A-Doc is celebrating 10 years of community in bloom, and with this historic milestone we wanted to share reflections from our members. To kick this initiative off, we have words from Set Hernandez.
Set Hernandez is a filmmaker, writer, and community organizer whose roots come from Bicol, Philippines. Unapologetically queer and undocumented, their filmmaking uplifts and complicates stories about their communities. An audio-centric film, Set’s documentary feature debut UNSEEN received an Independent Spirit Award among other accolades. They co-founded the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective, which promotes equity for undocumented immigrants in the film industry. In their past lives, Set has been a linguist, a seminarian, and a piano teacher. Their writings and contributions have been featured on Rappler, Documentary Magazine, Democracy Now, and beyond. Above all, Set is the fruit of their family’s steadfast love and their community’s generosity.
“For several years, I attended an annual conference at UCLA for undocumented immigrants like myself. When I was still a student there, I was in fact part of helping organize this event called The Immigrant Youth Empowerment Conference. A few days before the convening in 2016, I got an email from a friend, introducing me to a filmmaker who, at the time, was considering to make a film about undocumented Asian organizing. The filmmaker let me know she was planning to attend IYEC that weekend, and that maybe, we can meet up there. Ultimately, this filmmaker decided to not pursue her film idea, but she ended up inviting me to attend the IDA Getting Real Conference in 2016 for a historic gathering she’s organizing.
Little did I know that the gathering I was being invited to was the first ever meeting for what would be the Asian American Documentary Network. And that filmmaker I was introduced to? She’d end up becoming one of my first ever film mentors: Grace Lee, A-Doc’s co-founder alongside S. Leo Chiang.
Through the years, A-Doc would serve as the bridge that would lead me to so many more formative connections. Months after that fateful gathering in 2016, I saw on the A-Doc Slack that the editor Victoria Chalk was helping her friend find an assistant editor. When I sent her my resume, Vic noticed that I listed under my skills that I’m a Tagalog speaker. It just so happens that, at the time, she was working on a film set in the Philippines, so she recommended me to her team. Next thing I knew, I was interviewing for director PJ Raval who would ultimately hire me as AE and impact producer for his landmark film, CALL HER GANDA. Until now, PJ, Vic, and the rest of the CALL HER GANDA team are some of my dearest mentors who would invite me to collaborate with them over and over again for future projects. It is through them that I learned what it means to be a caring boss that empowers the emerging filmmakers they’re working with to step into their potential. To this day, I still fondly look back to the first work email I ever got from PJ, signed with his trademark ‘xo.’
And those indeed are the experiences that I cherish most from A-Doc. It’s not just the pathways into filmmaking that this network has afforded me. Beyond that, it is meeting and collaborating with artists who challenge themselves everyday to step into their integrity as people, whose films have shaped the way I understand the world around me (and even my own life), that I will forever feel so privileged to have experienced through this network. All the film practitioners that I’ve met in A-Doc (be they filmmakers, programmers, educators, etc.) are less interested in the industry of filmmaking than they are with making genuine impact in the lives of the people who watch their films.
With that, the reverberations of A-Doc in my life would ultimately culminate to one more consequential milestone two years later. During the A-Doc gathering at the 2018 Getting Real Conference, the legendary Jean Tsien would encourage me as well as A-Doc members Rahi Hasan and Miko Revereza to come together and convene undocumented immigrant filmmakers like ourselves amidst the citizenship restrictions we faced to pursue our projects. Soon, I’d end up receiving a DM on the A-Doc Slack from Nicole Solis-Sison too, and by March 2019, we’d be hosting in my apartment the first ever meeting for the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective. Had it not been for the spaces that A-Doc fosters, an organization like our collective might’ve never come to existence. And there’s no shadow of doubt in my mind that had it not been for A-Doc, my humble journey as a filmmaker would have been impossible altogether.
Fast forward 2026, I got to experience
Grace Lee‘s wisdom once again when I attended a recent screening of her seminal film
AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY: THE EVOLUTION OF GRACE LEE BOGGS. Just as it’s been 10 years since I first joined A-Doc it’s also been ten years since I first saw this film that transformed my life at a time when I was struggling to find my place in the world with the administration. I say this because it’s difficult for me to divorce the timeline of A-Doc’s journey with the political context it has existed under. Sure, we can say all we want about the thousands of members that A-Doc has amassed, the number of Oscar nominees amongst its membership, and some other impressive metric of growth. But what I’ve admired most about this network through the years is how its members have chosen to rise up to the needs of the moment time and time again – not just for the documentary field they’re a part of, but more importantly, for each other. I’ve experienced this for myself from the A-Doc members who’ve hired me and helped me bring my projects to life to those that have co-founded organizations with me and so much more.
As Grace Lee Boggs put it: ‘You don’t choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be.’ I am excited to witness all the ways A-Doc will continue to make that choice as a collective and continue to be an organization that lives up to the times it finds itself in.”
Have a memory you want to share? Check our Slack to fill out the form. In the meantime, take a look at our anniversary trailer edited by member Amy Fan.
It takes a village to get to ten years, and your generous contribution can help us continue to increase the visibility and support of Asian Americans in the documentary field. Consider making a donation.
