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1—Foster Child
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 2007
Director: Brillante Mendoza
Screenwriter: Ralston Jover
With script supervision by Armando Lao
Producers: Seiko Films & Center Stage Productions
Cast: Cherry Pie Picache, Kier Segundo, Eugene Domingo, Jiro Manio, Alwyn Uytingco, Dan Alvaro, Kristoffer King, Jake Macapagal, Ella Antonio, Paul Holmes, Lili Arivara, Ermie Concepcion, Jess Evardone, Ma. Ruvie Suarez, Hermes Gacutan, Aya Joy Ellett, Elize Santa Angelo, Coco Martin
Thelma prepares to turn over John-John, whom she nurtured for three years, to his adoptive parents, an American family. Her family, including her husband and son, live on what she earns from the foster-care program, where she’s acknowledged as the best participant. Bianca, the program coordinator, guides her through the turnover process, which includes a program by the working-class foster-care families and their wards. Bianca informs Thelma that John-John’s mother-to-be had an injury, so they have to bring the kid to his family in a plush Makati hotel.
2—Tirador
English Title: Slingshot
Year of Release: 2007
Director: Brillante Mendoza
Screenwriter: Ralston Jover
Producers: Center Stage Productions, Rollingball Entertainment, Ignite Media
Cast: Jiro Manio, Coco Martin, Kristoffer King, Nathan Lopez, Harold Montano, Angela Ruiz, Benjie Filomeno, Enrico Villa, Aleera Montalla, Jean Andrews, Russel Laxamana, Jaclyn Jose, Julio Diaz, Simon Ibarra, Mark Dionisio, Armando A. Reyes, Rigo Ramirez, Lucky Mercado, Pusa Milanez, Ezra Munoz, Aaron Rivera, Nico Taverna, Alan Trent, Jam Milanez, Archie Dennis Duro, Jess Evardone, Arsenia Acosta, Josefina Magtagnob, Ino Amoyo, Marina Sinadjan, Majij Et, Intoy Geluca, Gemma Barrientos, Tintin, Mang Tomas, Janus Bakla, Cadiza Agarin, JP Cuaresma, Alex Arcallano, Cathy Acosta
After a sona or police-conducted roundup of male residents in a slum area in Quiapo district for alleged drug trafficking, the arrested citizens are freed by a re-electionist official who extracts promises of support from each of them. They then attend to the everyday struggle for survival. Caloy has to make overdue payments on his loan for a pedicab that he drives for a living. Rex engages in appliance repair and petty thievery to maintain his drug habit. Odie watches over his drug-peddling father, while Leo and his gang extort money and valuables from strangers that they identify as prospective targets. Political and religious events provide opportunities for the characters to further victimize the public as well as one another.
Brillante Mendoza had an early start that must have been the envy of his contemporaries: local critics’ prizes mirroring foreign triumphs, capped by two separate awards at the Cannes Film Festival for direction and female performance. Dissenting opinions from major sources, compounded by his ill-advised political decisions, led to a cooling down of takes toward his subsequent output. Nevertheless no one else has been as prolific, with over thirty titles since his emergence in the mid-2000s, not counting shorts, documentaries, TV series, and his production of other filmmakers’ works, as well as his involvement in tech elements in his and other people’s projects. It should not surprise anyone that his early domination of local critics’ awards in the same year suffers from the weaknesses one could expect in exploratory attempts—in this instance, of documentary aesthetics. Yet Foster Child and Tirador also exhibit potentials that Mendoza’s later work would elaborate on and even exceed. Both partake of direct cinema approaches focused on the working class, one on a singular subject and the other comprising the delineation of a social milieu with a variety of participants. Tirador conveys the type of skill that Mendoza would be able to parlay into works whose discursive challenges occasionally exceed his grasp, but which always guarantee an admirable control of complex situations that spin out of the control of the characters, but never of the director’s. In contrast, Cherry Pie Picache in Foster Child embodies the predicaments that confront the country’s female citizens after patriarchal authoritarianism took a back seat for several decades. Her attainment of a reality effect is so intact that it invites us to wrongly assume that no effort was expended in the process; yet her quiet moments in experiencing the bond of mothering with a prospective adoptee, for example, or panicking over losing the child she fostered while marveling at the enchantments of the adoptive family’s prosperity, help in reminding us that such privileged moments are rarely encountered even in foreign cinemas.
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Serbis
English Title: Service
Year of Release: 2008
Director: Brillante Mendoza
Screenwriter: Armando Lao
Producers: Centerstage Productions & Swift Productions
Cast: Gina Pareño, Jaclyn Jose, Julio Diaz, Kristofer King, Dan Alvaro, Coco Martin, Mercedes Cabral, Roxanne Jordan, Dido de la Paz, Buddy Salvador Caramat, Julia Taylor, Arman Reyes, Armando Lao
The Pinedas live in and operate a decrepit provincial movie palace that doubles as a gay cruising area. But just like the decaying building, the family members’ relationships with one another gradually crumble due to problems like destitution, infidelity, adultery, incest, and unplanned pregnancies. Time can only tell if the family, just like their theater, will yield to a steadily worsening fate.
The third Filipino film to compete at the Cannes Film Festival—after Lino Brocka’s Jaguar (1979) and Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim (1985)—did not perform as well at the event as the fourth one, Kinatay (Butchered, 2009), also by Brillante Mendoza. Yet Serbis is distinctive even as a Mendoza film, since it foregrounds his self-referential concerns by setting the narrative in a movie theater. The memory of past glories is inscribed not just in the film palace’s architecture but also in the psychology of its restive, embittered characters, constantly seeking ways to fulfill personal desires yet thwarted by laws, conventions, and culs-de-sac. The unexpected and unlikely ending terminates the narrative but raises questions, neither encouraging nor savory, but absolutely essential to understanding what could happen next to Philippine society and local cinema.
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Lola
Additional Language: Cebuano & English
English Title: Grandmother
Year of Release: 2009
Director: Brillante Mendoza
Screenwriter: Linda Casimiro
Producers: Centerstage Productions & Swift Productions
Cast: Anita Linda, Rustica Carpio, Tanya Gomez, Jhong Hilario, Ketchup Eusebio, Benjie Filomeno, Bobby Jerome Go, Geraldine Villamil, Nico Nullan, Hope Matriano, Tim Yap, Earl Zanorio, Cherry Cornell, Jojit Lorenzo, Tess Antonio, Edwin Tio, Karla Pambid, Ruby Ruiz, Geraldine Tan, Enrico Villa, Ces Aldaba, Placer, Jeffrey Sison, Nolan Angeles, Cris Garrido, Elpidio Juanola, Miro Delano, Gigi Felix Velarde, Raymond Nullan, Mark Philipp Espina, Revo Dungca, Antonio de Guzman Jr., Harley Alcasid, Theresa Panlilio, Jenny Cabual
After Lola Sepa lights a candle at the footbridge where her grandson was stabbed dead when he resisted the thief attempting to take his mobile phone, she goes to the local police station where she learns that Mateo, the grandson’s killer, was already apprehended and is now incarcerated. She cannot confront him though because visitors were not welcome that day. As she leaves, Lola Puring, Mateo’s grandmother, arrives to drop off some food for him. The two grandmothers learn about each other and make clear their intention: Mateo’s punishment, per Lola Sepa, and his pardon and subsequent freedom, which Lola Puring determinedly pursues. Mateo’s fate hangs on whether the two old ladies could arrive at an agreement about what course of action would be best to take.
The same year that Brillante Mendoza came up with Kinatay (Butchered), which controversially won for him the best director prize at Cannes Film Festival, he also released this low-key and languidly paced neorealist drama, with two elderly actors whose characters warily circle each other, finally forced to a public negotiating table because of their indigent circumstances (minus any hint of hagsploitation, if that ever needs pointing out). One earns a living by selling vegetables at an illegal open-air market where occasional police raids wipe out the day’s earnings; the other lost her family’s breadwinner because of a botched robbery attempt by the former’s grandson. The socioeconomic dynamic in this scenario favors the former, but the latter can and does claim moral ascendancy. The rainy-season downpours provide an unobtrusive metaphorical counterpart of the wearying impact of neoliberal development on citizens unable to keep pace and forced to rely on the transactional favors of government functionaries, if not the goodwill of acquaintances who themselves are barely scraping by. Movie queen Anita Linda, playing the more impoverished grandparent, is situated in a riverside residence, where her character’s attempts at soliciting donations for her grandson’s funeral demonstrate her long-unchallenged stature as the country’s premiere performer; Mendoza effectively rewards her with a vision of surreal beauty, via positioning her in a rarely depicted fluvial funeral procession during a brief spell of sunshine.
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Ma’ Rosa
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Brillante Mendoza
Screenwriter: Troy Espiritu
Producers: Centerstage Productions
Cast: Jaclyn Jose, Julio Diaz, Baron Geisler, Jomari Angeles, Neil Ryan Sese, Mercedes Cabral, Andi Eigenmann, Mark Anthony Fernandez, Felix Roco, Mon Confiado, Maria Isabel Lopez, Ruby Ruiz, John Paul Duray, Kristofer King
Ma’ Rosa and her husband Nestor sell shabu (methamphetamine), using their family-run neighborhood variety store as front. Operatives at the local police district are able to arrest her entire family by capturing and convincing one of Ma’ Rosa’s regular clients to participate in a buy-and-bust operation. Taking the family to a secluded section of the district office, the police are able to bamboozle Ma’ Rosa into a palit-ulo scheme (where she identifies her supplier so they can make a bigger killing), and demand 200,000 pesos in exchange for her and her family’s release without charges. Her husband is too addicted to function effectively, so she asks her kids to help her raise the money.
On the way to winning big as Best Director at Cannes Film Festival for Kinatay (Butchered, 2009), Brillante Mendoza had to endure severe backlash from his detractors, led by the late Roger Ebert. No surprise then that his next major Cannes-winning entry, Ma’ Rosa (which won Best Actress for Jaclyn Jose), generated a similar round of reservations, primarily centered on the poverty-porn strategy which Mendoza had used in order to garner foreign acclamation. The surprise, rather, lay in how heartfelt, vibrant, confident, and light-handed it turned out to be, as close to an exemplary poverty-porn entry as local filmmakers have been able to get, without sacrificing the requisite soul-crushing resolution. Knowingly embodying the entire national allegory in her now-motherly frame, Jose fully earns her stripes the same way Mendoza does—with frighteningly sharp instincts and a judicious combination of roughness and technical expertise. Her histrionic triumph almost overwhelms another of Ma’ Rosa’s feats: a near-perfect acting ensemble, where even the smallest and/or quietest roles contribute to the larger picture with inspired-yet-disciplined performances. One would have to search in the distant past for an equivalent local sample, possibly Gregorio Fernandez’s Malvarosa (1958), with Charito Solis at her fieriest and fiercest.
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