Places We Go

A bilingual graphic novel nine years in the making

	Places We Go – Hazel Venzon and David Oro’s modern-day fairy tale about family separation completes artistic evolution with Buwan ng Wika presale, ahead of a September 26 release marking UNIT Productions’ 10th anniversary.

UNIT Productions and ANAK Publishing are set to release Places We Go, a bilingual Tagalog/English graphic novel by writer Hazel Venzonand illustrator David Oro. Now available for pre-order, the book will launch on September 26 coinciding with UNIT Productions’ 10th anniversary celebration.

“This story has taken almost every form I know how to tell a story in,” said Hazel Venzon, writer and co-creator of Places We Go. “Each version taught us something the last one couldn’t. The graphic novel is where it finally gets to stay.”

“Creating the world of this story from 2-D transparencies on an overhead projector to a fully illustrated animation to now a graphic novel has been the most epic transformative project I’ve ever completed,” said David Oro, illustrator and co-creator.

Places We Go is a modern-day fairy tale about Grace, an eight-year-old girl in Sta. Mesa, Manila, whose mother has worked abroad in Winnipeg for three years. On her mother’s birthday, Grace sets out to look for work – enough, she hopes, to buy her mother a flight home, if only for a day. Told in both Tagalog and English, the book follows Grace’s search for what home means when the people who make it are scattered across an ocean.

The story began almost a decade ago, when Venzon was invited to read a Filipino folk tale to young people at a Literacy Coalition event in the Yukon. Unable to find one she felt she could tell, she wrote a new one instead, inspired by a cousin’s real-life experience of family separation. What began as a told story with a slideshow became a shadow-puppet stage play, presented at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival’s 30th anniversary and toured to the Philippines. During the pandemic, the Prairie Theatre Exchange commissioned Venzon and Oro to adapt it into a digital production. The resulting short animation toured with the Carousel Theatre to schools across British Columbia, screened as part of the Shaw Festival @Home Digital Theatre Collection, and won multiple Awards of Recognition from the IndieFEST Film Awards, including for Animation, Asian, Experimental, Women in Film, and Children/Family Programming.

Places We Go now completes that journey as a 120-page graphic novel, published by ANAK Publishing Worker Cooperative in partnership with UNIT Productions.

The book’s official release and launch party will be on September 26, 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at 100 Arthur St. #300, Winnipeg. Pre-order Places We Go online at https://www.anakpublishing.ca/PlacesWeGo.html