Manny Crisostomo appearing in HBO original documentary

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Who are you?

[00:00:02]What is your identity? I think identity is like slippery slope.

[00:00:05]>> For decades, Manny Crisostomo has told stories through a camera lens, capturing Chamorro culture, identity, and community. But this time, the storyteller became the story. As you know, Joan, um I prefer to be on the other side of the camera and uh I prefer to be telling the stories instead of being the story.

[00:00:23]Uh but I I just viewed it as an opportunity to uh to have this sort of a larger megaphone, this larger platform to talk about uh the thing that's important to me, which is our people, which is the Chamorro people, the indigenous people of Guam and and the Marianas. Crisostomo is one of 15 individuals featured in HBO's documentary, The A-List: 15 Stories from Asian and Pacific Diasporas, a film that moves beyond broad labels to tell personal stories of identity, culture, and belonging. And for Crisostomo, it all started with an email he thought was too good to be true. They sent me a really nice letter and first of all, I thought somebody was like, all right, who's who's messing with me, right?

[00:01:04]Who's punking me with this letter? I I'm familiar with uh the producer, the executive producer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. I'm a big fan of his from from his years as a He's still a photographer.

[00:01:16]And now he's ventured into documentaries.

[00:01:19]And uh yeah, it was just sort of a an email.

[00:01:23]Um just, you know, opening up my email and and there was a a note from one of the producers asking me to be part of this. Um it's still, you know, in a I think this was maybe a year and a half ago, almost 2 years ago. He eventually flew to New York for a 3-hour interview, one that would be edited down to just a few minutes of film. But in that short time, he made sure the heart of the Chamorro people was front and center. You know, a lot of it is uh just my anecdotal experience uh photographing Chamorros and what I feel in my heart. Uh I talked about Mahålang.

[00:01:58]And I tried to explain to them what uh mahalang meant, that there's this longing, this deep longing as as Chamorros that we have.

[00:02:07]And then I told them that I uh a good friend of mine said, "The only real way to mitigate the mahalang is develop a sense that you know, the mahalang, the longing, the only way to mitigate the longing is to develop a sense of belonging." For Crisostomo, that belonging has always been found through community, whether on Guam or a thousand miles away. If I can't be in Guam, I'm I'm I am all over the country going to Chamorro festivals, Chamorro events. My neighbors are across the street are Chamorro, so it's really exciting. Uh I have a lot of people in the neighborhood that are Chamorros. I go to Chamorro restaurant in the Mission District in San Francisco and uh you know, I just uh kind of find our peoples. He also used the interview to explain one of the most important Chamorro values, inafa'maolek.

[00:02:56]Crisostomo recalling how he gifted the director one of his personal shirts after the interview.

[00:03:01]I said, "Dude, I just spent 3 hours trying to explain to you what Chamorro inafa'maolek means. It's this giving, it's this sharing, it's this support and stuff."

[00:03:13]I said, "I'm going to give you a shirt that cost me maybe $30 to make.

[00:03:17]But invariably, you're going to you know, edit and put the Chamorro people throughout a worldwide distribution.

[00:03:27]You know, take the shirt. It's [laughter] okay, you know." He's like, "Oh, I can pay you." I said, "No, that's that's inafa'maolek.

[00:03:34]You know, you it's it's a reciprocal trade, even though I'm getting the better end of the deal because he's again, he's adding me, he's putting me in this amazing film with these 14 other amazing uh folks. And um he wants my shirt, I give him my shirt.

[00:03:53]While the documentary puts him in the spotlight, Crisostomo says the mission has never changed.

[00:03:58]I'm going to continue to do what I'm doing uh, regardless of this documentary. There'll be more awareness.

[00:04:05]There'll be more, you know, that that uh, people will understand a little bit about who we are.

[00:04:10]Uh, you know, talking about our culture, talking about nafa' ma'olek, tansuli, kustumbre and tomorrow. And above all else, he says it's critical that tomorrow's control their own narrative.

[00:04:22]It's a really important to me that we tell our stories. That, you know, it's us telling our story, not somebody else from the outside telling everybody else what the tomorrow's are like. It's an amazing platform to tell the world who we are. Um, I hope I do a good job. I mean, I hope I don't embarrass myself. And for the next generation of tomorrow artists and storytellers, he hopes the moment shows them it's possible. I hope they they're inspired by it. The A-List, 15 stories from Asian and Pacific Diasporas, premieres May 14th on HBO Max. Jonatan Charfauros, KUAM News.