Dispatches from SGIFF 2024 Part 1: City of Small Blessings, The Shrouds

 Friday, Dec 6, 2024:

The two films I saw today deal with unrequited love in very different forms.

Based on Simon Tay's book of the same name, City of Small Blessings follows Prakash (Victor Banerjee) as he fights for the right to keep his home. You see, authorities have marked the area for demolition to give way to the construction of a new MRT line. Prakash thinks this is a minor clerical mistake and sets off to correct the problem, much to the exasperation of his wife Anna (Noorlinah Mohamed) and son Neel (Brendon Fernandez).

A retired educator who is responsible for the upbringing of many now influential figures in the Singaporean government, Prakash's pleas fall on deaf ears as he makes appeal after appeal to his former students. City of Small Blessings puts forth an idea of "home," one that exists in the space of one's mind and one that collectively means "home" to society at large. To others, Prakash's home is just an obstacle, a lot of land. But to Prakash, it means so much more than that: what is the loss of one's house or a beach where you courted your love? He has given so much to the land he loves: his memories, his life, his home, and it has given him nothing back. It is an unrequited love that has consumed a  man's entire life.

------------------ 

In 2017, Caroly Cronenberg (nee Zeifman) died of cancer. For his latest film The Shrouds, her husband David Cronenberg draws upon that lingering grief to create one of the strangest odes to a love lost, a story of a love that is, in a sense, unrequited. Because how can one seek love from one who has passed on? Such love will always be in the past tense, as, obviously, corpses cannot give it, the can only function as the receptacle of love with no other place to go.

Stilted, prone to conspiratorial tangents, and dry as a dessicated corpse, The Shrouds is Cronenberg's Megalopolis, ambitious and weird even in Cronenbergian standards. It is a story of death in many forms: the death of an idea, the death of personal and truth via the virtual image. But beyond the film's dry, almost mumblecore (corpsecore?) aesthetic is a tale of a deeply hurt man who sees his wife, ravaged and mutilated by disease, in everyone he meets, unable to detach himself from her even if he wants to, fixated on what is left of her body, creating stories to keep her in his mind long after her passing. 

A review of Idol: The April Boy Regino Story

 

During my last year of medical school, our batch was sent to San Juan, Batangas for our Community Medicine rotation. There's a variety of barangays in the municipality, ranging from cozy seaside villages to remote villages near the mountainside, and as only men in our block, we were sent to the latter. A good half hour away from the bayan by tricycle (and as you may expect, even longer by foot), it was one of the most remote villages in the entire municipality, consisting only of a smattering of houses. During one particular week, a karaoke machine served as the sole source of entertainment. My fellow intern and I decided to sing along, and it was clear the people of the town had their song preferences: the most popular song by far was Teeth's Laklak. But firmly in second place, collectively, were the songs of one April Boy Regino.

There's something about Regino's songs that make them extremely fun to sing. During a week where people were debating the annoyance of having people sing songs during a musical film, this was the film that made me sing out loud in a cinema, and not the other one. Thankfully, there were only three of us in there and the sound system over at Fisher Mall was loud enough to drown out my feeble attempts at singing. Despite its problems, Idol: The April Boy Regino Story transported me back to carefree times at the karaoke house in the province or back home. It's something that I appreciated, even though it struggles to reveal anything at all about its primary subject.

Idol: The April Boy Regino Story is about as straightforward as it gets, to the point where it's like the filmmakers consulted the Wikipedia page of April Boy and called it a day. Most, if not all, of the film's major plot points come from the page, to the point where anything not covered in the wiki isn't included in the film either. I would've loved to see various points of the man's career, including a short stint in acting (do you know he starred in a superhero movie with Carmina Villaroel?) and his long careers in Japan and the US are only barely alluded to.

To its credit, there are some points in the film where they try to show some of the man's inner turmoil: when he runs into problems and disagreements with his brothers Vingo and Jimmy (also his bandmates in the musical trio April Boys) the film cuts to a rendition of Regino's Umiiyak ang Puso, whose lyrics fit in with his current predicament. However, those moments are the exception to the rule. Despite being a biopic, the film doesn't say much about its subject's interiority.

Great moments are few and far between. Most notably, when Regino's most iconic song Di Ko Kayang Tanggapin starts to play, it's hard not to get swept along, despite the partially unserious, tongue-in-cheek goings on in the background.

Idol: The April Boy Regino Story operates with the energy of a tv special, its well meaning and committed performances befitting that of something you might see in GMA's Dramarama sa Hapon or Magpakailanman. It gets even worse during the film's second half, mostly dedicated to Regino's spate of health problems during the last decade or so of his life. Regino (John Arcenas) goes to a pair of doctors in America. I know they are American because of the very prominent American flags on their desks. One of them tells Regino, who is suffering from prostate cancer, that they are going to prescribe him some antibiotics, which is not something that's used directly for cancer. One of those doctors even stumbles on their words, calling a benign tumor malignant, as if second takes don't exist.

The film ultimately means well, and to be fair it's much better than a bunch of its biopic contemporaries (Isko, Kahit Maputi na ang Buhok Ko, Sa Kamay ng Diyos). If you recognize any of those films, just know that this film is better than them. It's not a particularly high bar to scale, but the man's music more than makes up for its numerous flaws, at least for me.

QCinema 2024: musings on Santosh, Mistress Dispeller, Cu Li Never Cries

This trio of "reviews" will be pretty informal, as I'm currently putting my energies to something big I'm currently working on.

I suppose it's serendipitous that prior to watching Sandhya Suri's Santosh, I watched two other Indian cop films in theaters: TJ Gnanavel's Vettaiyan, and Rohit Shetty's Singham Again. The latter of the two is unabashedly nationalistic, set in a world where the titular hero's tough cop, impunitive ethos is so baked into the public consciousness that there are now regional Singhams all over India. The former, Vettaiyan, is a film I'd like to compare with Santosh, because the first two films approach the same subject matter in completely opposite ways.

Santosh begins with its titular character (Shahana Goswami) running through the streets in a panic. Her policeman husband has just died. In order to earn herself money and to restore honor to her family, she takes her husband's job and becomes a constable. Soon enough, her ceremonial position is put to the test as she investigates the murder and rape of a young lower caste Dalit girl.

Santosh recognizes the multiple interlinked, intersectional issues that affect cases like this: issues of social status, of caste, of gender. There's an interplay between Santosh's own personal experience and her pursuit of the case: she is mostly dismissed and discriminated against due to her status as a woman, and her pursuit of a Muslim suspect may also bleed into the personal, as her husband was killed in a riot held in a Muslim neighborhood. 

And the film is acutely aware of how the same case is treated in mainstream Bollywood cinema like in Singham Again, where police action is seen as virtuous and something to be emulated, a source of national pride (the final scene even has its Avengers-like team standing on the bow of an aircraft carrier). There are a couple of scenes where Santosh views this idea as fantasy: one where a scene from a Bollywood film is shown on a TV, and another where Santosh looks at a meme where Indian police are seen as bumbling and incompetent compared to Chinese police.

The more Santosh gets immersed into the rhythms of police life, the more she appreciates what (relatively) unfettered power connotes. Her mentor is Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), a senior policewoman who has embraced this culture wholesale. But while Santosh sees justice as the pursuit of truth (and thus, closure), Sharma sees justice as the rest of the police force sees it: as the impression, but not the actual restoration, of social order, and the pretense of a resolution, reached.

Compare this to TJ Gnanavel's Vettaiyan, where an overzealous cop named Athiyan (played by Rajinikanth) pursues a suspect of a brutal rape and murder. Any complexities are smoothed out, even though the film seems to present ambiguities in the case. His "mentor" is Sathyadev Bramhadutt Pande (Amitabh Bachchan), a member of the Human Rights Commission who shows Athiyan what can happen if justice is miscarried. 

Both characters react to this realization in different ways: Athiyan tries to corrects his mistakes by working in the system, while Santosh sees the force as it truly is and shows she has the same integrity as the man she once loved.

***

Filipinos love kabit stories, and during a central confrontation in Elizabeth Lo's Mistress Dispeller, every single person in that theater probably waited with baited breath. But in this documentary that seemed too good to be real, there were no fireworks - only a conversation, albeit tense, between two women who love the same man.

The film does not take any sides in the conflict, opting to stay mostly invisible until certain fourth-wall breaking moments. This invisibility only contributes to how cinematic it all feels, despite being a documentary. The film's tone seems to cross the uncanny valley of reality and fiction because of this, which makes for a subtly unsettling experience.

Even the title invokes something mythic, as if infidelity was some sort of spirit that is created from wayward love, that grows like weeds and dwells in the cracks of a relationship growing stagnant. But instead of banishing these "spirits," people like Miss Wang assuage them, understanding that in the middle of this infidelity are flawed people who made bad decisions out of their loneliness.

***

Near the end of Cu Li Never Cries, Mrs. Nguyen (Minh Chau) heads to the Hòa Bình Dam with a waiter she fancies, who, for appearances' sake, she pretends is her son. She reminisces the times when she took part in the dam's construction. The glow from those historic moments have long faded, and she holds on to the dying embers of those memories. Hòa Bình Dam was once the largest hydroelectric damn in the region, but its record has since been broken.

Time and life both flow inexorably like a river, but like the dam she helped build, Mrs. Nguyen tries to stop its flow, to stem the tides of time and prevent it from moving forward - at first, out of a fear or repeating the past, but ultimately out of a fear of the future, and the idea that it might leave her behind. Her history, and by extension Vietnam's national history, seems to reflect that anxiety towards change. Ideals about love, marriage and society at large are changing, and she sees this in her newly pregnant niece and her well-meaning boyfriend. But at the same time, she worries about the idea that while time goes ever forward, it moves in a circle, with events doomed to repeat themselves.

Throughout its deliberate, languid 93 minutes, Cu Li Never Cries details the slow and arduous process of letting go, not only of the past, not only of deeply held beliefs or anxieties, but also letting go of the fear of what is to come.

Seven Days is the worst local film of 2024

 (... so far)

In December of last year, actor-director Mike Magat held a press conference for his new film Seven Days. Magat's IMDB filmography is spotty, but as far as I can tell Magat started out in several action movies as a goon or extra, including 1990's Robin Padilla actioners like Anak ni Baby Ama and Bad Boy. In that press conference, Magat talked about wanting to work with other actors, which in itself sounds like a cool thing.

After seeing this film, I would like to say to all those actors... run. RUN. RUN FOR YOUR LIFE GET SOME HELP

Seven Days is the heartwarming tale of a man who stalks a beauty queen, intrudes into her house and kidnaps her, then tells her that if she doesn't fall in love with him in seven days, he will let her go. Guess what fucking happens.

Seven Days is, in terms of technical ability, one of the worst made films I've seen this year. This film has credits: there's an editor, a sound designer, an assistant director, the usual stuff. But unlike other movies, the names listed in those credits function differently. They are less credits and more like vague probabilities. Like, did Someguy Whatshisface in the credits edit Seven Days? I GUESS. More like some dude fiddled around in Windows Movie Maker until it looked like something resembling a film. Certain shots inexplicably turn up before the scenes that they are supposed to appear. Did the sound guy do the sound in Seven Days? Kinda. There are sounds in this film, but to imply that they were edited in any way would simply be a lie. Sounds in Seven Days exist in a spectrum, ranging in between "commentary during a golf match" and "2 foot long hot pokers being inserted into my ear canal." The sound guy's personal philosophy seems to be laissez-faire. Or maybe he is not a sound engineer, but merely the suggestion of one.

The film begins in medias res, on the fourth of the seven days, with Kate (Catherine Yogi) running for her life from her captor, Marco (Mike Magat). He creeps up on her like a serial killer and catches her. The funny thing about this is, there's tense music while he's chasing her that CUTS OUT whenever it cuts to Kate, as if they rendered his chase scene first with the music and inserted her reaction shots in between.

Kate wakes up chained to the wall of a bamboo house. Marco walks up to her but he's shot in a very weird way, as if it's a surprise as to who it really is. WE JUST SAW WHO IT WAS FIVE MINUTES AGO. WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOI-

hilariously, the film repeatedly cuts to his pants and shoes lol

The film then cuts to the time when Marco kidnapped Kate, and there is no question that he's a creeper. There's a part during this scene that's shot like it's from the point of view of inside the car, and it's very silly because the car's headlights are on and it's going like 1 kph following this girl and she doesn't even notice. She gets incapacitated with chloroform, he puts her in his van and races off to a remote island near Taal Volcano. The soundtrack post kidnapping is really inappropriate, but as we will see inappropriateness is par for the course for this movie. Set to a sun at around 8am (the kidnapping takes place at night, so that's some pretty powerful chloroform), the scene is set to music that doesn't sound like some poor lady's been taken against her will, but instead sounds like if Marco rescued Kate from a rebel stronghold in Mogadishu with Josh Hartnett in tow.  

Back to the present. now we see who Marco is, like that matters now. Kate is understandably distressed about the whole thing, because, as we all know, SHE HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED. Marco plays it off and offers the girl coffee and bread, but she doesn't reciprocate his "kindness", because, and I can't stress this enough, SHE HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED. During this scene, the "editor" (as I've said, this is a very gracious description of what he actually does in this film) cuts to and from shots of Marco and Kate. Not different shots, just the same ones. Did they run out of footage?

We're not even fifteen minutes into this film, and God has already abandoned us. From now on, we will only stray further from His light.

The film goes from day to day, documenting Marco's advances towards Kate. On day 2, he takes her out to pee and there are shots of her legs as she squats on the grass. Mercifully, we don't actually see any pee actually come out, which is a positive for this film, but it's not much of a consolation. Oh, and I forgot, she does this WHILE SHE IS HANDCUFFED TO MARCO. Kate hasn't changed clothes, but Marco assures her that he will buy her seven dresses, seven bras and seven panties. We will soon see that the number of clothes Marco will ultimately buy will vary. I don't know exactly why this inconsistency exists, though it does paint Marco as a serial liar, or at least, someone who exaggerates the truth.

Day 3. Marco leaves to buy groceries. He leaves Kate with a charger for her cellphone. Not so that she can call for help (there's no signal in the island), but because, in his words. "para makapagselfie ka."

AO:DFJBGAE:LGBAEOIGDBADLKGJBE:ODILHNGE"SDLGHNS:ODGN

Sorry, my mind broke for a second there. While shopping for groceries, Marco finds a wanted poster of himself. It is printed via inkjet that seems to be running out of colored ink or is printing on draft mode. I get it, printer ink is expensive. Where is the wanted poster posted? On a wall somewhere? On a telephone pole? On the side of a building? Nope, the poster (more like a piece of bond paper) is nailed to a tree. Not just any tree, a tree in THE MIDDLE OF A SMALL FOREST. Marco tears up the paper.

Day 4. Marco is jogging somewhere nearby to the tune of light, jaunty music while Kate tries to escape from the "island". Like in a previous scene, the nincompoops who made this film rendered the jogging scene with the audio before editing it with Kate's escape. What results is Marco jogging, then the music abruptly cutting while Kate runs in silence. Amazing. Even high school students edit better than this.

The police talk about Marco. They don't actually try to catch him or hold a manhunt or anything, they just kinda call each other on the phone while looking at the poster they printed. You know, the one printed by a dying inkjet printer on bond paper. It might even be the same poster prop that was torn earlier and they shot these scenes out of sequence. While they are talking, the film cuts to a 2 second shot of a bonfire. The bonfire has nothing to do with the current scene, but it does show up in a latter scene. It was probably left there by mistake by the "editor."

The bonfire actually comes from the night of Day 4, where Marco holds a romantic dinner for Kate. Kate understandably still wants to escape but she plays along for now in the hopes that he'll slip up. During the dinner date, Marco explains in detail how he stalked her for months, found out she's a beauty queen and captured her to make her fall in love with him. "Sorry for kidnapping you," he says, as if that makes everything better. She runs away but he catches her (this is, if I recall correctly, the scene from the beginning of the film).

Day 5. Kate has a dream that she's dating Marco in some sort of garden. At this time my stomach sinks. Oh no. OH NO. OH NO.

Day 6. Nothing much happens. Marco sleeps near Kate and tells her good night.

Day 7. Marco tells Kate that he knew that from day 1 that Kate wouldn't like him SO WHY THE FUCK DID YOU HOLD HER CAPTIVE FOR SEVEN DAYS YOU FUCKING - 

these were my notes during that period. The chaotic scribbles to the lower right are a graphical sign of me losing my fucking mind.

The couple look at Taal in the distance and it seems to be erupting (!) I don't think these people had much of a budget so this was one hell of a lucky shot. It goes incredibly hard and is the best thing I like about this "film".

The euphoria from that shot soon vanishes when it is confirmed that yes, Kate has somehow fallen in love with Marco. I know Stockholm Syndrome is a thing and any movies have been made about that particular condition, but the film has so far given me no signs that these two are gonna fall in love. They have ZERO chemistry. It's made even more worse by the fact that they get married two weeks later, and what's even more hilarious, during what I assume is their wedding day, Marco STILL has handcuffs on his person! Does he plan on cuffing her during the honeymoon!? Who knows!

I suppose that the handcuffs are Magat's symbol for a relationship or something, but cuffing someone connotes the lack of agency or free will. To cuff is to imprison, to deprive someone of liberty. Is he applying that metaphor to marriage as well? What the fuck is going on in this man's brain? Have parasitic worms eaten Mike Magat's frontal lobe or something?

Two months later, Marco goes all the way to Manila to buy Kate some flowers, as if there isn't a florist anywhere near Taal. The Manileño florist identifies Marco immediately because he has a picture of Marco on his phone for some reason, and he calls the cops. Right in front of Marco. Who hears everything this bald dumbass is telling the cops. Genius storytelling right here.

The cops chase Marco in one of the slowest bike chases in cinema. The informant calls a cop, who calls another cop. As the second cop talks to the first cop, the phone's ringtone keeps on ringing, even if the second cop has already answered the goddamn phone.

Eventually a random car hits Marco's bike. He is killed on the spot. Kate mourns him; his tombstone is inexplicably located not in a cemetery but in some random forest (probably the same forest where the police nailed a bond paper to a tree). This cuts to a scene seven months later, where Kate is STILL mourning Marco. Couldn't they have combined the two scenes together? Why expect something rational from this trainwreck? During Kate's mourning scene, I kid you not, the film cuts around a dozen times to Kate's crying face and Marco's tombstone. They ran out of footage. AGAIN.

There's an epilogue to this film that I will not spoil (it's in the trailer, but it's out of context so it's easy to miss) that ultimately doesn't matter. This is a baffling film, a pure failure of filmmaking craft that demands 275 pesos from its audience. Did I say audience, I meant victims. Or maybe the correct word is patsies. Who is more foolish, the fool who makes the film or the fool who watches it?

What really put me in for a loop is the ridiculousness of this film's plot, but there is, weirdly, historical precedence to this. When I was a kid, I wondered why one of my uncles on my father's side looked different from my other uncles. Eventually, one of my other relatives answered the question: hundreds of years ago, apparently one of my ancestors decided to kidnap a Dutch woman (probably part of a crew of traders) and basically did a "Seven Days" on her. I cannot corroborate whether that's true or not but needless to say I was horrified, and I have since heard similar tales from other people.

Surely, you might say, this doesn't happen today, but a culture that doesn't respect a woman's agency and one that somehow justifies kidnapping to sate the desires of a man is a way of thinking that's still ingrained in many men today. Take for example Magat's co-star in his earliest films: Robin Padilla. A few weeks ago Padilla, the 1990's symbol for toxic machismo, made statements regarding the consent of women when that woman's partner has the urge to have sex. "Wala ka sa mood, paano ako?" he said to the horror of many. But that's the thing: a lot of people think that way, people like Padilla and people like Magat. Some make regressive statements that way because they do not respect the personhood of women; they do not recognize that they should be free to make decisions for themselves, that any kindness given by their captors is not kindness but a means to get what they want. Some make regressive (and technically inept) movies because of the same reasons.

These are the kinds of people who should be shot in front of Taal Volcano. I mean it in the other sense. 

Sinag Maynila 2024: Reviews of all Full Length Films

Jewel (Rebecca Chuaunsu) is an elderly Filipino-Chinese woman suffering from dementia. Her lawyer son Kyle (Boo Gabunada) hires a caretaker, Teresa (Elora Españo), to take care of her, and they form a sort of tentative bond, albeit a bond that isn't completely altruistic. As Jewel recounts her childhood and family situation growing up in a strictly conservative Filipino-Chinese family, she remembers how her brother Magnus (Richard Mata) tricked her out of her share of the family's inheritance and decides to sue him.

Her Locket is a family drama that in the larger scale of things, doesn't really do anything new, but it's a comfortable and generally enjoyable movie to watch. It follows in the slew of films about Filipino-Chinese communities popularized by Joel Lamangan's Mano Po, and it does that depiction well. It also touches into generational divides and how rigidity and traditional thinking can rip families apart.

However, something feels off about the whole enterprise. Perhaps it's that the film's final act (and the decision that resolves it) doesn't quite align with everything that leads up to it. I get the pivotal character decision near the end of the film, as it is probably a sign of someone who knows they only need to be proven right, as there is no utility to 'winning' at this point in one's life. Perhaps it's the numerous court scenes, which mostly revolve around seemingly random percentages touted as forensic analysis, and often devolve into hammy, overly theatrical sequences that suspend my disbelief. Or maybe it's Teresa's character arc, which doesn't feel fully realized, showing only a fraction of her interiority, if at all. Or maybe it doesn't delve too much into Kyle's own story and how it could mirror his mother's. But my favorite scene of Her Locket, and perhaps its most effective, is a wordless shot near the end, and Rebecca Chuaunsu and Elora Españo communicate everything that's needed at that moment. It almost made everything click into place.

Andy (Perry Dizon) is a historian. As with many an academic, he is in the process of finishing a book that might never get finished. The years (and an addiction to alcohol) have taken a toll on him and his memory is slipping. After collapsing during a lecture, he goes to live with his translator cousin Christine (Dolly De Leon) in order to recuperate. But visions of a mysterious woman named Salome (Ram Botero) haunt his life, both in waking moments and in dreams.

At a certain level, Gutierrez Mangansakan II's Salome shares themes and elements with his 2018 film Masla A Papanok: the erasure of culture by colonialist ambitions, that cultural erasure mirrored in its central character's deteriorating memory, and a woman whose mythohistorical existence is shaped by an amalgamation of multiple cultural elements (Christianity, indigenous religious beliefs, etc), a sort of protean historiography. There is also the looming threat of an apocalyptic event, but while in his earlier film this apocalypse refers to the death of colonized cultures, the events depicted in Salome refers to something equally resonant and immediate.

This is not to say that Salome is a simple reiteration of that earlier film; in particular, the film points at the looming extinction of another set of people: cultural workers and historians like Andy and Christine, and how the reception to the film proves its point.

That's why I consider the most pivotal scene in the film to be one where Christine and Andy look at the looming horizon and talk about their work. They lament their respective career quagmires and consider the importance (or unimportance) of cultural workers like them. In my view, what they do is of utmost importance: they provide context to text; that is, they help us understand the meanings of art, historical records and photographs. The film notes that historical records (in particular: photographs) have long been used "for the purpose of empire," To 'decolonize' culture we need understanding, and to do that we have to look back and interrogate the intent and history behind the many things left by our former colonizers. Indeed, Christine's current project involves Antonio Pigafetta's Primer Viaje en Torno del Globo, which is one of the first books to describe Filipinos from a western perspective. Without the benefit of Christine's translation and the context provided by historians, how do we make sense of their accounts other than what is presented to us ex facie? Without them, it would be like looking only at one side of the moon, one face eternally facing earth, the other side perpetually locked in darkness.

Salome, whose original name was Dayafan until the colonizers 'westernized' her memory and history, can be seen as a sort of parallel to Andy and Christine: she is a prophet, and prophets are conduits, interpreting and translating the language of the divine in order for the common people to understand divine will. She prophesizes a coming calamity and relates the outbreak of a disease in her community that decimated her people. Like the prophets of our indigenous past, historians see cycles and patterns that ostensibly help us prevent them from reoccurring. Alas, as Salome takes place in the last few months and weeks before COVID, these prophecies sometimes reach deaf ears.

There is also one more thing in Salome that metatextually refers to its own utility in this process of decolonization: as it is itself a work of art, there are people whose task is to glean meaning from it. The late David Bordwell once wrote that "the text is inert until a reader of listener... does something to and with it... Meanings are not found but made." Aside from filmmakers, the cultural workers that do that are film historians and critics, but film critics are as much in danger of extinction as art historians, partly because we as a society are fostering a film watching culture that eliminates nuance, that sees its critics trapped in western formalist discourse, that reduces an opinion to a single number or phrase, and is populated by fundamentally incurious, willfully ignorant people who refuse to engage with a work unless everything is spoonfed to them. That is made more than evident upon reading some of the reactions to this film. To those people, no meaning is created, and nothing will ever be created. To liberate film, to decolonize it as part of decolonizing culture, is to disabuse ourselves of this emerging insipidity and to continue to create meaning, to understand, and to use that understanding to be free.

Arvin (Tony Labrusca) wants to work, and it looks like he just landed a job in a resort in Palawan. He's been at it for a while, watching self-help videos in an attempt to give himself an edge. But Arvin's job hunt comes at the worst time, because it happens just at the cusp of a certain worldwide pandemic...

Trapped in his home with ever more dwindling prospects for work, Arvin begins to lose his mind. He is then 'visited' by Ace (also Tony Labrusca) who is Arvin's total opposite, or rather, his deep-seated Id, acting out in ways Arvin could only imagine doing himself.

What You Did captures the isolation and loneliness a pandemic can bring, and how, for some people, that same pandemic took away their ability to be useful to society. Having to rely on handouts from relatives can feel humiliating. The first part of the film feels like a fugue state, where Arvin's (and by extension the audience's) sense of time and place blur.

The isolation of the pandemic made a lot of us turn inward (in introspection) and bring out parts of our psyche that social graces had previously hidden. Through various forms of social media and outlets on the internet, the pandemic revealed something dark about a lot of people - podcasts, for example, went on the rise during the pandemic period, partly because of our desire to be entertained, and partly because of our desire to connect to someone else. It comes as no coincidence that the first thing Ace puts out on the internet (in Arvin's name) is an insane conspiracy theory, which is just a manifestation of Arvin's growing paranoia and anxiety - and it also has to be said that people flock to him regardless, like moths attracted to a flame. 

What You Did is weakest as it transitions to its latter half, where it tries to provide a justification for Ace's existence and awkwardly stumbles towards a conclusion. There are some tense moments but the film could have benefited from building up more of it. At this point the pandemic years seem so far away, even though we still had vestiges of it in early 2023. It's going to be interesting seeing 'pandemic' cinema as filmmakers and audiences look at it in retrospect.

(as an aside, getting like 100k views is gonna get you jack shit even if you monetize it lol)

The first time we see Macky (L.A. Santos, In His Mother's Eyes) and Molly (Kira Balinger) they're a couple newly in love. Five years pass since their first meeting, and they're living a relatively humdrum existence: Macky is a restaurant manager and Molly, like the rest of her family, is subservient to richer relatives, working as an assistant to her cousin. In order to gain financial freedom, Molly decides to immigrate to Canada with Macky, re-enter college there and eventually find a way to get permanent residency and try to move the rest of her family into the country.

Benedict Mique's Maple Leaf Dreams resonated a bit with me, because it's the sort of experience my loved ones have experienced: for one, my maternal grandmother spent decades in Ontario until her retirement. Canada has a reputation of being one of the most immigrant-friendly nations in the world, taking in hundreds of thousands of people in the country every year. 

The film is pretty rough in its construction: at one point, it uses social media as a narrative device to depict its characters' feelings, as if everyone in the world is an influencer of some kind. They really don't need to be gallivanting around the city like it's one of those "travelogue" Star Cinema films, and the whole thing feels forced. 

What Maple Leaf Dreams does successfully articulate, however, is the immigrant experience of many Filipinos seeking a better life abroad. It's not Canada-specific, the film could have taken place in Azerbaijan and not a lot would change, but it doesn't need to be. In particular, Maple Leaf Dreams shows how lonely a life abroad can be: years upon years away from family and loved ones, earning money but not for one's own enjoyment, eternally (and in Molly's case, ironically) at the service of others. The film shows one of the greatest assets one can have while living in a foreign land: not (just) the monetary compensation, not (just) the affordable healthcare, but the presence of community, the "third space" that forms when people from another culture settle in a wholly different country.

A seemingly superfluous scene, where Molly and Macky leave a steaming hot (!) Christmas dinner for a party with fellow Filipino-Canadians, ends up being the film's centerpiece. It turns into a documentary style sequence of stories from actual Filipino-Canadians relating their experiences abroad. Mini spoiler alert: it's not an easy life. And with rising global anti-immigrant sentiment, worsening economies all around the world to the point where even in Canada, immigrants are struggling to make ends meet, it's not getting any easier for people who are considering taking the risk. But, as the film tries to say in all its clumsy ways, it's a little bit easier to dream when you have someone dreaming alongside you.

Alvin Yapan's Talahib begins with a lengthy quotation from retired justice Isagani Cruz. The quote refers to an en banc decision Cruz made in 1989 over the implementation of the Agrarian Reform Law, which was supposed to award land from landowners to farmers. Said landowners protested, saying that the President had no authority to do that, or that they were owed some kind of compensation. Cruz dismissed these petitions and upheld the law, giving the land to the farmers. In his closing statement, Cruz says that "meantime, we struggle as best we can in freeing the farmer from the iron shackles that have unconscionably, and for so long, fettered his soul to the soil."

If we are to assume that case forms the basis of the film, the opposite seems to have happened: the land itself is possessed by a malevolent spirit, the ghost of a man who was buried there, seeking vengeance upon all that oppressed him. A woman (Sue Prado) and her would-be rapist are killed in the beginning of the film. This leads the local police, led by Bong (Joem Bascon) to investigate. When they run into a group of young people led by Joyce (Gillian Vicencio) at the crime scene, things get a little more complicated.

Talahib is rich conceptually; Yapan is no stranger to allegory, and the land's seeming malevolence against anyone who walks in its territory is anger distilled from years of unfair treatment. At first watch I was confused: the victims of the Talahib killer call themselves farmers, but they do not do farming; the land is untilled, the grass grows tall and is not reaped. A dilapidated model house stands alone amongst the grass, and there are talks to sell the land for purposes other than farming. These 'farmers' are rich and send their children abroad. Then I realized, their testimony of the ghost is false. In my reading of the film, the 'killer' is not a 'killer', or at least he wasn't one until after he was killed; the victims of the 'killer' are tenants and landowners who call themselves "farmers," but benefit from land that is not theirs.

That all said, the film is not very well made. From the first frame, I felt a feeling of impatience to the film in its editing and sequencing of events, as if it did not want to bother establishing a scene, filling in narrative blanks, or introducing us to its characters. There's one time where the characters anxiously search for a character named Vernie, and I was like "who the heck is Vernie?" It's Kate Alejandrino's character, but I only knew that after looking at the credits. In another instance, a tense chase inside an abandoned house abruptly cuts to a shot of two policemen waiting outside. The tense chase scene ends off screen and is rarely alluded to again. It's like massive chunks of the film are missing. 

Talahib is a disappointing mess. While it does build some dread in some of its scenes, it is not tense; as a police procedural (for at least 80% of the film, it functions like one) it fails. 

What makes a film good to me? Is it the cinematography, the editing? Is it its intrinsic entertainment value? I'm not really sure I can answer that right now, but I think one of the factors is how much fun it is, for me and for the filmmakers who made it. Banjo is objectively not a very good film, but I had a blast watching it, and the dedication and passion of the filmmakers is more than evident, despite working with what I assume is 50 pesos and a prayer.

The film begins with Banjo (Bryan Wong, who also directed the film) in dire straits. He was supposed to infiltrate a drug cartel led by crime boss Franko, but his cover is blown and he's captured by Franko's underling Zaldy (Rhodium Sagario). Before he is captured, Banjo goes to a fiesta where he sneaks up on a guy stealthily to kill him, ignoring the fact that in the reverse shot there are like five people behind him and he would be spotted immediately.

Zaldy forces Banjo to kill a hooded figure, who turns out to be his brother Marko (AJ Arobo). Banjo then proceeds to kill everyone in that room for making him do that, and sits in the corner after the deed a bloody mess. His pants are also ripped at the crotch area, not intentionally (I think!!!!) but that's beside the point. Let me tell you this right now: Banjo has a couple of decent action scenes at least in terms of choreography. The camerawork and editing may need a little polishing but there's something dynamic in these scenes that we don't usually see in other action films.

The superior officer in charge of Banjo's operation (Mon Confiado) tells Banjo to continue trying to get to Franko - he's likely to be chased by Franko's goons from now on and as long as he doesn't die, maybe he can get Franko to emerge from hiding and expose him. This is also the last time we see Mon Confiado in the film, because I guess that's all they have in the budget for his talent fee. In the meantime, however, he has to get the hell out of Zaldy's base, so he calls his ally Yuri (Missy Acodile) to rescue him. Franko's goons quickly find out where he is, however, and raid the hideout.

Banjo's sent to a butcher who's going to use his body to store contraband (replacing his organs with drugs) while Yuri and a bunch of other women are set to be sold off as sex slaves to a wealthy congressman. Franko's underling Hector (the late Bordie Carillo) does his sales pitch selling weapons, girls and even parts for nuclear weapons (!!!) Meanwhile, Banjo, Yuri and her new lady friends are in a room. before Banjo is dragged out of the room to be dissected, he defiantly kicks one of the gunmen on his way out! Yuri ends up choking the guy guarding her then she... lies beside the girl next to her??? I have several questions. Why are you storing drugs in dead people? Isn't lugging a dead person around Mindanao gonna look suspicious? Where did those other women come from? Why did Banjo kick that guy while he was being dragged out of the room???? What happened to the guy Yuri choked into unconsciousness???? What dimension does this take place in??????? 

Banjo manages to free himself and rescue the hostages and go to a secluded location in Rogongon, Iligan City that used to be a tourist spot. If you're familiar with Bryan Wong's previous short films (he has a LOT on his FB page), then you know he likes to shoot in resorts in Mindanao, and that's also the case here - he shoots in at least two resorts in Banjo, or maybe it's the same resort and they just shot it in different parts. Here's where I found the one thing I liked the most about Banjo: it has extensive lore for its huge cast of characters. Banjo meets up with Rakman (Malizord Waway Estillore, and damn that's a tokusatsu-ass name if I ever saw one) a former rival assassin who Banjo made an ally through the power of friendship. Yuri also recounts how she met Banjo - after some family issues, she becomes a party girl, apparently doing drugs and dancing the night away in a club that has a total of four people in it, tops. Maybe it was a soft opening. After the Rogongon sequence, we don't see these two people again.

The Rogongon action sequence is probably the film's centerpiece, as it embodies a lot of things, in all its ultra low budget glory. It understands the flow of an action scene (preparation, action proper, then resolution) but doesn't quite understand how it fits into filmmaking (what looks like an establishing shot doesn't match the location where the action actually takes place, and doesn't quite communicate the locations and positions of its characters in an obvious chase scene). In one glorious moment, Banjo hides under a bridge and snipes Franko's henchmen one by one. One last henchman falls, but there's no gunshot - THE POOR MAN JUST SLIPPED ON THE MUDDY GROUND. The take keeps rolling as the man struggles to get up, while a firework effect made to simulate gunfire simmers nearby. He decides not to get up and instead squirms on the ground towards Banjo's position. I have never felt so much second hand embarrassment for another person in a while. Banjo eventually puts the poor man out of his misery. My eyes are full of tears, but not from crying.

Banjo escapes from Rogongon and goes into hiding, eventually gaining crucial intel left behind by his brother Marko, who happens to have a very pregnant wife (MORE LORE!!!). His new boss, General Laguesma (Jerome Laguesma) is in Los Angeles for some reason, tracking a guy named Dr. Sanders. Why a General would personally be doing a covert operation instead of one of his agents baffles the mind, but whatever.

This review is getting way too long (and I want to keep some spoilers in case you see the film, please release the film somewhere) so let's just say Banjo always gets his man. I'm telling you though, there's a ton of things I haven't even talked about - I sometimes take notes on films I watch and it's usually 2 pages tops. For this one, I took 10 back to back pages of notes about a truckload of characters with backstories and relationships to Banjo. 

It's like a AliExpress John Wick in here. Among the other characters, of note is Banjo's daughter (!!!!) who talks with the famed assassin in cutesy language that only proves the point that no matter how badass you are, you're always gonna act cringe to your kids. This is not a film that was made without thought (okay, yeah it was, filmmaking wise), this story had an outline. This film has lore. Bryan Wong, this absolute madman probably had character sheets. Character sheets!!! He probably even had a relationship chart, this movie has enough material for five sequels. And from the films two (yes, two!!!) mid credit sequences, I would not be surprised.

Banjo proudly continues the tradition of cheap but supremely enjoyable action schlock made with earnestness from truly independent, regional filmmakers. It's the most fun I've had in a cinema all month. I would honestly watch Banjo 2: Franko's Revenge, Banjo 3: Big Wolf Keeps Slipping On Mud, and Banjo 4: His Pants Ripped Again At the Crotch if they ever had the budget to do so.

A review of Un/Happy For You

 

Note: I recommend watching the film first before reading this, as there are some small spoilers especially near the end.

Was there ever a time where I held the torch for too long? Oh yeah. Many moons ago, I was young, stupid, and hopelessly infatuated with this person. When she didn't reciprocate, those feelings had nowhere to go, and they turned into frustration, and that frustration turned into anger. As I tried to save a "romance" that was never there and had no chance of being saved, all I did was destroy our existing friendship. When I realized how stupid I was being and stopped, it was too late. That put me off relationships for almost a decade.

My case is not an isolated one; I've heard lots of stories of love becoming something destructive, with people unable to process their feelings maturely. Aside from a lack of emotional intelligence, these attitudes spring from a culture that over-romanticizes longing, while not doing the same to the act of letting go. Hugot, that oft-repeated term for unrequited love that has become an entire sub-genre of cinema, is what has emerged in contemporary cinema thanks to that obsession. 

That's why I enjoyed Petersen Vargas' Un/Happy For You, Star Cinema's latest romance offering. It's basically a film that repudiates hugot, or at least warns of its dangers when it goes out of control. The film sees two former lovers meeting again: Juancho (Joshua Garcia) and Zy (Julia Barretto) meet in Bicol after an abrupt end to their relationship years prior. Chef Juancho had previously followed writer Zy to Manila in order to establish a restaurant together, but stress and mismanagement eventually tore the two apart. To Juancho, he felt neglected by Zy, and they weren't operating as a team anymore. One day, Zy leaves for New York, tells Juancho in a phone call that she's met someone else, and ghosts him. This leaves Juancho understandably angry and distraught at the lack of closure.

There's an immediate tinge of sexual tension between the two when they meet again, tension that builds and eventually explodes in a sexy scene that surprised even me, considering Star Cinema romances are usually rather tame. There's the idea of rekindling the romance between the two, and true to formula, the film isn't shy with showing the two in all sorts of cute situations. The thing is, something feels off about the whole shebang. For one, Zy is engaged to Matt (Victor Silayan), her editor, and Zy is basically cheating on him. This idea drives Zy away from Juancho initially, but the two can't help but cross paths, encounters that Juancho actively tries to cultivate.

Juancho's hung up on a relationship left hanging, but he's also filled with the resentment that comes with love unsated and unrequited. When I saw his character, I saw that past version of myself in more uncomfortable ways than one: that sense of entitlement to love denied, that desperation that maybe, just maybe, I can make it work, even if all evidence shows otherwise. Juancho's probably one of the most pitiable characters in contemporary Philippine cinema. Like the dishes he cooks, Juancho's folly is that the love that he gives is too fiery, too all-consuming, to the point where it does not only ruin him, but his relationships with his friends. Seeing him try to be better, then relapse is very painful to watch, but it is unfortunately part of the long process to emotional maturity.

It's even made more evident when we see Zy's point of view near the middle of the film, where we see how much Juancho's love blinded him to everyone else, ironically including the person he claims to love the most. This is perhaps my biggest gripe with the film: Zy feels like an accessory character to what is supposed to be a love story, and it takes two to tango. Granted, Zy's equally conflicted in their relationship rekindling, though we don't exactly see much of her thought processes behind her decisions. It can be argued that the film would become even more bloated than it already is, but I feel that getting more of her perspective is important. Ultimately the film is more a character piece focused on Juancho than anything else.

Despite its flaws, the ending of Un/Happy For You drew me back in. In my view, it sends a message that too much love, too much spice so to say, ruins a dish; that hugot should be the beginning, but not the end, of a love spurned; and that while clinging on to love despite all odds may seem great, the most profound and deepest kinds of love are those where you know when to let it all go.

Cinemalaya 2024: The Wedding Dance

 

The last time I talked to my late uncle, the famed Tausug artist and painter Rameer Tawasil, we talked about film. He talked to me at length about his desire to make a film showcasing Tausug culture - something that depicts the many daily rituals and rhythms of Tausug life, from birth to death. Unfortunately, that film will probably never get made, but if it did, it might look like the first hour or so of Julius Lumiqued's The Wedding Dance. Based on the story by Amador Daguio, the film is about a husband and wife on the eve of the titular dance. The thing is, Awiyao (Arvin Balageo) is not dancing with his wife Lumnay (Mai Fanglayan), the two are separating, and Awiyao is being wedded to Madulimay (Christal Dagupen) because Lumnay is unable to give Awiyao a child.

That's basically the entirety of the story, and while the film tries to fill in the gaps with some rudimentary worldbuilding, a sideplot involving a Japanese soldier and a bunch of flashbacks, it's not very successful in fleshing things out. A few days after seeing the film, I don't remember anything remotely romantic about the two during this initial period. That's not to say the film's cast tries their best; Mai Fanglayan, perhaps best known for her lead role in 2018's Tanabata's Wife, does her best with the material.

With all that said, it doesn't mean the film has nothing to say: even now, in our deeply patriarchal Filipino society, there are societal pressures for couples to have children. Back then, the reasons for this are practical: as Awiyao says at one point in the film, without children, no one will inherit the fields, and no one will continue the tribe. Wedding merely for love goes against the community and can be construed as a threat to the community's survival. But as the film tries to tell us, that process leaves the wreckage of many dreams in its wake.

The film's odd structure is one thing, but the climactic confrontation (basically the first dozen or so paragraphs of the short story) gives way to its infamous ending, an interminable slog that should honestly have ended 30 minutes prior, which then bafflingly, abruptly ends with a drone shot that feels like a jump scare. Other reviews of the film are right, in my view: it just doesn't work.

Cinemalaya 2024: Kono Basho, Tumandok, Kantil

 

There is a lone pine tree in Rikuzentakata, Iwate prefecture. Locals call it the ippon matsu (一本松), which is just a direct translation of "lone pine tree". Before the tsunami of 3/11, the tree was part of a large and famed grove called Takata-matsubara, a small forest of seventy thousand pine trees on the town's shoreline. When the 2011 tsunami hit, destroying the town and killing hundreds of people, it was the only tree left standing. Standing before the tree, Ella (Gabby Padilla) wonders why so much money was spent on the tree instead of giving it to the survivors, despite the fact that much was spent surrounding the locale with seawalls and literally raising the entire town above the ground. Ella's half sister, Reina (Arisa Nakano) replies to her that "memories are important." And that seems to be the central theme of Jaime Pacena's Kono Basho, because the thing is, that lone pine isn't exactly the same tree that stood in 2011: it had died due to saltwater toxicity, was felled, preserved and replanted as a memorial. An anthropologist like Ella should know that memorials are there not only in service of the dead, but also the living: as a way to keep those who have passed to live on, if only as a memory.

Ella has come to Rikuzentakata to say goodbye to her estranged father who has recently died, and settle her affairs regarding her inheritance. His second family has taken her in, though for Ella there is still a tinge of resentment at the family that took her father away from her. 

Aside from its surface level family drama and slice of life elements, Kono Basho isn't only about "a place," it is also how people shape places and vice versa, and how that shaping creates history. It is only appropriate that the film takes place in Rikuzentakata, a place so profoundly changed that its previous self lives on only in the memories of the people who stay, whether by choice or not. In one scene, Ella muses on her sister's life before the tsunami: where could she have spent her idle time? in what places did she create memories?

It is also a film where culture shapes a person: for the Japanese, spirits live on beyond the corporeal body in a particular way. In the Shinto religion, people become kami (usually translated as 'gods' but in this case, spirits) who help the living and guard the land. They stay with us, forever, becoming part of a place. We rarely see or hear Ella and Reina's dad, but his presence is felt everywhere. The home where Ella stays and where Reina lives is a manifestation of his will. In contemporary westernized Filipino culture, souls go to heaven or hell. They do not stay, unless as ghosts. That dissonance can be seen all throughout the film, and is a source of the disconnect between the two sisters. 

Reina is at peace and grieves openly at the start, but it takes Ella more time to process that grief. Ella chose to disconnect herself with a painful part of her past and made herself, in a way, incomplete. A popular saying exclaims that we are every person that we've ever loved; Kono Basho argues that we are also every place we've ever been. "Think of this place as your home," Reina tells her sister near the end. However far, however detached through space and time, there are homes, gardens, small ippon matsu in all of our hearts.

Two things struck out to me during my viewing of Richard Salvadico and Kat Sumagaysay's Tumandok. The first is a line spoken by one of the elders near the end of the film, to a local official from whom he is seeking help, and I paraphrase: you can order us to the ends of the earth, and we will settle there. But the people who take our lands may also claim the ends of the earth for themselves. 

The film depicts the struggles of the Ati population living in Sitio Kabarangkalan in Iloilo. They're part of a group of indigenous peoples who have lived in the Visayan islands for many centuries. For many years, these people have been systematically driven out of their lands by state forces, capitalist interests, or both. Hewing from real life experiences, the film follows a young Ati girl (Jenaica Sangher) as she tries to manage the affairs of her chieftain father, who has been ailing for a while. She and her father go up and down the mountain to the government offices to process the papers for them to own their own land, a process that will take their people an enormous amount of resources. But our bureaucracy is labyrinthine and rigged against them. At the same time, she tries to contact her brother, who is in a minor position in the military, to help them out.

Tumandok embodies the function of film as testimony: the film's cast consists of the actual inhabitants of Sitio Kabarangkalan, speaking in their own language, telling their stories directly to you. As testimony, films like Tumandok also help tell stories that would otherwise be ignored - for example, many may not be aware of an incident where the police killed several Tumandok leaders in 2020. 

Tumandok is also an embodiment of film as history and documentation: to tell one's story and shape histories. At one point in the film the residents of Sitio Kabarangkalan stage a performance for a public official's visit, and also to earn money for their land title. The song and dance is not theirs, not a part of their culture, and some of the people in the film decry it as such. That scene, (and metatextually, our viewing of it) reflects our own skewed view of these people in popular media, views that are distorted in "art" that is not made by the people it depicts. Art as a reflection of truth is art in its most powerful form.

The second thing that struck me during my viewing of Tumandok didn't happen during the screening, but in the talkback session after it: one gentleman, visibly moved by what he just saw, talked to the filmmakers, and related his own experience as part of an indigenous community in the Cordilleras. Films help people share experiences, and solidarity is formed in that sharing. Tumandok is a tremendous work, testimony and history combined, a film that reaches beyond the four walls of the cinema.

To help the people of Sitio Kabarangkalan regain their land, you can donate by clicking this link.

Paleng (Edmund Telmo) and Eliong (Andre Miguel) are lovers living in a small seaside community. Eliong is the son of the mayor (Raul Arellano), who is grooming the boy to be his successor. At the same time, the mayor seeks to evict the inhabitants of the seaside communities, including the one where Paleng lives. The community fights back, led by Mrs. Buhisan (Sue Prado) but the mayor has a retinue of goons supporting him. In one operation, said goons conduct a 'purge', and Eliong is seemingly killed. But when a fisherman (Perry Dizon) catches a mysterious rock from an ocean trench, things begin to change.

Kantil is a film that is admittedly unable to contain its creative audacity, though it puts up a noble attempt: it weaves together many stories and builds a world that feels alive and lived in. It feels very personal with its central romance but there is a feeling of something larger, something cosmic in scale, going on beyond these characters. 

Many little things pop out to me while watching: the sheer randomness and happenstance in which power comes to people, the lengths to which people hold on to that power, and the capriciousness of that power being taken away, as a sort of corrective action bestowed by the land itself. There is also the community who, when continuously faced with their own destruction, relies on its own solidarity, and the cliched (but in this case, welcomed) trope of love enduring beyond death, persevering beyond time.

Cinemalaya 2024: The Hearing, Shorts A

 

A young deaf-mute boy, Lucas (Enzo Osorio) lives a quiet life in a quiet seaside town. But that peace is upended when the local priest (Rom Factolerin) rapes him. Lucas' parents (Mylene Dizon and Nor Domingo) take the priest to court, but they are immediately met with backlash from the community. Meanwhile, Maya (Ina Feleo) is a sign language teacher who faces marital difficulties at home. She is eventually assigned to Lucas' case.

There's so much tension in the ensuing courtroom scenes in Lawrence Fajardo's The Leaving, partly because of Fajardo's expert treatment of point of view: much of the film, especially during crucial parts of dialogue, are filmed in Lucas' perspective, as if to make us feel his confusion and anxiety. Since Lucas doesn't have any formal training in sign language, relay interpreters are used: one translating the hearing parts of sign language, and another to translate that standardized sign language to something that Lucas understands. The anxious waiting in between his responses creates a sort of gap in between the unconscious tension that we feel through the filmmaking and what is created when we understand what the boy is saying.

Maya's sideplot in the film involves her being unable to speak out against her abusive husband. This sideplot doesn't entirely gel with the rest of the story, though the intent is to show that a disability is not the reason why people are unable to speak, it is courage (or the lack thereof) that prevents them from doing so. It is ironic that the one person who wants to speak the loudest is physically unable to do so properly with the world of whose who can speak and hear.

And what takes his voice away from him? It is a lack of institutional support (education, interpretation, etc) for deaf and deaf-mute people. Without support, attaining justice becomes exponentially harder. I've found one quote that sums this up quite well, and it comes from a support group for disabled people: the biggest barrier for people with disabilities is not merely their own disabilities, it is how society disables them. In our neglect, we are the ones disabling our own people. That's a chilling thought.

*

Shorts A Short Reviews

The first two shorts that I saw in the program dealt with grief; having gone through grief myself, I found myself connecting with these two shorts the most. In the first, Abogbaybay, three brothers deal with the untimely loss of their mother in different ways: one is firmly in denial, seeking the sea to find his mother, another takes the responsibility to bring her home, and a third lets his grief run wild, floating like ashes in the sky.

I'm not sure if it was Ayala Malls Manila Bay's overly loud sound system or something inherent in the film itself, but the sound design of All This Wasted Space immediately popped out to me: seemingly louder, made even more so in the cramped spaces of a house that is empty (no people) but not emptied (filled with memories). It reminds me of something I'm writing in my book about grief: that it speaks loudest in silence.

There's a lot of quirky fun in Ambot Wa Ko Kabalo Unsay I-Title Ani, in that during the creative process, sometimes you don't really know the direction a work of art is gonna go - that much is evident in the wishy-washiness of the title. It's gonna be relatable to anyone who's picked up a camera on a whim.

An Baga Sa Dalan reminds me a lot of Khavn's Balangiga, opening with a depiction (in this case, a recollection) of horrific violence, and then a journey to a mythical land as a means of emotional and spiritual healing. However, the treatment in this case isn't as well made, even though it deals a lot with pertinent issues that should definitely be addressed.

And finally, there is another kind of response to a kind of death that is not grief in Pamalandong sa Danow. In it, people fight with all they have to stop the end of their way of life, to push back the darkness so to say. It's a hard battle, but in the solidarity these three friends have, that fight is a whole lot easier than fighting it alone.

Cinemalaya 2024: Alipato at Muog, An Errand

 

In this country, Jonas Burgos is perhaps the most well known of the desaparecidos: the victims of enforced disappearances perpetrated by state forces. Ever since he was abducted in 2007, Burgos has not resurfaced, despite a supreme court resolution that holds both the armed forces and the police accountable for his disappearance. His story was dramatized by Joel Lamangan in 2013 into a feature film, Burgos, starring Lorna Tolentino.

Alipato at Muog (Embers and a Fortress) is a documentary delving into Burgos' case and his family's search for the truth, while also showing that Jonas Burgos' case is not unique: thousands of Filipinos have disappeared since the time of Martial Law, and many still vanish to this day. At the same time, it's a personal story, as the film's director, JL Burgos, is Jonas' brother.

"A tomb is the beginning of justice," JL notes near the end of the film. There is something deeply tragic about someone who just vanishes without a trace - in the space where that person once was, grief cannot easily fill it; in that uncertainty, there is little room to mourn. The truth and the search for justice are both forms of closure not just for the person who is gone, but also those he leaves behind. In the film's final moments, in front of a crackling fire, JL and his family show that the best response to the lack of closure is to live a normal and fulfilling life, to never forget, to keep the embers of a man burning for as long as memory allows, to honor a man who gave and gave and gave parts of himself until, in the end, there was nothing at all.

An immediate peculiarity upon watching Dominic Bekaert's An Errand: DP Steven Evangelio frames the film's protagonist, Moroy (Sid Lucero) inside side mirrors and reflective surfaces, as he eavesdrops and listens in to the conversations of people who ride in his car. It's as if we are in the car, listening in with him... or looking back at him listening to us. It is a strange kind of intimacy: one whose obtuseness creates emotional distance despite being physically immediate. At times, the camera slowly zooms into his face, as if to search for meaning that isn't quite there. 

The central conceit of An Errand is a mundane, if absurd, task: deliver a gaudy t-shirt and a tin of viagra via a roundtrip from Manila to Baguio. The titular errand itself doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, as it is merely used to frame its central character's deeply personal search for meaning.

Its treatment eschews many conventions of narrative, the finished film more like a tone poem that evokes a mood rather than a story that brings us from A to B. If you're not in the mood, it's not going to work as well as it should. But to me, the film's (alleged) abstruseness is a feature and not a bug.  

Moroy is living a life as fake as the watch he sports: one modeled after his boss, his idylls filled with fantasies of a life that is not his. When he tries to say that he and his boss aren't so different and gives a justification of his relatively humdrum life to his boss mistress (Elora Españo), she points out the artifice in his words. 

One thing that occupies most of the goings-on of drivers like Moroy is waiting: seemingly endless stretches of time in stasis, in strange, unfamiliar places, or in transit to them, silently, in a vehicle. His journeys are rarely ones he takes for himself. Moroy's eventual emotional journey is one that tries to find itself out of homeostasis, to take a detour, if not a completely different path.

Cinemalaya 2024: Love Child, Gulay Lang, Manong

 

Adapted from his short story of the same name, Jonathan Jurilla's Love Child begins in a period of transition: Pao (RK Bagatsing) and Ayla (Jane Oineza) are in the process of moving to the province with their young son Kali (John Tyrron Ramos) in tow. Kali has just been diagnosed with autism and is currently non-verbal; in order to cut costs and rent and provide a healthy environment for their son, Pao and Ayla move to a relative's home in Negros Occidental. Kali was born out of wedlock, and both Pao and Ayla have issues with their parents that either abandoned them in their childhood and are trying to reach out, or are not fully accepting of Pao and Ayla's present situation.

Parenthood entails sacrifices, and some parents sacrifice more than most: in one instance Kali shreds one of his mother's certificates. Ayla, a talented debater and promising lawyer, had to cut her career short, while Pao, an equally promising filmmaker, is relegated to screening his award winning films as a side attraction of his coffee cart in order to make ends meet.

The film leans on the casting of Oineza and Bagatsing, both a love team and a couple in real life, by presenting the film as a sort of epilogue to a rom-com. Both characters question themselves throughout Love Child if their decisions prior to the film, to choose the idea of love conquering all, have culminated in a life they would have wished for themselves. While they see colleagues flourishing, they're stuck. It's presented sometimes with cheesy, clunky dialogue, as if to use the conventions of the genre ironically, because this is nowhere near any idealized fantasy version of their life.

It's a bit of a paradox to me, because I see the film as both a tragedy and an incredibly romantic film, without a doubt this couple's most romantic outing ever. It's a tragedy in that these two shouldn't be struggling in the first place - to meet the needs of a special needs child should not be a luxury reserved only for the rich. Had Pao and Ayla not had the privileges of their middle class status, Kali might not even have the capacity to go to school at all; in fact, without the resources needed for specialized care, he might not even get diagnosed in the first place. The film offers a parallel to the story of Ayla and Pao, where both of the parents of an autistic child work abroad, leaving the child in the care of their grandparents, but that is itself an indictment of the material realities such parents, special needs children or not, have to face to take care of their families - to keep it together, families sometimes have to be split apart.

And while it flouts the structure of a rom-com, Love Child still operates on something like an 'ideal' romantic setting: Pao is laser focused on his family, while parents of autistic children tend to divorce or separate at rates higher than the general population. The love fostered by Pao towards his wife and son isn't one borne out of meet cutes or kilig moments, it is borne out of a conscious, everyday decision to love and cherish something bigger than yourself. As I've gotten older over the years, I've found that that is the greatest kind of love you can give.

Long demonized by sensationalist and conservative media (1936's Reefer Madness immediately comes to mind), Marijuana has been looped into harder and more dangerous drugs in the public consciousness, even if it is not as addictive or harmful, and even if some of the active components of the plant have proven useful for a plethora of neurological disorders. The latter isn't even breaking news; studies investigating the benefits of compounds like THC and CBD have existed since the nineties. I'm of the opinion that at the very least, Marijuana should be legalized and regulated for medicinal use (to ensure consistency in dose, etc). And personally, I don't see why it shouldn't be legalized for recreational use, either - if we're going to compare, alcohol, which is legal and widely available in the country, is far more dangerous and detrimental to public and personal health.

BC Amparado's Gulay Lang, Manong! is a spirited argument for the legalization of Marijuana, at least for medical use. Pilo (Perry Dizon) is a farmer in Benguet living with his grandson Ricky (BJ Forbes.) When, by sheer coincidence, Ricky is caught by policeman Ariel (Cedrick Juan), the officer recruits Pilo into a scheme to expose the entire drug 'cartel' in the province.

What follows next is relatively loose and occasionally trippy as Pilo, Ariel and right hand man/marijuana grower Razer (Ranzel Magpantay) deliver a stash of specially cultivated Marijuana called Super Jane to a big and influential client. This is where, in a cliched setup, Ariel learns the error of his ways and changes for the better, but this film's ending is far more complicated. What eventually happens reflects the deeply seated prejudice towards Marijuana in society, a prejudice that has been sustained across generations due to misinformation, a religious culture and an accompanying deeply seated moral anxiety. The shift towards acceptance and legalization takes a paradigm shift, but that shift is slowly taking roots. 

That holds true for this film as well: by the end, the seeds (metaphorically and literally) have already been planted. A sideplot in Gulay Lang, Manong! concerns Pilo's struggle to stay financially afloat. He constantly faces exploitation from middlemen and inconsistent demand from shopkeepers. All throughout the film we see farmers dispose of wasted harvests and food left unsold. In one particular scene, out of desperation, Pilo sells two crates of perfectly good vegetables at a huge discount. The film makes an argument not only for Marijuana's health benefits, but also its economic benefits - to farmers like Pilo who are consistently taken advantage of by an unfair system. In its own way, to grow it is to protest that very system.