—and fortunately received—the inaugural Princeton ReachOut Herbert C. Paschen, Jr. ’56 Fellowship, which allowed us to complete a public service project in collaboration with our selected nonprofit organization, Global Seed Savers, Inc. As we performed research in preparation for our project, we noticed a gap in existing documentaries on seed saving—many were rich with science and data, but they often missed the personal connections that ground this practice. Few centered the lived experiences of farmers, and even fewer featured Southeast Asian voices. HASIK was born out of that absence.
As we embarked on our filmmaking journey and spent time listening to, farming with, and learning from the farmers, we came to understand that seed saving is more than just an agricultural process. It is an act of environmental stewardship, cultural preservation, and reclaiming agency in food systems shaped by industrial and commercial forces. The farmers’ stories are deeply rooted in the diverse cultures and ecologies of the Philippines, but they resonate far beyond its borders as the challenges Filipino seed savers face echo global struggles over land and food sovereignty. With HASIK, we set out to honor that power through intentional collaboration—crafting a film shaped not just by our vision, but by the narratives the farmers themselves wished to center.
The process was not easy. Midway through production, we lost four out of six of our original farmer participants within 24 hours of each other. Although the circumstances were beyond our control—with government corruption, armed conflict, and death threats (none of which were directly relating to us or our project) coming into play—this forced us to pause, reflect, and reimagine our entire film. Though devastating, that turning point led us to a more emotional, complex, and powerful storyline than we had first envisioned.
The challenges surrounding seeds and food sovereignty are far-reaching. We don’t have the solutions, but by sharing the stories of the seed savers who welcomed us into their lives, we hope HASIK serves as an invitation for viewers to think more critically about the origins of their food, reflect on their personal or familial ties to seeds and land, and consider how they too might begin to sow seeds of care, resistance, and change in their own lives.