Cinemalaya 2020 Festival Report: Selected Reviews from Indie Nation Shorts, Special Premieres

 

The first few minutes of Joey Paras' Igib lets us know what kind of person its main antagonist is: opportunistic, selfish, the kind that doesn't take responsibility for her actions, the kind that takes a mile for every inch. Despite many calling it a blatant display of poor people doing poor things, I tended to see it more as a character study between a wayward mother and son, and an acting showcase for comedian/director Joey Paras, who gives an excellent performance here.

There's a very clever narrative trick at the end of Arby Laraño's Ang Meron Sa Wala that leads one to reconsider the entire film not just as an examination of a father's regrets, but as a genuine attempt to understand them. To say more would be a spoiler, so I'll just leave my recommendation here.

Dama de Noche's otherwise run of the mill plot is enhanced by its unique coffin-eye view, placing us in the shoes of its "protagonist," an OFW whose existence is reduced by many of those left behind to her ability to make money, even from beyond the grave. It gave me the feeling that I was being buried alive, and if it's "protagonist" were alive, I'm sure she'd feel something similar.

There's a lot to be gleaned in the silences of Cody Abad's Grand Gestures, a film about how some families tend to bypass said grand gestures when reconnecting and asking for forgiveness. In fact, its major character moments are seen in little things, without any accompanying histrionics (arguably the only grand gesture in the film is the incident that incited the events of the film in the first place.)  It's subdued but meaningful, making the most of its short timespan.

For every film like The Slums, we have films like Tarang. While Tarang boasts an impressive cast, I am personally getting tired of the same formula depicting poor people being subjected to near constant misery and misfortune, something that now feels as cliched as a mainstream romcom. 

Tahanan reminds me a bit of Brillante Mendoza's short Shiniuma; in both films the protagonist is displaced from a life that he's known for decades into a place that's alien and off-putting, a place where he doesn't belong to anymore. I like the character study, even though it's a riff on familiar material.

What makes Gulis (Lines) work for me is its depiction of familial love, the type of love that is given despite everything, without judgement. It's a fitting last (?) performance from Menggie Cobarrubias and I hope to see more from this director in the future.

The superimposed layers on top of the form of Displaced feels unnecessary, because its stories and accounts from people during and after the Marawi siege are powerful enough.  Still, even just for those stories it is worth watching.

***

Basurero is a great addition to the canon of films taking place during the government's war on drugs. It's also notable in that it also shines a light on why the poor are forced into the drug trade - because of limited opportunities for employment, selling drugs feels like easy money.

Like last year's PPP entry Pagbalik, Nang Em is heartfelt but very rough in its construction, with a tone that feels all over the place. But Gloria Sevilla's performance carries the film for me in any case. One's mileage may vary.

If there's any film that encapsulates the growing frustration of Filipinos during this latest crisis, it's probably Chuck Gutierrez's adaptation of the stage play Heneral Rizal. The titular Rizal doesn't refer to the National Hero, but rather his brother, Paciano (played by Nanding Josef), who laments the state of the nation after our country is passed on from one colonizer to another. Its ending scene seems to imply that we should not seek the guidance of a singular savior or the second coming of someone who has long passed away, but instead we should emulate a love of country and nation within our own selves, and that's something I can get behind.

Cinemalaya 2020 Festival Report: Main Competition Entries

Cinemalaya 2020 exists now in a different form than earlier planned: from a venue-based film festival, Cinemalaya has joined other festivals to the online space, with films old and new available for streaming for a very reasonable price.

Here are some short thoughts about the Main Competition entries for this year's edition of Cinemalaya:

SHORTS A

Ang Gasgas na Plaka ni Lolo Bert was part of last year's Cinema One Originals Film Festival, and its depiction of isolation and loneliness in old age rings even more poignantly today, considering the physical and emotional distances that have emerged between us during this pandemic.

Parts of Hubert Tibi's Pabasa Kan Pasyon reminds me of the Cinemalaya 2012 short Victor in its depiction of religiosity and the irony that arises when that religiosity conflicts with worldly desires. But beyond that, it explores the ironies of human behavior: how we sometimes treat the profane as sacred, and how we treat the sacred as profane. This facet of human nature is portrayed via various images: urinating next to holy symbols, posing for pictures next to Herod and not Jesus, storytelling for things both scandalous and holy.

Out of all the competition shorts in this festival, James Mayo's Fatigued is the short that takes the most advantage of the festival's shift to the online space (although hearing people chanting and stomping their feet in, say, the Tanghalang Nicanor Abelardo would be a hoot and a half.) Its aesthetic evokes a Japanese Visual Novel, both in its interactivity and its general visual feel. But the game itself is a facade, an illusion of choice - evoking the helplessness and hopelessness this pandemic has brought out of us.

There's something magical about Tokwifi, a spell of a film that shatters the rigid tenets of Western thinking and colonialist mindsets in the context of our society. On one hand, we have Limmayug, the indigenous man, whose culture and humanity has been dismissed by the white man as savagery and incivility, and Laura, the woman, whose image is molded in the white man's eye, her personality dictated to her by those same men. During the climax of this short film, those chains are broken. When Limmayug shows Laura the beauty of his culture by showing her something those colonizers could only dream of building, Laura, albeit temporarily, is liberated (figuratively or not), the film's way of urging us to consider the stories of our people in a different light, through our own eyes.

Quing Lalam Ning Aldo is a relatively straightforward tale of homecoming, but like many of the other entries in this festival, it takes on a whole different meaning when there are families all over the Philippines that are separated thanks to this plague, and not by choice either. Its ending represents the dream of a world that has returned to normal, a world that feels increasingly out of reach as days go by.

SHORTS B

There are two disasters in Ang Pagpakalma sa Unos: the first is the disaster caused by Typhoon Yolanda when it struck Leyte and Samar (as well as many other provinces.) The second disaster is what happened next, thanks to the ineptitude and callousness of the Aquino administration and the local government. It's a hard watch, but it's a necessary one, as it shows us that what's happening to us now is merely the latest iteration of a systemic problem that's been around for a very long time. We can prepare for disasters, but how do we prepare for disastrous leadership? The film is not completely dark, however, as it also shows the capacity of people to cope and survive in the face of unfathomable tragedy. Perhaps the biggest tragedy of the film is that some of these people didn't need to reach that point in the first place.

There's an almost Murakami-like surreal quality to Living Things, when a subtle shift in a relationship between two people is made tangible and literal. But the nonchalance of the response to that shift is also a testament to how we are pliable, elastic; willing to bend and mold ourselves in response to great changes in our lives. Its last sequence, a shot of people undergoing the same process, feels prophetic (if it was made before the pandemic). 

Utwas is perhaps the most gorgeously shot of all the shorts in this entire lineup; the S.O. remarked that it felt like a wedding videographer shot the whole thing, which is meant as a compliment. That said, the slice of life that Utwas presents us is cut short prematurely in my opinion, offering a tantalizing but incomplete look at the lives of these fishermen.

There's a shot in former QCinema 2019's Excuse Me, Miss, Miss, Miss that sticks to memory even more in these times - that shot of workers, all having completed a day's work, waiting hours to catch a ride home. It's gained more poignancy in the age of the pandemic, in an environment where Filipino workers are oppressed even more than usual. The absurdity of Excuse Me, Miss, Miss, Miss is the ironic point of the film, asking us why such illogical, inhumane labor systems exist, and why we treat such systems as normal.

And finally, we end this festival report with The Slums, a satirical take on how some depict the poor in media. It shows the artists' complicity as they profit off their subjects' misery. It is humorous and tragic in equal fashion, as we witness people carelessly creating works of art that ignore the humanity of its subjects while exploiting their misery for public display.

Transformers: War For Cybertron is what happens if you have bad leaders

This is gonna be short but I just wanna talk about this.

Transformers: War for Cybertron is a weird show. It's a heavily retooled retelling of the Generation 1 story that's darker and edgier in some ways than the original TV show. This first part of a planned three part series covers the battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons before their fated trip to Earth. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it's okay, and fans will surely get some sort of enjoyment out of it.

What really piqued my interest, however, was the backstory of the whole conflict, which sounds like a far more interesting story than the main story of War For Cybertron. I don't have much of a background in Transformers except for the G1 TV show and some scattered episodes of later series, so let me know if this has happened in other series too.

In some side dialogue, the Decepticons mention that they staged a revolution because they were abused and used as labor for a very long time. Thus, the conflict between Autobot and Decepticon is basically a class war, and the Decepticon uprising is basically a worker's revolt against the aristocratic Autobots, who fight for nebulous concepts like freedom (from what, exactly?) and miss a world with arts and culture (mentioned specifically during dialogue.) The Autobots were the oppressors, and they got overthrown.

What happens next after the Decepticon victory reminds me a lot of Pablo Freire's 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, when he talks about how oppression dehumanizes both oppressor and oppressed, and how the onus for uplifting society lies mostly on the oppressed. Screw up that process, and all people will be doing is switching sides. That's kind of what Megatron ended up doing - instead of equality for both Autobot and Decepticon, he decides to take revenge. Other than that, he establishes authoritarian rule and a cult of personality around his leadership. Usurping the desire for change, he uses blind loyalty and all too human desires to create a new oppressor class.

How ironic (or fitting) for a series about fighting robots.