Explore the Cost of Love in Michaela Ternasky-Holland’s VR experience, Mahal

Mixed Asian Media - June 14, 2023

By Jalen Jones

Award-winning XR/metaverse creator and storyteller Michaela Ternasky-Holland is the co-creator and director of Mahal—the second installment of her Reimagined anthology series. Inspired by indigenous Philippine mythology, Mahal is a virtual reality narrative experience that follows sibling deities Apoloki, Mayari, Tala, and Hanan (gods of the sun, moon, stars, and dawn respectively) as they mourn the death of their father. Mahal has officially started its festival run at this year’s Tribeca Festival. To commemorate Mahal’s grand premiere, Ternasky-Holland sat down with us to give us a deeper look at the otherworldly experience.

What led you to base Mahal on indigenous mythology, as opposed to something more modern?

This actually isn’t my first time doing a Filipino project in VR. My first project in VR that was specifically focused on the Philippines was a social impact project with the Yellow Boat of Hope Foundation, which is an incredible nonprofit in the Philippines that builds boats and creates access to education for kids who live in the remote islands of the Philippines. The Yellow Boat of Hope was an amazing first step for me to understand that I can really tell stories about the Philippines in an authentic way. It was also my first time really working with animation, and I loved it. One of the reasons we wanted to do animation on that project was so that we could be authentic to what was happening in the Philippines, in a way that was respectful to poverty but didn’t showcase poverty porn. We showed the gumption and the humanity of these kids who are still just kids at the end of the day — kids who really want to be able to bring back all of the knowledge they learned in school back to their village to help their homes become stronger and better.

When I was thinking about doing my own VR film to be animated using Oculus Quill, I really wanted to explore Filipino culture again. But I didn't want to showcase the “Third World” country Philippines, or the Christian Catholicism regime of the Philippines. There's so much content out there right now about the dictatorship that is currently in power, about the lack of freedom in journalism, and about the drug busts, and people dying and being killed. I was like, “Well, I don't know if that's authentic for me to talk about, because I'm Filipino American. But there still needs to be something out there that shows Filipinxs as these strong, amazing, empowered people. Because we are!

I've also always been a huge fan of Roman and Greek mythology. I really wanted to showcase the power level of gods and goddesses through a Filipino lens. And that's really what led me down that path of exploring mythology, and exploring more indigenous belief systems pre-colonization, pre-Christianity, pre-capitalism. That was really the impetus for me to want to do that kind of project.

Mahal has a very nuanced presentation of grief. The deities all seem to approach their grief in very individualized ways. How was the research process for that? Was it grounded more in psychology studies, personal experience, or something else?

Definitely more personal experience. The beauty of this project is that it's not just an homage to my father, but to so many people that I love and adore who also find themselves fatherless. The producer of this project, Julie Cavaliere, lost her father. My personal partner and one of the lead stars of voiceover actors also lost his father. One of my dear friends here, Mixed Asian Media’s Alex, also lost her father—like there's so many people around me that have dealt with [grieving] a father or even a parent leaving this earth before they were expecting, and so I took a lot of my personal experiences with grief and kind of interpreted them through these characters.

I looked at the characters themselves and asked: “What did they want? What did they need, and how are they trying to get what that?” So for Apolaki, what is his want? What does he need to do to make everything go back to normal? He needs to recognize his sisters are hurting and recognize he himself is hurting. For Mayari—what does she want? She wants to be the strongest so that she can protect her family. What does she need to do? She needs to confront her resentment and anger. Each character was looked at from a personal lens, where I considered their individual traits and gave them really human ways of reacting to grief. 

All of those have been personal moments I've had with my own grief. I've had resentment and anger. I've had the need to make everything seem normal, the need to people-please and ignore my own emotions. I've had the need to drown myself in work and creative expression in order to disappear from my emotions. All these things that these deities go through have all been personal moments that I've also gone through.

Which of the deities would you say you related to the most in this story?

Oh, that's a hard one. I relate to all of them on some level, but if someone was like, “If you could jump into your story world now and be one goddess, which one would you be?” I'd say Mayari. She represents so much athleticism and strength and just unabashedly has this anger and resentment that I think sometimes would be healthy for all of us to take a page from. Instead of being so by-the-book, she's like, “No, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm doing my own thing.” That was hurting her family, but I know there's also a part of that where even the ability to express your heart is so important, and even the ability to express that like you're frustrated is important. That’s what the whole family is struggling with — the other three siblings aren’t expressing that they’re hurt, or expressing their frustration either. Interestingly enough, Mayari was the one that felt the most clear to me, but she was the one that I had the hardest time writing for. So I feel like she really has a special place in my heart.

There are definitely a lot of emotions that most people would initially interpret as harsh or angry, but at the end of the day, it's rooted in sincerity and care and love. Balancing all these emotions while grieving is much deeper than how it appears on the surface.

Exactly. That hurt, and that heartbreak. That's really the reason it's called Mahal. As a noun, “mahal" is the Tagalog word for love, but as an adjective, it transforms into the Tagalog word for costly or expensive… Love comes at a cost, and these kids are hurting. We really had to find voiceover actors who could portray these characters as hurting characters, not as just characters with these big surface-level emotions. It takes understanding the heartache that all those emotions really stem from.

I see this is the second installment of the Reimagined anthology series. So where do you see Reimagined going after this?

So Reimagined as an anthology series really is just around this ideology that female creators, female directors, and female producers are the captains of the ship. They’re driving the storytelling, the visual art style, and the retelling of the story that they choose. Volume One was a retelling of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale and was directed by Julie Cavalier, who is also the producer of Mahal and the co-creator of the Reimagined series. Volume Two, Mahal, is directed by me, and is about Philippine mythology, and reimagining it into a narrative handling grief. Volume Three will be by a guest director, Melissa Joiner. She identifies as Black and will be retelling a southern Nigerian folk tale of a woman with two skins — that's all I can really tell you about Volume Three for now.

I've been told a couple times that the house should be like its own Disney+ series, or maybe we should expand the IP. That is definitely something I would love to do — it's just something we have to figure out with Meta.

Could you talk a little bit about the supplemental aspects of this project?

The VR Animation Player — which is where Mahal will release to the public when we finish the festival run — is a space on the VR headset, and when we sign our contract with Meta Quest, it's not just to create the actual film, but to create three pieces of content that will live on the shelf alongside the film. Most people do like a behind-the-scenes and meet-the-character feature. Kind of your standard DVD bonus content. But I really wanted to use that moment of having the supplementals to say, “Why don't we show more explicit connections to Philippine indigenous culture?” So through one supplemental, we highlight things like Kali sticks, tatak tattoos, and like all these subtle details that we put into the piece in the village that you might not notice or be aware of. In another supplemental, we really highlight the deities and some of the tales that are told about these deities, showing who they are in the canon of Philippine mythology. In the final piece, we really show the making of Mahal — all the nuts and bolts, to show how we approach VR animation, and how VR animation comes to life.

And where can viewers expect to access Mahal?

It'll be on the Meta Quest TV store. Meta Quest is a VR headset that's for sale on the market, and then anyone with a Meta Quest that has a Wi-Fi connection can download Mahal for free, from a specific storefront called the VR Animation Player, which is also a free app that they download.

You can think of it as like downloading the YouTube app, so you can stream a film. You can download the VR Animation app, to then stream Mahal on the headset. That will all be when we release it for free on the Quest headset later this year. Right now, it's going through its exclusive festival circuit.

Catch Mahal at the 2023 Tribeca Festival, from now until June 17!

To stay updated with Michaela Ternasky-Holland, Mahal, and the Reimagined series, be sure to follow @michaelaternaskyholland and @reimaginedvr.