Baron, Mylene, Jay top Cinemalaya winners

Francis Xavier Pasion’s Jay won Best Film in the full- length feature category of the 2008 Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival and Competition with Best Actor Award going to its lead star Baron Geisler. Jay also won for Best Editing (Kate Serraon, Chuck Gutierrez and Francis Pasion).

Jay was chosen as Best Film “for its sheer originality, its energetic story-telling, its mastery of digital technology in order to tell a story that is a trenchant commentary on the technology itself, and its very revealing take on the media and the uses and abuses of the truth.”

As winner of the Best Full Length Feature Film, Jay won an additional grant of P200,000 and the Cinemalaya Balanghai trophy.

Special Jury Prize went to Tara Illenberger’s Brutus “for courageously and effectively drawing the audience’s attention to the complex dynamics between the exploitation of cultural communities and the degradation of the environment.”

Brutus won the awards for Best Supporting Actor, which went to Yul Servo, and Best Original Musical Score, which was done by Joey Ayala. Brutus also tied for the Best Cinematography award (Jay Abello) with Huling Pasada (Dan Villegas).

Chris Martinez’s 100 won five awards. Best Direction and Best Screenplay went to Chris. He was cited “for excellence in technique and effective depiction of a young woman coming to terms with her mortality.  Best Actress went to Mylene Dizon “for her moving portrayal of a woman raging against the dying of the light” and Best Supporting Actress went to Eugene Domingo. It also won the Audience Choice Award in the full-length film category.

Michael Christian Cardoz’s Ranchero won Best Sound (Toto Sorioso, sound engineer; and Lito Cruz, soundman) while Best Production Design went to Baby Angelo (Cristina Honrado).

In the short feature category, Milo Tolentino’s Andong won the Best Film award “for its devoted and humorous take on a young boy’s obsessions, revealing in the process the complex of social relations and social struggles that are any young Filipino’s rite of passage.” Tolentino also bagged the Best Screenplay award. This is the second time around for Tolentino who bested in the short feature category in 2006 with Orasyon. As Best Film awardee, Andong received a cash grant of P100,000 and the Cinemalaya Balanghai trophy.

Other awards in the short feature category are Special Jury Prize, My Pet by Anna Bigornia; Best Director, Mark Reyes for God Only Knows, which also won the Audience Choice Award; Special Jury Citation, Angan-Angan by Sheron Dayoc.

The winners of Cinemalaya were selected by the jury comprised of film critic and writer Lito Zulueta; Cesar Montano; Ansgar Vogt, Berlin International Film Festival programmer; Kim Ji-Seok, co-founder and program director of the Pusan International Film Festival; and Max Tessier, Asian and Japanese cinema expert and artistic consultant for international film festivals, including the Cannes Film Festival.

Cinemalaya is a presentation of Cinemalaya Foundation, CCP, UP Film Institute, Film Development Council of the Philippines and Econolink Investments, Inc.