I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that a chain of grocery stores started a film festival - we did have ToFarm, after all. Puregold's Cinepanalo Film Festival is a festival that, in their words, aims "to deliver powerful narratives celebrating Filipino strength, success, and joy in movies that aim to foster Filipino talent through filmmakers, actors, and actresses." The full length feature offerings of the festival are comprised of works by established directors, up and coming talents and newcomers to the industry. For the most part, the results are pretty fine - I didn't find myself disliking any of the entries.
Granted, there's a caveat to all this, given production constraints for both budget and time, these films aren't all going to look stellar. Filmmakers have done a lot with less (some iterations of Cinemalaya come to mind) but it's a big ask. The lack of polish hurts some of these films: sound levels out of wack, dialogue recorded with an audible buzz, visuals that look muddy or out of focus, but for what these six films have done in such a short time, it's still pretty impressive. Here are some thoughts on the six full length entries of the festival:
*
After mishearing a lab competition as a "love" competition, Pinky (Uzziel Delamide) inadvertently joins an inter-school agriculture quiz bee. It isn't all bad, mainly because of two reasons: 1) her crush, Genesis (Potchi Angeles) is her teammate and 2) being an Aeta who is familiar with local foliage, she's actually pretty good at this sort of thing.
What follows is a wholesome tale that's never cloying, a pure and unbothered kind of love from two people who have their own hopes and dreams. Pinky feels an omnipresent insecurity borne from years of colonial thinking and discrimination, and in a crucial part of the film, this leads her to set aside her dreams for someone else's. But aside from being a movie about young romance, A Lab Story is also a story of self-lab, pardon the pun: one where our protagonists learn that their own dreams are just as important as everyone else's.
While the film has its share of non-actors, Uzziel Delamide and Potchi Angeles do a great job as our central couple, though Donna Cariaga's supporting role as their equally lovestruck teacher and coach carries the film as well. A Lab Story may not have much polish, but it's the most charming local film I've seen this year.
*
Mary (Lady Morgana) works in a parlor and takes care of a son (Tommy Alejandrino) from a one night stand with their lesbian friend. One day they find out that their coach and mother figure has died. See, back in the day, Mary was part of a volleyball team in their barangay, and they were damn good at it. Since then, they've all gone their separate ways. In order to pay for their coach's costly funeral expenses, Mary sets off (was that a pun? lol) to reform the team, win a barangay-wide One Day League and recapture the glory of lost days.
Most of One Day League is Mary assembling the team and competing in games as they ascend the league tournament, while showing their lives in the interim. This is not necessarily a sports movie as it is a slice of life: while the volleyball in this film is exciting and pretty well shot, the film has always been more about the family that Mary and their teammates have formed over the years, and the close bonds they still have despite the time and distance in between.
In communities where you are pushed to the side or discriminated against, marginalized groups find solace and comfort in each other and the strength that stems from that is, in the film's view, unbeatable. That's a message I can get behind. Things don't always end cleanly, life goes on, and that's okay. Granted, it's rough around the edges, but One Day League had its share of fun moments.
*
The people of Negros love food. They love cooking it, they love baking it, and of course, they love eating it. Love is the operative word here, and it is also the central concept behind this next film. Food is so beloved, in fact, that of all the food-centric local films that I've seen (I can probably count them with two hands), two of them are from Negros: the 2008 film Namets! and this film - Kurt Soberano's Under a Piaya Moon.
Stephen (Jeff Moses) is an idealistic baker who seeks to reopen his family's baking shop. He and his girlfriend Joy (Pauline Dimaranan) aim to innovate on their product and make new products inspired by pastries from other countries. But Joy cheats on poor Stephen, leaving him distraught and in search of direction. He comes across his grandmother, Fina (Charito Ferrer-Motus), who has left her home because she fought with her husband Poldo (Joel Torre.) Through his grandparents, Stephen begins to rediscover the love he has for his craft and the true essence of Negros cuisine.
All of what I just said in that previous paragraph is told in a strangely edited, haphazard manner, as if Stephen himself was telling you the story on a drunken night. For my own sensibilities (that are not rooted in Negros) don't think it works particularly well but I think it's emblematic of director Kurt Soberano's approach to the film: this is a film about love, and that love manifests itself in his work, just as much as Poldo and Fina's food, adhering to decades (or even centuries) old baking and cooking traditions, is unequivocally Negrense. When Stephen deviates too much from the recipe his grandparents have taught him, his food no longer has the essence of the pastries he is tasked to make - just as this film would not be a Negrense film had it been told any other way.
This is a film that values tradition in both its form and its content - love extending to pride, a love of one's own traditions and beliefs. It's also why it juxtaposes this traditionalism vs modernism duality to Stephen's love for Joy versus his grandparent's love. Whereas the former is concerned with money and opportunity and goes from one lover to another, the latter endures despite hardships, always, inevitably, returning home.
It sometimes loses its momentum at some points - for example, Soberano is no stranger to compelling and exciting camerawork like in certain oners in his short film Golden Bells, which would have been an asset in the competition parts of the film - but the finished product is still fine. At some points it goes into the process of making these pastries and those are honestly my favorite parts of the film. At the very least, Under a Piaya Moon made my mouth water, and for me that's more than enough.
*
Road to Happy is as straightforward as it sounds: an influencer, Herald (VJ Mendoza) is headed to the province for a gig. Along the way, a stowaway (Darlyn Izabelle Salang) boards his van; taking pity on the girl, he decides to bring her to her home because it's only a small detour... a small detour that spirals out of control.
Road to Happy is a about a man looking for (and finding) the happiness that he's looking for, though that happiness isn't in what he's doing right now - in work where social relationships are manufactured and impersonal. Herald finds love and warmth from the people he meets in his journey and experiences contentment for the first time in a long time, and it's because they're seeing him for who he truly is, and not the social media persona he projects into the world, or as a replaceable commodity to be exploited.
Unfortunately, the road to that happiness isn't very exciting - though the film has its share of comedic parts, it lacks the comedic punchiness of Joel Ferrer's best films. It's carried somewhat by Smokey Manaloto's performance, but it's not enough. It's still a relatively fine film to watch, but I'd understand if some disembark from the journey midway.
*
I was a boy at the back too when I was a kid, not because I was academically delinquent or anything, but because I was the tallest. Still, because many of us attended the same school from my elementary and even my preschool days, I was friendly or at least acquaintances with everyone, even the ones that weren't academically stellar. These people, my second family in a way, were normal boys and girls just like me, trying to get by school as well as they could. Decades later, some of these kids who weren't achievers or who didn't particularly stand out ended up doing pretty well for themselves. Many have families and a thriving business. Heck, some of them make more money than I do.
Raynier Brizuela's Boys at the Back is about one such group of misfits, high school students who have been left behind by an educational system that either pretends they don't exist or dismisses them entirely. While they languish in educational limbo, their teacher (Bani Baldisseri) terrorizes the rest of the class, concerned not with educating these students but instead with propping himself up for the limelight.
It takes a transfer student named Kevin (Noel Comia Jr.) to meet these misfits head on and actually interact with them as people and teach them in their own language. He finds a strange affinity to them, not only because Kevin is himself an outsider, but also because he has his own things going on: his mom and dad separated, and he's still attached to the last thing his dad gave him before he left. As for the titular boys (and girl!) in the back, Brizuela gives us little hints as to what they're about and why they are the way they are academically: they are either occupied by other things, don't have support systems in place (financially or otherwise) so that they can study properly, or conventional ways of teaching just don't work on them. Kevin creates an environment where they can thrive and still be themselves, and that's why they succeed. In the absence of proper educational authority figures, students find their own solidarity in peer groups and friends.
I've seen reviews of this film that note how Kevin's confiscated iPod disappears from the story past a certain point and how such a disappearance means several things are left unresolved. The iPod represents an attachment to the past, and it was never the point of the film. Or rather: Kevin finds a new family of his own with these people and grows himself because of them.
Boys at the Back is itself a misfit as far as movies go: the film is obviously shot on a shoestring budget, and Brizuela casts himself and his friends as the titular Boys. There's a noticeable level of jank in it all. Despite that, there's something endearing in that scrappiness and the movie as a whole works because of it. Like my classmates who were themselves getting by the best they could, Boys at the Back (in my opinion) got by this viewer pretty well. And if Brizuela can do something like this with this much, imagine what can happen with a proper budget behind him.
*
Pushcart Tales gains points by taking place in an actual Puregold, and goes for a creative interpretation of the festival's uplifting/wholesome theme, because on the surface it looks anything but wholesome, the film beginning with a sequence of its six main characters as zombies, shambling aimlessly in the ruins of a Puregold that's seen better days. But Zombies in this context is an (admittedly unwieldy) metaphor for a second chance, a way to live a life anew for its six protagonists.
In the present day, during what appears to be a world-ending deluge, the employees and customers of a local supermarket are trapped with no way to go home. There's manager Jack and senior employee Sarah (husband-wife team Nonie and Shamaine Buencamino), rookie employee Emily (Therese Malvar), straggler and supermarket regular Ria (Elora Españo), rich kid Ryan (Harvey Bautista) and senile regular Benjamin (Carlos Siguion-Reyna).
The dialogue and structure of the film resembles theater than anything else, though this is probably one of the best casts that could tackle the material - and indeed, this cast is a contender for best local ensemble of the year so far. Much like other films with a small cast in an enclosed space (Vincenzo Natali's 1997 film Cube comes to mind) the film slowly reveals more about its characters, in both well integrated and contrived ways. A major example of the latter occurs halfway through the film, where a simple game becomes an extended series of flashbacks that provide more context to its characters' motivations and backstory. At the end of it all it spans a giant chunk of the film, and while it's well acted, it feels clunky and unnatural. Immediately following that is a moment of lucidity that serves as another series of character revelations that, while also still a bit clunky, feels more natural and didn't need to go into a long segue of flashbacks.
Given the production restrictions of the film, Pushcart Tales is quite impressive, looking very much like the most polished of the bunch. Though the pieces don't quite fit as well as they could, I had a good time watching nevertheless.
