A decade after its debut, That Strange Summer — a student-collaborative documentary directed and produced by Michigan State University journalism Professor Geri Alumit Zeldes — will be honored this August with a Michigan Legal Milestone. The recognition, marked by a permanent plaque at the Philippine Community Center of Michigan in Southfield, cements the film’s role in resurfacing a buried chapter of Michigan’s legal and cultural history.
The film revisits a chilling 1975 case in which two Filipino nurses, Filipina Narciso and Leonora Perez, were falsely accused of injecting patients with a lethal drug at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Ann Arbor, MI. Convicted by an all-white jury — but never retried after the court cited prosecutorial misconduct — the women were ultimately released. Their story, largely forgotten by the public, sparked powerful activism in the Filipino American community.
Zeldes said she felt like she should have known about the case prior to learning about it through an MSU colleague in 2011. After all, she grew up near Ann Arbor and attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate student. “And I’m Filipino,” she added. “I felt like this is something that needs to be explored, because there's a huge gap in Filipino history in general.”
That disconnect became her calling. “With a lot of documentary film ideas, my self-test is, ‘if it keeps me up at night.’ And that story kept me up for months.”
Read the full story on the College of Communication Arts and Sciences website.
