MANILA, Philippines - It’s called festival fever because it possesses all the qualities of one: a hot flush and a weakening and a mostly figurative frothing at the mouth prefiguring a unique condition when regular life comes to a standstill and we are beholden to screening schedules, becoming slightly less extreme iterations of those nerds with no life who pitched camp outside the theater months before the Star Wars prequels came out.
Camping out, of course, is a pertinent reference because that’s what it often amounts to for the avid cinephile. I remember the year Tarantino came to Cinemanila in particular, also the first year the festival held court at Gateway, and how enclosed and contained and conducive to sealing yourself off in the venue was, going there just a little after lunch, and staying there until way after dinner, subsisting on nothing but coffee and fast food, flitting in and out of endurance screenings, imbibing that thick sense of community. My initial sensations when a festival approaches come in prickles— of anticipation and of anxiety both. The Tarantino year was the year I discovered Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Raya Martin, John Torres and Ploy. It was also the year I missed Faith Akin, Christian Mungiu, Jeff Nichols and Foster Child by inches. Life and screening times don’t always cooperate. But you do get to see more films camped out this way; at least you can circumvent the scheduling snafus.
Scheduling snafus have always been the one flaw about Cinemanila. Mapping a course through a festival can be a daunting task of precision planning, and such lapses can be the downfall of even the most mathematically rigorous of maps. But it’s a flaw that gets less and less frequent with every year. And one I’ve learned to forgive after having a hand in running a much smaller festival myself. Ironically enough, the uniqueness of Cinemanila lies entirely in its being traditional, in not fixing what isn’t broke. Whether you find the programming impeccable or questionable is really a matter of taste and/or of cynicism, but Cinemanila is essentially a yearly banquet of world cinema, and the only one. This is what distances it, in many ways, from the other ubiquitous film festivals of every year, Cinema One Originals, Cinemalaya, and the dreaded and mostly dreadful MMFF.
Everybody rags on MMFF and, if only for the yearly brain rape that is the Enteng Kabisote franchise, it deserves to be everyone’s horse to flog. The way it seals off the last two weeks of the year and declares an embargo on foreign movies, seemed designed to optimize conditions for the risk-averse studios to bankroll their risk-prone projects with a distribution platform that guarantees, if nothing else, a return on investment it wouldn’t have any other time of the year. Used to be the MMFF was a showcase for a studio’s prestige film. These days, give or take a few exceptions, it’s a glorified latrine for the studios, or even, arguably, for one studio, which notoriously monopolizes it under different affiliations, as if the movies were tax shelters. It’s where their most decrepit formulas go, not to die, but to decompose right before your eyes, proving that you can tap into dreck for revenue streams long as you feed it to the same republic of people who made Praybeyt Benjamin the highest grossing movie of all time.
Grant money
The procedures for getting into MMFF may be no different from Cinema One Originals and Cinemalaya, sure, but MMFF doesn’t cede grant money to filmmakers, nor does it cede it in tranches while holding everyone to a festival date, the combination of which has been historically proven to cause all sorts of sticky wrinkles: films finished hastily, unfinished films screening to paying audiences, filmmakers resorting to crowd-funding months before the festival opens. Even FDCP’s Sineng Pambansa, which allegedly gives its seed money in one go at the onset, has seen its spate of films come dangerously close to not being finished on time.
It is useful to reiterate that Cinema One Originals and Cinemalaya are essentially curated cable station content providers, although who knows what Cinemalaya films provide content for, as nearly all of them have all but disappeared without a trace. The prevailing curatorial aesthetic for one and the other is, of course, the spanner in the works and the differences tend to glare. There are always exceptions, sure, and there have been gems, but Cinemalaya has famously, or infamously, favored a more conservative strain of narrative arthouse predominantly modeled after American independent cinema.
It’s Philippine independent cinema’s version of what Sundance has become, and I’m not sure I mean that as a compliment. Cinema One may have started out shakily as a bit of a Cinemalaya clone, and is sometimes still is, but has also aggressively thrown diversity and adventurism and experimentation into the mix, admittedly to ambivalent results, but Kalayaan notwithstanding, Cinemalaya is not going to shepherd anything like Big Boy or Imburnal or Mga Anino Sa Tanghaling Tapat or Ang Damgo Ni Eleuteria to completion anytime soon.
To each his own perhaps, and I’m speaking entirely from a position of personal taste, but sometimes you can’t help wish the constitution of whoever selects Cinemalaya films would go out on limbs more, watch more kinds of films, be a lot less prudish. Because, between the two, it is admittedly the festival with the most pull and profile. And it is a bit of a shame that it doesn’t exploit the leverage to push more films that push more.
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