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Gabi Kung Sumikat ang Araw
English Title: Sun Rises at Night
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1983
Director: Gil Portes
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
From a story idea by Manny Pichel
Producers: Four N Films & Gold Lion Productions
Cast: Gina Alajar, Charito Solis, Sandy Andolong, Kristine Garcia, Edgar Mande, Juan Rodrigo, Bebong Osorio, Willy Cruz, Glenda Tuazon, William Martinez
A nightclub singer, Rosita is used to entertaining male customers and occasionally sleeping with them for the money. After a while, she falls in love with Danny, but winds up quarreling with him. Lota, Danny’s ex, searches for him to be able to reconcile with him. Via a detective, she finds out that he died after his last date with Rosita. The detective also warns Rommel, who’s apparently falling for Rosita’s charms, that a number of other people have been found dead after associating with her.
More typical of Gil Portes’s output, Gabi Kung Sumikat ang Araw furnishes strong material with less-than-satisfactory execution. Enough integrity remains to reveal certain concerns of the period, specifically the late martial-law era of the elder Ferdinand Marcos, when pent-up dissatisfaction with the regime’s mismanagement and corruption was just about to be detonated by the assassination of returning oppositionist Benigno S. Aquino Jr. The mid-plot revelation of a community of nighttime normies who transform into old people during the day could readily be read as an allegory for Communist-rebel outsiders, amplified by their wariness about being discovered. Yet the contemporary decline in rebel militancy enables the film to command an even stronger signification—as a metaphor for outlaw sexualities. The climactic onslaught of geriatric folk evokes parallels with the Spanish horror classic Island of the Damned (dir. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 1976), where the seemingly harmless children are replaced by initially benign elders. The situation in GKSA is arguably more distressing, since people who age are presumed to have acquired wisdom and enough apathy to let go of survival issues.
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’Merika
English Translation: America
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Gil Portes
Screenwriters: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr. & Gil Quito
Producer: Adrian Films
Cast: Nora Aunor, Bembol Roco, Marilyn Concepcion, Cesar Aliparo, Boogie Abaya, Chiquit Reyes, Marshall Factora, Brenda Duque
For five years, Mila has been living well in New Jersey as a hospital nurse and a nursing-home aide. However, she is beset with loneliness and constantly questions whether or not she should stay in America. It is when she falls in love with fellow Filipino immigrant Mon that she truly sees the situation she is in and finds the answers she has long sought out.
The Nora Aunor persona embodied the working-class Filipina, tracking the latter’s transition from local domestic to foreign care professional. ’Merika would necessarily exhibit alienation and weariness, since these are essential components of the overseas worker’s experience. The film sports a rarely encountered reality effect, drawn from filmmaker Gil Portes’s training in official (and therefore “objective”) documentary practice. Local film observers would be hard-put to find a movie whose production elements are so subtle and unobtrusive, perfectly matched as usual by Aunor’s delivery. Toward the end of the narrative, a series of editorial interventions points up the fictional nature of the material by interweaving simultaneous scenes from disparate locales. At this point, and by this means, the text’s reality-based presentation transforms into a call to empathy and attention.
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Bukas … May Pangarap
English Translation: Tomorrow … There’s a Dream
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Gil Portes
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Tri Films
Cast: Gina Alajar, Tommy Abuel, Ruben Rustia, Michael Baluyot, Richard Baluyot, Joy Glorioso, Lucy Quintos, Bebong Osorio, Dante Balois, Daniel Martin, Eric Lava, Tony Pascua, Beda Orquejo, Thea Cleofe, Chito Vicente, Evelyn Vargas, Josie Galvez, Mel Ladongga, Lucy Baldorado, Bes Flores, Sammy Morales
When her husband Udong becomes a contract worker in Saudi Arabia, Mering adopts an optimistic disposition despite the hardship of rural poverty. After a month without hearing from him, she tries to allay her fears for the sake of their two young sons. When he returns with nothing, victimized by his recruiter and imprisoned as an illegal alien in the country he had pinned his hopes on, she has to figure out ways to pay their creditors and survive from one day to the next, since Udong is obsessed with avenging himself on the recruiter. Nothing that the couple can do is able to stave off hunger, the contempt of unsympathetic neighbors, and the negligence of an unresponsive government system, compounded with their growing disaffection for each other.
One way of accounting for the critical negligence suffered by Bukas … May Pangarap is that it functioned too effectively as a cautionary protest film, the same way that early social-realist texts presented difficulties suffered then by our impoverished compatriots that have since been redressed, or that war films delineated conditions that no longer exist. An even more insidious factor may have been at work as well: Gil Portes did not belong to the front- or even second-rank of elite practitioners favored by local tastemongers, so he apparently could not be capable of accomplishing two vital samples in a row, no matter that they happened to cover the same topic of overseas work. ’Merika, the film with a triumphant narrative, has been the one that shows up in extensive canon listings, although Bukas can similarly boast of a storytelling triumph of its own. As an entry in the country’s yearend film festival, it has even proved to endure better than the films that out-earned and out-awarded it. As in the case of Nora Aunor in ’Merika, Portes hands to Tommy Abuel what has been far and away his defining performance; but it is Gina Alajar’s also-overlooked turn as the conflicted housewife, stressed beyond humanly endurable limits, that remains frighteningly and recognizably real.
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