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.
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