Ramona S. Diaz Turns 'My Family's Slave' Into a Documentary
Filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz has launched a feature documentary adapting 'My Family's Slave', the Pulitzer Prize-winning personal essay by Alex Tizon that The Atlantic published posthumously in 2017, according to Deadline.
The essay tells the story of Eudocia Tomas Pullido, a woman Tizon's family called Lola. She was 18 years old, Tizon wrote, when his grandfather gave her to his mother as a gift. Pullido served the family for 56 years — a reality Tizon, a Filipino American journalist who died in 2017, laid bare in one of the most widely read and debated magazine pieces of that year.
Diaz is producing alongside Diane Quon, an Oscar nominee for the documentary Minding the Gap, and Janice Chua of Third Culture Content. The executive producer roster carries weight from both the independent and studio worlds: Lee Daniels, whose own connection to the material runs deeper than a credit — he had previously optioned 'My Family's Slave' for a planned fictional adaptation before Diaz's documentary project took shape. Also on the producing side as executive producers are Linzee Troubh for The Atlantic, Chris Quintos Cathcart and Tyler Boehm of Unapologetic Projects, and actress Liza Soberano.
Diaz told Deadline she hopes to complete the documentary in late 2027, with a release targeted for early 2028. The timeline places it well ahead on the festival and sales calendar, where feature documentaries typically find distribution through a combination of streaming acquisitions and traditional theatrical runs. Quon's production website confirms the project, listing it as a documentary directed by Diaz and produced by Quon, in which a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist reveals the truth about the woman who served his family for decades (dianequon.com).
Tizon's essay, published after his death by The Atlantic, sparked a global conversation about complicity, family silence, and the persistence of servitude across generations and borders. The piece appeared in June 2017 and drew millions of readers within days.
What gives this documentary its particular charge is the shift in form. Tizon's essay worked through confession on the page; a documentary puts faces, places and voices on screen — and hands the telling to a film-maker, Diaz, whose own body of work has consistently returned to Filipino and Filipino American stories. The move from a scripted feature, the path Daniels had been pursuing, to a nonfiction treatment suggests a different kind of accountability to the material: the people who lived it, speaking for themselves rather than through actors.
Whether the finished film lands at a festival like Sundance or Toronto in late 2027 or early 2028 will depend on the edit. For now, the camera is rolling.
