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Yanggaw
English Title: Affliction
Language: Hiligaynon
Year of Release: 2008
Director: Richard Somes [as Richard V. Somes]
Screenwriters: Richard Somes & Dwight Gaston
Producers: Cinema One Originals, Reality Entertainment, Larger Than Life, & Strawdogs Studio Production
Cast: Ronnie Lazaro, Tetchie Agbayani, Joel Torre, Aleera Montalla, Gio Respall, Monet Gaston, Keith Bryan Cabañez, Leon Gaston, Erik Matti, Lilit Reyes, Juliet Matti, James Montelibano, Dwight Gaston
Amor returns to her family’s rural home after coming down with an undiagnosable and incurable illness. Her father Junior and the rest of the family soon discover that her ailment causes her to transform into an aswang or flesh-eating ghoul. Initially hesitant to harm his own daughter, Junior is driven to extremes just to protect her. But his fatherly compassion threatens to tear apart not just his family but also his small village.
Otherness will probably be the always-already underlying theme of regional cinema, proceeding from the latter’s linguistic and geographic distance from Manila-centered production. In depicting a poor rural family coping with a beloved member’s monstrous transformation, Yanggaw foregrounds this Otherness, stripping away the usual artifice of indie-digital projects and working out ways, mirroring its characters’ exertions, to cope with the challenge of low-budget genre production. The resultant shock lies as much in the monster’s capacity to generate a parallel lethal response in her heartbroken father (exceptionally played by Ronnie Lazaro), as in our realization that the filmmakers had enough backbone and brains so that they no longer needed to resort to pricey production or visual effects in order to fashion a devastating tale of familial love beyond human understanding.
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Mariposa: Sa Hawla ng Gabi
English Title: Butterfly: In the Cage of Night
Year of Release: 2012
Director: Richard Somes [as Richard V. Somes]
Screenwriters: Richard Somes, Boo Dabu, Jimmy Flores
Producers: Cinema One Originals & Strawdogs Studio Production
Cast: Erich Gonzales, Alfred Vargas, Mark Gil, Joel Torre, Maria Isabel Lopez, Rez Cortez, Dennis Padilla, John Lapus, Odette Khan, Vangie Labalan, Mon Confiado, Ermie Concepcion, Levi Ignacio, Alex Medina, Shielbert Manuel, Eric Perez, Jim Libiran, Adriana Gomez, Jimmy Callanga, Jake Alba, Allan Ramos, Jack Loterte, Peter Quilapio, George Constantino, Milka Bahian, Johnny Barnes, Cesar Cruz, Conrad Vargas, Vorgy Torre, Coco Torre, Christian Halili, Rayann, Jestoni Negradas, Greg de Costa, Arthur Cudia, Alex Samoranas, Gerald Torrejos, Ju San, Edielyn Hyacint, Barbara Chavez, Grace Ann Gonzales, Charloitte de Guaman, Anna Rose Mina, Yannick Gutierrez, Stefany Lim, A.C. Roperos
In 1994, Maya’s alerted by her aunt, who’s unable to shoot a monitor lizard that attacked their chickens. Maya takes the gun to kill it, then skins and prepares it for a meal. Her aunt brings a telegram from Vivian, her sister Mona’s friend, telling her she needs to travel to Manila immediately. Vivian brings Maya to a morgue, but when the attendant reveals Mona’s body, Vivan’s unable to recognize the face and rotting body. When she recognizes some of the tattoos on Mona’s body, the attendant tells her that she needs to pay 40,000 pesos to retrieve the corpse or it will be donated to a university for dissection by med students. She reads a name, “Carlos,” on one of the tattoos, and asks Vivian to accompany her to wherever the guy lives. Vivian says that the place is dangerous and that she cannot help out after a day. Caloy feels guilt-ridden when he discovers what happened and volunteers to take Maya to Eddie, who knows the crime lord who lent Caloy money in exchange for Vivian’s services.
Mariposa: Sa Hawla ng Gabi enacts a long-overdue twist on the hoary standard of the rural innocent who’s lured then consumed and expelled by the city. The first indicator of its purpose is in how the title mirrors Lino Brocka’s seminal Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila: In the Claws of Light, 1975), but the points of departure are immediate and startling: Mariposa focuses on a still-young lady, whose sister had strayed into the human-trafficking racket that Maynila’s Ligaya Paraiso endured. True to her millennium-era emergence, Maya proves to be just as truehearted a seeker as Julio Madiaga, but far better-prepared than the supposedly conflict-scarred urbanites she encounters. Admittedly, this feminist idealization only works within the generic terms dispensed in the film, but that would belie Brocka’s own belated realization that the arty social-problem subjects he was encouraged to pursue also had their own baggage of rules and limitations. He’d started to reorient himself in the wilderness of the commercial genres he’d earlier abandoned, and would probably have found some satisfaction in Mariposa’s embrace of the monstrous, which also distinguished director Richard Somes’s approach in Yanggaw (Affliction, 2008). The larger, more abstract monster, which indubitably accounts for film evaluators’ hesitation, is that of generic excess: when Maya, her reluctant guide, and the small-time loan shark who’d collected her then-still-living sister as payment all slug it out in a bid for dominance, the unpredictability of the violence reveals how position, gender, even age become incidental factors when the ultimate stake is survival. And the worst (which is ironic good news for genre hounds) is yet to come.
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