Pinoy films in focus at Festival Paris Cinema

MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines is the focus country in this year’s Festival Paris Cinema, which opens today and will continue until July 12.

Over 280 film screenings will be held all over Paris. Forty films from the Philippines will be shown, according to festival programmer Jeremy Segay.

The festival pasy tribute to Filipino filmmaker Brillante Mendoza, whose latest film Serbis was nominated for the Pal, d’Or at the recent Cannes Film festival. There will also be a retrospective of the films of Joey Gosengfiao.

Two Philippine films will be in competition: Tribu by Jim Libiran, which won the top prize in last year’s Cinemalaya independent film competition, and the short film  Rolyo  by Alvin Yapan.

Tribu, the story of a street gang in Tondo, was filmed on site and starred real-life gang members.

The Lino Brocka classic  Insiang will also be screened, but Segay lamented the difficulty in finding screen-quality prints of old films.

“In general, in the Philippines it becomes hard to find a good copy of a film even if it is only five years old,” Segay said. “We luckily found some copies of films more than 30 years old in the archives of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila. However that’s quite rare.”

A forum on Philippine cinema will also be held during the festival. The Philippine participation is undertaken by the Film Development Council of the Philippines, in cooperation with the Cultural Center of the Philippines and Cinemalaya.

Chair of this year’s festival is actress Charlotte Rampling.