Future perfect: Colossal beginning

MANILA, Philippines - I’m used to having two people come, and we’re good,” recent film school grad Whammy Alcazaren says. But despite his limited audience, Manila’s most noteworthy film writers have listed his thesis film and, recently, Cinemanila-screened Colossal in their top Filipino films of 2012. It’s been under-the-radar, covered up by our perennial rom-com hits that bank on artistas but have nothing new to say. He is that glitch, a bearer of progression, especially for his generation that’s increasingly losing their grip on attention.

For one, Alcazaren’s work demands concentration. Despite himself getting a headache to finish one of Lav Diaz’s marathon-length experiments, Alcazaren dares to challenge his audience with the same viewing rigor. His first film Leviathan, for example, is a meditative meandering after a simple encounter with the sperm whale skeleton in National Museum. For the entirely black-and-white Colossal, he started from vintage photographs from throughout Philippine history “and whatever I’m feeling then, whatever happens to the form.” He says, “Most of my works are accidental.”

That is not to imply complacency but a unique process. Colossal also had a script, 40 pages of voiceover in Cebuano, an oblique personal rumination that weaves into communal consciousness. And yet, true to an actual thought process, the work remains non-narrative, which is what limits his audience but doesn’t faze him from making it. “Here, for most people, when they watch films, there’s still the connotation that we’re gonna be entertained,” he says.

Like the works of Diaz, who makes a cameo in Colossal, his work is “more imposing as a medium, and it’s not very passive for the audience.” As a collage of images, it has the same pull as Derek Jarman’s Glitterbug and John Torres’s voiceover-driven quasi-fictional and quasi-historical filmmaking. Its pace and silences are also reminiscent of the Cannes-honored Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

School is finally over for Alcazaren, and while putting his film out for the non-classroom audience, he had also been involved in making Ato Bautista’s Scorpio Nights-inspired Palitan. After finishing the Alexis Tioseco Internship Program, which focuses on archiving, Alcazaren is now looking at where he can take his pet project Attack Cinema, a last hurrah film event for graduating film students to do what they want “before going into the real world so they could do what they really want.” Soon, he’s looking forward to shoot his next project, a sci-fi film called Islands. But what else? He says, “I’m a very typical film school graduate. I studied film, so that’s what I want to do.”