Spring 2023 Showcase Ocampo

Noreen Ocampo
A Taste of home

This commercial is a love letter to Filipino food. Until very recently, I have avoided trying to cook Filipino food because I knew it would never taste like my parents’ cooking. While we can perhaps only hope to cook something that tastes just like Mom’s, this commercial encapsulates the colors, sounds, and unexpected joys of trying. I wanted to shoot a commercial that encapsulates the feeling of achieving a sense of home while away from home to celebrate successful attempts of connecting with my culture. I also wanted anyone who feels similarly about their own relationship to their culture to feel seen, and I believe that although I am centering a Filipino dish, this experience can resonate with many people — so join me in making a pot of hot sinigang. Maybe the secret ingredient is a whole lot easier to get our hands on than we think.

Noreen Ocampo is a Filipino American writer and poet from metro Atlanta. Her collection Not Flowers won the 2021 Variant Lit Microchap Contest, and her work can also be found in Sundog Lit, Salt Hill Journal, and Taco Bell Quarterly, among others. She holds a BA in English from Emory University and currently studies poetry in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.