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Transit
Additional Languages: Hebrew, English
Year of Release: 2013
Director: Hannah Espia
Screenwriters: Giancarlo Abrahan & Hannah Espia
Producers: Cinemalaya & Ten17P
Cast: Irma Adlawan, Jasmine Curtis-Smith, Ping Medina, Marc Justine Alvarez, Mercedes Cabral, Yatzuck Azuz, Perla Bronstein, Omer Juran
As Israel begins deporting the children of foreign workers, Filipinos Janet and her brother Moises hide their kids so they can remain in the country, with their respective Israeli employers sympathetic to their plight. Janet, a maid, clashes with her daughter Yael, who struggles to define her identity. Moises, a caregiver, looks for ways to make his son Joshua a legal resident. But an unfortunate incident will cause massive changes for these four individuals.
The most persuasive argument to be made for university-administered formal film training lies in this type of output, a debut film made by a fresh graduate, a woman who’d been partly foreign-based. The expected technical limitations will be evident to anyone who watches just for the purpose of cataloguing them, but the filmmakers turn their weakness into an advantage. Although resembling several foreign films that deal with the subject matter, including an Israeli entry, Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret’s Meduzot (Jellyfish, 2007), Transit compensates by using surface plainness as an opportunity to interweave globalization issues, fragmented time and space, and multiple characters. The result, as expected, is discursively complex; but the unexpected bonus is that the film is emotionally affective as well. The multicharacter film text has become one of the distinctive specializations of Filipino filmmakers, but Transit takes this format a step forward by applying the principle of multiplicity not just to the number of characters, but to the concepts of time and space as well.
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