Shapes of filmmaking to come
The “...and Action! Asia # 03” short film screening last month was the culminating event of a 13-day exchange program involving 19 mostly undergraduate film student-participants from the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. The exchange is an initiative of the Japan Foundation Asia Center with the University of the Philippines Film Institute (UPFI) acting as co-organizer.
The students were split into three groups which then produced three short films. They were given several parameters, the most interesting of which were as follows: 1) films must run for only five minutes; 2) the production budget must be kept within P12,700; and 3) film locations should only be within the University of the Philippines- Diliman’s premises.
Production time was also tightly managed as the teams had only roughly eight days to work on everything: “Two days pre-production (ocular, casting and rehearsal), three days of shoot, and three days of post-production (editing and sound mix),” according to Sari Dalena, director of the UPFI. Time (or rather, the lack of it) — for the securing of permits and organization of shooting schedules among others — was what primarily circumscribed these conditions.
I mention these provisions as I have observed how similar, often very swift and condensed (the word “intensive” has been used) exchange programs tend to adapt this familiar model. Exchanges can be terribly expensive and logistically demanding operations.
Much of the load falls on its facilitators who grapple with the exigencies of administration and the necessary outcomes that will eventually have to materialize into organized and cohesive articles embedded in annual reports. The participants, who are aware of these intricacies, are often pliant and sensitive to frames and interests (their own interests notwithstanding).
How these delicate transactions turn out — and what they churn out — are sometimes more useful as telling markers of one’s, and an institution’s, position with regard to “cultural diplomacy” than as actual sites of creative translocation and transmutation.
Always more telling, too, is the aftermath: in hindsight, what has the “lab” collectively realized from its gains and failings? How have the mandatory and/or impulsive relationships — on which meetings and discussions are predicated — grown and developed?
The “... and Action!” films are ambitious symptoms of this exercise. Pitted against each other a la film festival during the screening, the films were also subject to commentary from à jury-panel that consisted of the directors Carlos Siguion- Reyna, Mark Meily, Raymond Red and screenwriter Armando Lao.
Dalena shares the rationale behind this: “A public screening of their films is also an important filmmaking experience, to listen to and accept criticism and engage in discourse. This also prepares them for film festivals that do give awards, so the competition becomes a part of the creative and learning process.”
Critical intermediaries and “competition as pedagogy” aside, the three student films: Kelly and the TV Head, Taste of Life and Red reveal conflicted causes and intentions implicit in creative exchange that only film, a medium hinged on collaboration (incidentally, a particular kind of exchange), can render. Kelly and the TV Head, at one point, approximates a ’90s MTV station ID which transitions to a hasty flashback of the protagonist’s apparently unpleasant childhood. As pointed out during the Q&A, certain conventional plot strategies (really “only a scene or two,” as observed by one of the panelists) would’ve allowed the film to thread a more cohesive and logical narrative.
The second film, Taste of Life, exposes a similar obstacle although less so. The innuendo here is better expressed because of more — for lack of a better word — efficient writing, i.e. a clearer and more plausible script. The film also has potentially more robust characters: the meeting between a mousy, Thai Muslim food blogger and a sunburnt, libidinous Pinay “food guide” sounds like a capable point of departure for an “indie” ASEAN romcom that could serve as a stand-in for intraregional love (and hate) affairs in Southeast Asia, i.e. love in a time of territorial claims and neoliberal integration.
The last film, Red, takes on a rather fraught approach to the gendered body. Shot MOS (without diagetic sound) and accompanied by gamelan music, the film allegorically narrates the story of a woman-like figure and parallels her “choosing” between being a man or a woman to entering public restrooms marked “Male” and “Female.” A longer discussion of the film’s premise may be better suited elsewhere, but what is striking is how of all three films it is only Red that sought to work around the specificities of the short film — no matter how problematically — by considering the structure and tenor of the short film as a specific kind of film (in contrast to, for example, feature length films that, conventionally, approach narrative time differently) and therefore, to a certain extent, the contingencies of “...and Action!”s framework.
“... and Action!” as an activity, expressed through its three films, provides us with a glimpse of how film schools administer exchanges today: oriented and directed by filmmakers and producers and structured after standard film and advertising industry productions (i.e. produced by a crew or a “team” and planned in a chain of phases: pre-production, production and post-production), the exchange program’s films offer film festival-ready — and friendly — fare that, after some polishing and tidying-up, could easily fit into any of the country’s current suite of competitive film showcases. What is missing, though, is what could not — because does not — befit the current billing. This, perhaps, is no longer within the remit of this particular exercise.
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The “... and Action Asia #03” Film Screening took place at the University of the Philippines Film Center.
