Living the indie dream

CEBU, Philippines - When 26-year-old Remton Siega Zuasola was still a child and owning a television set was then a luxury, his family only had a radio to amuse themselves with. So he became fond of listening to radio dramas.

What fascinated the young boy was how the absence of visuals allowed his creative mind to supply its own images, attach faces to the voices, create sceneries out of few descriptive words, and imagine a whole different world. 

He even made a camera out of pasted cardboards, asked his brothers to act in front of it and made imaginary movies. “Our neighbors would laugh at us, but I pursued that childhood dream stubbornly,” he recalled. 

During college at the University of San Carlos where he completed his Advertising Arts degree, he experimented in doing short narratives. But it took time for Remton to really build the confidence that he could make a career out of filmmaking.

After graduation, he took workshops in Method Acting and Film and TV Directing at the International Academy of Film and Television. As travelling was his other passion, he eagerly jumped into his first directing assignment which was the travel show “Island Hopping” for Cebu TV 28. It was followed by a number of other travel and lifestyle shows for the same channel such as “Around the World” and “Road Trip.”

In 2008, he decided to shift focus on independent filmmaking. “I felt that I had learned enough through extensive self-study and experience that I decided to make it a full-time job. It was also around this time that I felt my own voice was starting to emerge and that it needed my full dedication for it to flourish and mature,” said Remton, a resident of Tisa, Cebu City. He lists Wong Kar Wai, Pedro Almodovar, Ishmael Bernal, Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, Ang Lee and Andrei Tarkovsky as some of the many filmmakers he admires.  

His indie films have received various awards and have been showcased in local and international film fests. Just last December, he made fellow Cebuanos proud by winning the Best Southeast Asian Film during the Cinemanila International Film Festival for his first full-length work “Damgo ni Eleuteria.” It also won the Jury Prize and Best Musical Scoring by Jerrold Tarog in the Cinema One Originals Film Festival held last November in Manila.

“I was very happy and honored especially for my team who worked so hard for this film. The awards served as a stress-reliever for us. These awards would hopefully inspire other Cebuano filmmakers to keep on striving for Cebuano cinema,” he said.

For one of the film’s producers, UP Cebu Masscom professor Jiji Borlasa (the other producer is Beverly Tañedo), finishing the movie despite all odds was accomplishment enough. “I’m speaking more for myself but I think most of our crew members would agree. The awards are a wonderful and very much appreciated bonus. We are very happy about all the distinctions that the movie has received so far.”

Some of the obstacles Borlasa said they encountered were script revisions, casting, locations, technical issues and unpredictable weather in Olango Island where they were filming.

“Damgo ni Eleuteria” is about a girl who was about to leave her hometown to marry a rich old German, an agreement her mother made with a recruiter. The young Terya, who has a fisherman boyfriend, wants to resist her fate, but she is assailed by people trying to convince her that the right decision is to go abroad.

“The story of Eleuteria was offered for me to direct by its author Maria Victoria Beltran. The first time I read it, I found great potential with the material. Although the finished film remotely resembles the original story, still it was able to retain the soul of a living, breathing island girl whose life is about to change,” stated Remton, who also wrote the screenplay that was based on the short story of Cebuana author Maria Victoria Beltran.

The Cebuano cast included Donna Gimeno, Lucia Juezan, Gregg Tecson, Fedwilyn Villarba and Daday Melgar. Chosen through tedious auditions, Remton related that a big factor in choosing who would play the lead characters were their improvisation skills since most of the dialogue and scenes were done impromptu style.

“Aside from the short story, I also did some in-depth interviews with a number of mail-order brides who are now back in Cebu. Although Beltran is not a mail-order bride, she had a long relationship with her late German husband and was living in Germany for a period of time, where she met real mail-order brides who have become successful while others were not so lucky. The original story was an insider’s look into the lives of these women, a sort of collective stories woven into one,” he added.

What made the film more remarkable among critics (with one of them labeling Remton as “Philippine cinema’s next big thing”) was its long-take-no-cuts style.

“I love shooting in one long take because the suspension of disbelief is hardly being broken since there are no cuts to distract the audience. Once the audience starts watching, they are naturally drawn in deeper into the story and the characters,” he explained.

“Long takes are also very helpful for the actors in building up their emotions, because the events happen chronologically. Thee progression of emotions flows naturally as compared to the jumps and cuts found in traditional filmmaking styles. But shooting a long-take-no-cuts movie is not easy for both the actors and the crew. It is physically demanding and very costly.”

Because of the recognitions that “Damgo ni Eleuteria” has gotten, a number of international film festivals have expressed interest. For us here, we’ll be looking forward to its Cebu premiere that Remton is targeting to happen on February in one of the city’s major cinemas.

He and his team are also currently working on the pre-production for their next film project to be shot this summer. When not filming movies, Remton is directing, conceptualizing and writing scripts for TV, commercials, documentaries and corporate videos. 

From playing with a makeshift cardboard camera as a kid, he is now indeed living a childhood dream.  (FREEMAN)