Cinemalaya 2018 Quickies: Life is What You Make It, A Piece of Paradise and a preview of Signal Rock

Today's post is a relatively lean post since I was darting all over the place. Sadly, not a lot of pickings this year other than the main competition stuff, but here are some pearls:

I managed to catch the second half of Jhett Tolentino's autobiographical Life is What You Make It. Tolentino is a Tony and Grammy award winning producer who grew up in the slums of Iloilo City. After getting his accountancy diploma, he moved to New York, where he worked in the finance and healthcare industries, eventually ending up producing shows for Broadway. The film (or at least, what I managed to watch) is Tolentino going back to his roots as a way of thanks: back to see his old friends from school, to the foundation that funded his education, and so on.

It's an inspirational tale, and a nice piece of advice for people wishing to follow their dreams.

A Piece of Paradise follows the lives of three women who are part of the sizable Aklanon community in Toronto, Canada. This is a personal story to me, since I have relatives who live in Toronto, and I spent a small chunk of my childhood there while on vacation. There are a number of notable observations, such as how the Filipino community tries to keep their traditions alive even in a culturally different landscape, or how religion plays a large part in keeping communities together. There are also scenes that any person with an OFW relative can relate to: the overstuffing of bags, the seemingly endless stream of gift giving during holidays, and so on.

The film could have expanded more to fit in the perspectives of the children, including how they view their parents and how they reconcile two completely different cultures and viewpoints, but I understand the need to keep it focused (and perhaps what I described could take up the space of its own documentary.)

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And finally, on a non Cinemalaya note, I managed to catch a preview screening of Chito Roño's Signal Rock, on its way to Philippine screens next week as part of the second edition of the Pista ng Pelikulang Pilipino. I didn't manage to catch the first fifteen minutes or so of the film, so I can't talk too much about it for the sake of fairness, but I did enjoy what I saw. Coming in with no idea what the film is about, it ended up being a pleasant surprise. It's an interesting film that subverts the relationship between OFWs and the people they leave behind. For some reason I felt that watching Nunal sa Tubig before this film ultimately influenced my interpretation of the film, since they both take place in relatively isolated communities and they depict the rhythms of small town life in a fairly intimate manner. Also in that respect, it can be considered as a companion piece to Roño's 2013 film Badil, in that it deals with middlemen, though here the treatment is different. I cannot wait to see this film again, in its entirety, in cinemas.