The A/V Club
MANILA, Philippines - ‘The A/V Club’ is a column that will rotate pieces from the views of four film critics Alexis respected and supported: Richard Bolisay, Francis Cruz, Dodo Dayao and Philbert Dy. Alexis spoke highly of these four critics.
By Francis Joseph A. Cruz
Ditsi Carolino’s Lupang Hinarang (roughly translated in English as Hindered Land), a two-part documentary about the failure of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Act, screened during last year’s edition of Cinemalaya as a work in progress. The documentary has all the ingredients for late-night editorial-political television programming. However, what Carolino does is both simple and magical. By following the farmers in their symbolic battles (the Cuenca farmers staged a 29-day hunger strike in front of the Agrarian Reform headquarters; while the Bukidnon farmers walked all the way from Bukidnon to Manila), allowing the farmers to tell or show their own stories without need of intervention, and ultimately relegating the politics to the background, she molds what possibly could be the most poignant, urgent and pertinent advocacy-oriented film in recent years. Editing hundreds of hours of footage into a tightly woven package showcases Carolino’s talent for taut storytelling and efficient filmmaking. Creating a masterpiece that moved an entire audience to sobs and tears for people whose lives and dilemmas they may hardly know or normally care about showcases Carolino’s sincerity, selflessness and compassion, three traits I wished more of our filmmakers had. The fact that the documentary is still a work in progress is quite troubling, evoking a sense that there are still so many promises of land grants that remain hindered and unfulfilled.
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By Dodo Dayao
Filipinos in High Definition (John Torres): A year later, this work-in-progress would cohere into John’s second feature, Years When I Was A Child Outside.
But who knew the resonance of seeing it in its halfway-there state, with a live score at that, would gain even more cling and force over time and overshadow, for me at least, the finished work?
This is a film that most likely doesn’t exist anymore, at least not in this form, and my love for it gains a melancholic pang out of that and that’s even before we get to the work itself — unfinished films about unfinished lives strung together into an unfinished piece as shot through with hope as it is with sadness, meditating as it does on the agonies, but more on the ecstasies, of failing beautifully.
In many ways, it is the same film. And in just as many ways, it isn’t. Unforgettable, unrepeatable.
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By Phil Dy
Jerrold Tarog has emerged as our very own version of Robert Rodriguez: a filmmaker who can write, shoot, cut and score his own films, work quickly and cheaply while maintaining a certain level of quality, all while keeping a vague notion of mainstream sensibilities in mind.
He makes a bid for commercial success this year with his third picture, and how he does might clue us in to the future of independent filmmaking in this country.
Is there a viable financial model in independent films that doesn’t preclude gay content or having a large mainstream budget?
Tarog seems determined to find out. Outside of the usual monetary concerns, the most exciting Filipino filmmaker around is Christopher Gozum.
His first feature Anacbanua (which won top prizes at Cinemanila) was the first Filipino film entirely in Pangasinense. In a poetic and visceral 100 minutes, Gozum makes a bid for the cultural preservation of his native Pangasinan, along the way documenting the livelihoods and cultural artifacts disappearing in the wake of general assimilation.
It’s worth noting that Gozum is an OFW, working as a videographer in the Middle East. Perhaps it is this situation that grants the filmmaker such a unique voice, a kind of honesty and immediacy that just can’t be found elsewhere. I don’t really know. Whatever the case, Gozum’s got plenty to say, and he’s going to keep saying it.
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By Richard Bolisay
There is greatness that goes without saying; greatness that only gets vaguer when explained, when detailed, when someone comes to its defense; greatness, considering the meaning of the word slowly becoming obsolete, that is liberating, emancipating.
For a film like Anacbanua to be made speaks of the times, of the reality that multiplies itself as much as fiction does. The young poet returns to his roots to have himself healed — to free himself from the angst that he feels, the spiritual sickness that grips him as he dreads the materiality of the mundane.
What does he find? What does he not find? What else has changed? What else can change? Filmmaker Christopher Gozum films images the way an impressionist painter dabs his brush on his tableau, not only careful to achieve the effect he wants, but also careless to discover an exciting mistake.
Remember what the pensive Emmeline Fox says in The Crimson Petal and the White? “I think we’re moving towards such a strange time. A time when all our moral choices will be complicated and compromised by our love of progress.” And if she said that in a book taking place in the 1870s, could she also say the same thing now? Now as ever?
Imagine her saying: “Love exists; and now it is as painful as death, as slippery as memory, as lonely as a falling leaf.” Yet, in Anacbanua, love exists, and it is indeed as painful as death, as slippery as memory, and as lonely as a falling leaf. It has the courage of others and the heart of just one — the dead star’s glimmer before it bids goodbye, before it succumbs to that progress. Pronouncements never really make sense upon reflection, but for the heck of it: Anacbanua not only completes a year; it crowns a decade.
