Cinemalaya 2018 Quickies: Manggagarab, Journeyman Finds Home, Nunal sa Tubig (restored version)

There's an impressive level of ambition behind Kyle Fermindoza's Manggagarab, part of the Cinekasimanwa film festival, a showcase of filmmaking talent from Western Visayas. The film has impressive visual ideas (considering its low budget), interesting action and choreography and even worldbuilding. One wonders what the result would have been if the filmmakers' lofty ideas had the resources and facilities to match. For now, the film exists as a promise for better things, and a testament to the depths of creativity we possess in the regions.

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Journeyman Finds Home plays itself out like your usual sports documentary in its first half, as it tries to chronicle the life journey of Simone Rota, a Filipino orphan who gets adopted by an Italian couple. He grows up in Italy, where he becomes a professional soccer player, and thanks to a twist in fate, he gets recruited to play in a football club here in the Philippines, eventually gaining a position in the Philippine National Team, the Azkals.

Things switch gears during the second half, when Rota begins a search for his biological mother. Then the film becomes something else; it shows us the strength of the bonds that complete strangers can form, bonds that are sometimes stronger than blood, bonds that can come from the most unlikely of places.

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And finally, ABS CBN film restoration premiered the restored version of Ishmael Bernal's Nunal sa Tubig. It's a strange and haunting film that was misunderstood during its time, a restrained look at the lives of an island fishing community and the quiet devastation wrought upon it by unrelenting change.

The sea is depicted as a conduit, giving life and taking it away. When a fish kill threatens the collective livelihoods of the fishermen living on the island, it is a portentous event; the villagers face exploitation and further hardship brought on by outsiders trying to have a say in their affairs.

The film also possesses interesting touches, visual or otherwise: Maria (Elizabeth Oropesa) embroidering a scarlet letter, for example, or the outsiders slipping as they enter the island, or the daily rhythms and cycles of life, scenes of fertility, birth, circumcision and death.

There is also Ella Luansing's character, a woman driven to madness, but not to the histrionic extent we see in other films of this time period, and we find parallels with her character and the events of the film's ending, where we get hints that the intrusion  into this oasis has happened before, and will happen again.