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That Thing Called Tadhana

English Translation: That Thing Called Meant-to-Be
Additional Languages: English, Ilocano
Year of Release: 2014
Director & Screenwriter: Antoinette Jadaone
Producers: Cinema One Originals, Epicmedia, Monoxide Works, One Dash Zero Cinetools

Cast: Angelica Panganiban, JM de Guzman, Joem Bascon, Carlos Castano, Joenel Canaria, Bianca Balbuena, JR Miano, Joi Bayan, Kelvin Dy, Martin Mayuga, Jane Torres, Marjarey Kasey Politico, Monique Ladimo

At the airport on his way home from overseas work in Rome, Anthony Lagdameo sees Mace Castillo unable to check in her luggage because of excess weight. He offers to carry some of her possessions since he will be traveling light. Mace is affected by tearjerker scenes in the movie that she watches, and confesses that her boyfriend had dumped her for another woman. Anthony opts to keep her company to help nurse her broken heart, even when she expresses a drunken wish to take a trip all the way north to Baguio. They discover along the way that Mace’s dream was to write short fiction, while Anthony’s was to be a book illustrator. Their further interactions reveal a mutual compatibility with each other, but the results of such a quick-blooming romance will sometimes be unpredictable for both of them.

The several crossovers from independent to mainstream film practice generally failed to find sustainable exemplars. That Thing Called Tadhana has been the most influential of the lot, and the reasons are immediately apparent: a strong, articulate woman meets-cute with an understandably smitten man, both unfazed by the prospect of overseas employment yet sharing some past experience of heartbreak, venturing into less-familiar scenic spots while exchanging wit-laden insights into each other’s situations, ending with a bittersweet lack of closure that heightens their newly formed romantic bond. One may wonder how such a plain, by-now predictable formula can continue to yield such a well-received series of follow-up projects, but TTCT is long-ago enough to provide us with clues. The first would be a light directorial touch, reminiscent of the French romantic comedies (notably those of Eric Rohmer), successfully appropriated by Richard Linklater for his Before trilogy (1995-2013) as well as by Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo. The next would be a feminist spin on the manic pixie dream-girl, a Hollywood stock character who winds up being domesticated by the man she falls for; TTCT’s self-ironic neurotic lead female refuses to yield to her male partner’s bemused stoicism, instead winning him over to her impulsively free-spirited approach to life. A special touch that only TTCT has been able to pull off so expertly that the entire movie takes on the quality of a well-remembered pleasant dream is when the heartbroken woman reaches for an ideal of true love via John Lloyd Cruz’s character in Cathy Garcia-Molina’s One More Chance (2007). The reflexive touch is unobtrusive mainly because of the credible manner in which Antoinette Jadaone succeeds in integrating it into the narrative. (Not surprisingly, her earlier indie project and full-length debut, Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay [2011], foregrounded this process by letting the main subject play herself in a mock-documentary.) TTCT affirms its innovative roots by being lesser-budgeted than its progeny, but overflowing with so much spunk and wisdom that it still manages to surpass all the rom-coms that it had since inspired.

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On the Job

Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 2013
Director: Erik Matti
Screenwriters: Erik Matti & Michiko Yamamoto
Producers: Star Cinema Productions & Reality Entertainment

Cast: Joel Torre, Gerald Anderson, Piolo Pascual, Joey Marquez, Michael de Mesa, Leo Martinez, Angel Aquino, Vivian Velez, Shaina Magdayao, William Martinez, Rayver Cruz, Empress Schuck, Lito Pimentel, Rosanna Roces, Al Tantay, Niño Muhlach, Joel Saracho

Tatang and his cocky protégé Daniel are let in and out of jail by the powers-that-be to work as hired killers. Handling their cases are local cop Joaquin and promising National Bureau of Investigation agent Francis. But the pursuit of justice becomes complicated when Francis realizes that his search for the truth can lead him to permanently sever his ties with his politician father-in-law.

Changes in technology can no longer be called revolutionary during a time when companies upgrade their electronic products as a means of capitalist survival; but the digital shift in Philippine cinema can be granted a measure of progressive agency if it manages to revitalize a long-dormant genre such as, in this case, the action film. On the Job upholds the critical social commentary that the best action samples purveyed during the genre’s heyday, roughly from the 1960s to the people-power revolt in 1986: as examples, in the present canon listing alone, we have films such as Gerardo de Leon’s The Moises Padilla Story (1961), Cesar Gallardo’s Geron Busabos: Ang Batang Quiapo (1964), Celso Ad. Castillo’s Asedillo (1971), Romy Suzara’s Pepeng Shotgun (1981), and several entries by Lino Brocka. On the Job depicts a heretofore clandestine situation so abhorrent and extensive that even recent real-life discoveries of similar and worse conditions still enable the movie to retain its shock factor—a tribute to Erik Matti’s skill at delineating congested urban spaces steeped in paranoia, betrayal, and ensuing heartbreak. In fact, because of the intensity of the movie’s vision of the state as failed and abusive provider, the narrative’s cold-blooded resolution regarding the denial of fatherly commitment provides cathartic relief, since it is a flesh-and-blood criminal father (Joel Torre in peak form) who grieves as he executes his professional duty at the expense of his chosen son. Along the way we get treated to impressive set-pieces, harrowing chase sequences, mile-a-minute repartee, even lust and tenderness—so for those inclined to linger further, the complex allegory advanced by the film becomes worthy of contemplation.

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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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Zombadings 1: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington

English Translation: Zombadings 1: Kill Remington with Fear
English Title: Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings
Additional Language: English, “Swardspeak” [Philippine gay lingo]
Year of Release: 2011
Director: Jade Castro
Screenwriters: Moira Lang, Jade Castro, & Michiko Yamamoto
Producer: Origin8 Media

Cast: Martin Escudero, Lauren Young, Kerbie Zamora, Janice de Belen, John Regala, Roderick Paulate, Daniel Fernando, Angelina Kanapi, Eugene Domingo, Leandro Baldemor, Odette Khan, Ward Luarca, Bayani Agbayani, Jess Evardone, Joseph Fernandez, Andre Salazar, Marian Rivera

As a kid, Remington’s inconsiderate behavior toward gays causes a grieving cross-dresser to curse him to a future as a queer man. Fifteen years later, the curse starts to take effect as it changes how he looks and acts, despite his pursuit of a “normal” heterosexual lifestyle. Coincidentally, several gay men die one after another, of causes unknown. Realizing that he might be vulnerable to the same fate, Remington goes on a paranormal quest with his girlfriend and his best male friend (who willingly accommodates his conflicted other personality) to find out how to lift the curse and possibly stop the series of deaths.

By the time Zombadings demonstrated its creditable box-office clout, local film-industry observers were ready to accept the ability of so-called independent-film projects to challenge mainstream entries. What was exceptional about this particular piece, though, was its spirit—and not just in terms of its fantasy-based premise: it was the first and, as of this writing, the only local digital-indie movie to set aside both its expected high-art ambitions as well as its competitors’ mainstream appeal. Instead, it turned to a tradition in Philippine film practice, one that had generally paralleled the art-vs.-commerce struggle that vied for the public’s attention but always stayed under the radar, as it were: the much-derided B-movie, where all manner of crowd-pleasing genres clashed without worrying about their mutual incompatibilities, and where the complete lack of respectability allowed their practitioners to engage in occasionally innovative treatments of overlooked subjects. Zombadings brings together comedy, horror, action, musical numbers, transvestism, soft-core (same-sex) erotica, science fiction, family melodrama, and just plain old-fashioned weirdness; demands that its cast of veterans and newcomers, notably Martin Escudero in the title role, be good-natured sports in ridiculous-though-fun parts; and sneaks in an unexpectedly hefty critique of social intolerance and personal hypocrisy.

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LSS

Alternative Title: Last Song Syndrome
Year of Release: 2019
Director: Jade Castro
Screenwriters: Siege Ledesma & Jade Castro
Based on a story by Jessie Lasaten, Emman A. de la Cruz, Nikkie del Carmen, Siege Ledesma, Jade Castro
Producers: Film Development Council of the Philippines & Globe Studios

Cast: Gabbi Garcia, Khalil Ramos, Ben & Ben, Tuesday Vargas, Bernard Palanca, Elijah Canlas, Iana Bernardez, Mika Manikan, Eian Rances, Ameera Johara, Jam Rances

Zack and Sarah are millennials saddled with their own domestic problems who notice each other on a bus ride because of their love for the music of Ben & Ben. After the ride, Zack contends with his heartbreak over a crush who’s unavailable because of her on-again, off-again relationships, and provides much-needed company for his quirky single mother and her determination to find for him a suitable partner. Sarah, for her part, has to give up her dream of success as a singer-songwriter in order to help her younger brother finish his studies. The two navigate the complex challenges thrown their way by modern living until another chance encounter, also centered on Ben & Ben, brings them together once more.

Before she succumbed to an illness that cut off her mid-career productivity, Marilou Diaz-Abaya expressed her concern for the then-ascendant independent-cinema scene: that its practitioners looked down on mass audiences and, consequently, on their preferred genre in film—which for the past decade-plus meant romantic comedies. She explained how celluloid-era directors had to be careful in planning their projects down to the last shot, because of the great expense involved; for this reason, connecting with the audience, she said, should be a non-negotiable feature of filmmaking practice. Fortunately, a number of indie figures, most of them (not surprisingly) women, seemed to heed her call and began the time-honored tradition of introducing innovations and refining them while maintaining the genre’s appeal, which was (per Diaz-Abaya) allowing people to hope for something better. After Antoinette Jadaone’s That Thing Called Tadhana (2014) made strong femininity, sensitive masculinity, and ambivalent closures viable, LSS attempts a mode of seemingly meandering storytelling closer to the Euro art-film inspiration of indie projects, fuses this with TTCT’s still-useful elements, and draws from director Jade Castro’s confidence in investing seemingly trivial, even corny, developments with dignity, respect for the audience, and faith in his performers—who respond in turn by providing a reality effect all throughout what appear to be random twists and turns of events. The use of profound ironies as well as the subtlety of the film’s class, gender, and sexual politics would elicit admiration from the likes of Ernst Lubitsch, if the rom-com master were still around today, while its stylistic fluidity would be worthy of comparison with none other than Diaz-Abaya in peak form. Philippine cinema welcomes a brighter future, once everyone takes a breather and figures out what makes an apparently casual yet strangely satisfying affair like LSS work.

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Ang Babae sa Septic Tank

English Title: The Woman in the Septic Tank
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 2011
Director: Marlon N. Rivera
Screenwriter: Chris Martinez
Producers: Cinemalaya, Martinez Rivera Films, Quantum Films, & Straight Shooters Media

Cast: Eugene Domingo, JM de Guzman, Kean Cipriano, Cai Cortez, Jonathan Tadioan, Carlos Dala, K.C. Marcelo, Cherry Pie Picache, Mercedes Cabral, Lani Tapia, Eric Cabahug, Melvin Lee

Film-school graduates Rainier, Bingbong, and Jocelyn are raring to make what they envision as their Oscar-worthy debut movie, Walang Wala (Impoverished). As they discuss the film’s various possible treatments, they succeed in getting acclaimed actress Eugene Domingo to be their leading lady. However, a series of misadventures threatens to sabotage the project even before their cameras start rolling.

One of the first cautionary comedies about the Filipino film industry’s wholesale embrace of the digitalization of the medium was unsparing, prescient, and (true to the nature of the project) guffaw-a-minute funny. The tale of a clueless middle-class team whose members set out to make their mark in foreign film festivals by documenting what they believe are typical Third-World scenes might have failed in halting other local filmmakers’ cynical exploitation of contemporary social miseries. In this instance, however, it served adequate notice that Filipino observers were on to the trend. The current blurring of the boundaries between “mainstream” and “indie” projects may yet be considered Ang Babae sa Septic Tank’s most constructive contribution. On the basis of its international acclaim, we may meanwhile conclude that Euro-American responders have remained prepared to accept the movie’s criticism of their own foreign venues as the primary enablers of what has become known as the “poverty porn” trend. Septic Tank has also proved to be capable of sustaining its own sequel, with Ang Babae sa Septic Tank 2: #ForeverIsNotEnough (also by Marlon Rivera) released during the 2016 Metro Manila Film Festival; a trilogy-of-sorts was realized via a seven-episode TV series titled Ang Babae sa Septic Tank 3: The Real Untold Story of Josephine Bracken [the American-adopted Irish woman who became national hero Jose Rizal’s common-law wife] (2019, dir. Chris Martinez), with Eugene Domingo the mainstay in the entire set of presentations.

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Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria

English Title: Eleuteria’s Dream
Alternate Title: Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria Kirchbaum
Language: Cebuano
Year of Release: 2010
Director: Remton Siega Zuasola
Screenwriters: Maria Victoria Beltran & Remton Siega Zuasola
Producers: Cinema One Originals & Panumduman Pictures

Cast: Donna Gimeno, Gregg Tecson, Lucia Juezan, Emelda Mabusay, Ara Chawdhury, Daday Melgar

Eleuteria is a young lady who is reluctant to fly to Germany where a rich old man is waiting to claim her as his mail-order bride. However, her mother convinces her that this is the best way she can support their poor family. As she walks toward a harbor en route to the city airport, with her boyfriend pleading with her to stay, she has to choose between her family’s welfare and her own happiness.

A tour de force made even more remarkable by the fact that the material is set on far-flung Olango Island, part of an eponymous island group in Cebu Province and famed as a bird sanctuary. The actors speak in Cebuano and the action unfolds in real time. Remton Siega Zuasola was brazen enough to appropriate, in his first feature-length release, the single-take strategy of a few (appropriately celebrated) Western models.[1] Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria stakes its interests in an issue as vital to the survival of the Philippine nation as it has also become the concern of citizens in more affluent economies: the uprooting of Filipino citizens, occasionally against their will, as constituent elements in the country’s labor-export machinery, its only viable new-millennium industry.

Note

[1] The single-take film can arguably be ascribed to the very first commercially successful instances of cinema, little over a hundred years ago: the Lumière brothers’ so-called actualities, each comprising about a minute’s worth of unedited footage. This may be one of the reasons why people familiar with film history appreciate long unbroken shots. Since commercial-gauge celluloid film could only be exposed continuously for up to ten minutes at a time, Alfred Hitchcock had to use artificial devices (usually panning or zooming into dark surfaces) to mask the cuts in Rope (1948). Because of the extreme difficulty of executing narrative dramas this way, as well as audiences’ unfamiliarity with the technique, most single-take efforts during the pre-digital period were confined to experimental arthouse releases such as Andy Warhol’s eight-hour Empire (1964), a stationary shot of New York City’s Empire State Building, and Michael Snow’s 45-minute zoom Wavelength and whirling-camera La region centrale (The Central Region, 1971). The digital format enabled actual or simulated single takes and provided several notable samples: Mike Figgis’s commercially released Timecode (2000), with four full-length single takes presented in four interactive frames simultaneously; Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russkiy kovcheg (Russian Ark, 2002), where a ghostly narrator, represented by the camera, wanders through Saint Petersburg’s Winter Palace and encounters people and events over the past three centuries; and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s so-titled Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), a mixed-genre film with reflexive elements that won the US Academy Award for Best Picture. In the Philippines, Zuasola’s subsequent films as well as Pepe Diokno’s Engkwentro (Clash, 2009) were also single-take features.

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Biyaheng Lupa

English Translation: Overland Journey
English Title: Soliloquy
Year of Release: 2009
Director & Screenwriter: Armando Lao
Producer: Quantum Films

Cast: Jaclyn Jose, Julio Diaz, Coco Martin, Angel Aquino, Eugene Domingo, Susan Africa, Shamaine Buencamino, Mercedes Cabral, Carl Guevara, Allan Paule, Andoy Ranay, Archie Adamos, Jess Evardone, Jose Almojuela, Isabella de Leon, Mely Soriano

The stories of various people come together via their thoughts in a bus ride from Manila to Legazpi City. Anabel, a young single woman, is pregnant and, wracked by guilt, worries that she might give birth to a monster. Alex, whose ambitions have fallen apart, desperately clings to the pyramid scheme that he believes will be his key to success. A mother, Irene, regrets leaving her son so she can work abroad. Fina, a game-show contestant who finally admits to herself her dissatisfaction with her husband, crumbles at the prospect of meeting him once more. Helen, a woman conducting an extramarital affair, is anxious to maintain her secret. Her reverie is interrupted when a gossipy spinster, Lilian, boards the bus; in turn Lilian sets her eyes on Pepe, the conductor, just as a gay passenger similarly eyes Obet, a dreamy, melancholy young man who turns out to be homophobic. Even Mickey, a deaf-mute, articulates his thoughts as he leaves his foster home to visit his biological mother’s grave. As more passengers hop on and off the bus, these and other stories either find, in their own ways, their own welcome (or unwelcome) resolutions.

A busload of working-class characters journey to a distant destination and see, not the scenery passing by, but their past follies, present predicaments, and uncertain futures. The movie first takes on the difficult challenge of pulling off a genuine multiple-character narrative, perhaps the most ambitious among local features, with 16—or possibly 17, counting the unseen bus driver—lead actors. It then complements this with the audacious technique of externalizing these personalities’ inner lives by allowing us to literally hear their thoughts. The end of the film, coinciding with the end of their trip, demonstrates not just how rare it is to encounter a fully developed aesthetic philosophy in a first film, but also how preferable this is to the skills display that most debuting directors feel obliged to demonstrate. Perhaps more significantly, in light of Lao’s extensive influence in local film-project conceptualizations, is in how Biyaheng Lupa departs from Lao’s utilization of real-time presentations, notably in his collaborations with filmmakers who first garnered global attention via the scripts he wrote for them. Lao described BL as reliant on poetic time, where cosmic principles impinge on the unfolding of the narrative, as opposed to the duration-dependent real time and his earlier deployment of character-based dramatic time. Such insights on transience, destiny, and the abiding power of memory are brought to bear in the film’s bravura climax, simple in conception, casual in execution, yet grand in the best possible way, where a series of rapturous textual ruptures build up to an incredible final shot that resolves the film narrative in a way that coalesces the literal with the symbolic in a manner that might still have the capacity to surprise avant-gardists wherever they may lurk.

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Booba

Year of Release: 2001
Director: Joyce Bernal
Screenwriter: Mel Mendoza-del Rosario
From a story by Joyce Bernal & Mel Mendoza-del Rosario
Producer: Viva Films & RS Productions

Cast: Rufa Mae Quinto, Gary Estrada, AiAi delas Alas, Gina Pareño, Roldan Aquino, Archie Ventosa, Denver Razon, Ava Avila, Rico Miguel, Rad Dominguez, Polly Casawan, Felindo Obach, Rudy Meyer, Josie Galvez, George Lim, Angie Reyes, Peter Lim

Forthcoming.

Masikip sa Dibdib: The Boobita Rose Story

Alternate Title: Masikip sa Dibdib: Ang Tunay na Buhay ni Boobita Rose
English Translation: Tight in the Chest: The Boobita Rose Story
English Translation of Alternate Title: Tight in the Chest: The Actual Life of Boobita Rose
Year of Release: 2004
Director: Joyce Bernal [as Binibining Joyce Bernal]
Screenwriter: Mel Mendoza-del Rosario
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Rufa Mae Quinto, Antonio Aquitania, Gina Pareño, John Lapus, Sunshine Dizon, Phytos Ramirez, Tita Swarding, Rudy Hatfield, Raquel Pareño, Kier Legaspi, Bernard Bonnin, Charlie Davao, Chinggoy Alonzo, Raquel Monteza, Ralion Alonzo, Earl Ignacio, Lui Manansala

Forthcoming.

Forthcoming.

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Kimmy Dora: Kambal sa Kiyeme

English Translation of Subordinate Title: Twins in Silliness
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 2009
Director: Joyce Bernal [as Binibining Joyce Bernal]
Screenwriter: Chris Martinez
Producers: Spring Films & MJM Productions

Cast: Eugene Domingo, Dingdong Dantes, Zanjoe Marudo, Ariel Ureta, Miriam Quiambao, Baron Geisler, Gabby Eigenmann, Archie Alemania, Zeppi Borromeo, Leo Rialp, Phillip Nolasco, Tyrone Rabago, Christian Bautista, Marvin Agustin, Mark Bautista, Paolo Ballesteros, Jinggoy Estrada, Vhong Navarro, Rufa Mae Quinto, Erik Santos, Aiza Seguerra, Regine Velasquez

Smart yet moody Kimmy and sweet but airheaded Dora are identical twins who always seem to be at odds with each other. Both are also heirs to the Go Dong Hae business empire. A misunderstanding leads Kimmy’s lawyer Harry to hatch a plan to eliminate Dora. But when the plan hits a major obstacle, each of the sisters faces a slew of problems that can endanger their business and their family.

The doppelgänger situation has been the stuff of fantasy and horror, and occasionally of metaphysically minded authors and auteurs. Film enables what theater has difficulty pulling off, but Kimmy Dora banks on the performance-driven fireworks of Eugene Domingo, replicating theater veteran Roderick Paulate’s multiple (because popular) accomplishments[1] and enhancing it with a pared-down version of the class conflicts portrayed in Jim Abrahams’s Big Business (1988). Despite these references, Kimmy Dora retains the progressive orientation that made its predecessors worthy of double takes, and literalizes Christian Metz’s appreciation of mirror construction, where film enables its audience to witness a hall-of-mirrors effect of the medium portraying and commenting on itself. At one point, when Domingo is challenged to depict evil-sister Dora mimicking the angelic Kimmy in order to mislead their overindulgent father, the multiple bravura impersonations that Domingo performs provoke a rare instance of laughter in local comedy that is presented as slapstick but is premised on conceptual sophistication. Director Joyce Bernal provides the humanist and romantic resolutions that characterize the earlier texts, yet insists on the primacy of feminist independence and cathartic humor, hand in hand (in hand) with Domingo’s game sensibility.

Note

[1] The films invariably exploit Roderick Paulate’s “Rhoda” or flaming-queen persona by contrasting him with a straight-acting twin. These include Ako si Kiko, Ako si Kikay (I Am Kiko, I am Kikay) and Kumander Gringa (Commander Gringa), both directed by Mike Relon Makiling and released in 1987, with the first proceeding from a sci-fi premise where each of the brothers drinks a potion, transforming into a princess and a prince charming but unaware of each other’s existence. Kumander Gringa, as well as Maryo J. de los Reyes’s Bala at Lipistik (Bullet and Lipstick, 1994), turns on the more realistic Kimmy Dora formula of twins with differing orientations and placed in life-threatening situations—the Philippine rebel insurgency in the former and gangland conflict in the latter—where the interloping femme brother has to mimic his butch counterpart in order to survive. An attempt to update the formula, possibly intended for Vice Ganda, the contemporary counterpart of Paulate, was Wenn Deramas’s Bromance: My Brother’s Romance (2013), where the professionally successful gay brother suffers a concussion and lapses into a coma, and his homophobic ne’er-do-well sibling (both played by Zanjoe Marudo) has to enact a queer charade while exploiting his gay bro’s closeness to the woman he desires.

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Independencia

English Translation: Independence
Year of Release: 2009 / B&W
Director: Raya Martin
Screenwriters: Ramon Sarmiento & Raya Martin
Producers: Cinematografica, Arte France Cinéma, Atopic, Razor Film, & Volya Films

Cast: Sid Lucero, Tetchie Agbayani, Alessandra de Rossi, Mika Aguilos, Bodjie Pascua, Lui Manansala, Richard Gonzales, Carl Lawrence Lagasca, Bong Cabrera, Lav Diaz, Arnold Reyes, Angeli Bayani, Adriana Agcaoili, Arleen Cuevas

As American forces invade the Philippines during the late 1890s, a mother and her son settle in a jungle to hide from the ongoing chaos. One day, the son finds a wounded pregnant woman (everyone is unnamed in the story) who later becomes part of the family. Years pass but as a storm approaches and American troops wend their way through the jungle, the family’s peaceful existence could soon come to an end.

The reflexive strategy, where an artwork exposes its creative processes—a novel about a novel being written, for example, or a painting of the painter finishing a painting—succeeded in film more than in any other medium, for reasons that we take for granted today: its photographic nature guarantees a “real,” as opposed to abstract, experience; its use of actors provides the lure of star-worship; its commingling of all the other art forms that preceded it allows it to be indirectly self-referential in focusing on a non-filmic occupation. In this respect, the deep reflexivity that Independencia extends bodes well for literate film entertainment. Handling a late 19th-century fictional situation with late 19th-century cine aesthetics, Raya Martin renders the anachronism with such bravura expertise that we wind up accepting his stylistic strategy as an appropriate means of framing the narrative. In retrospect, silent-era cinema’s bold artificialities also enable our better-late-than-never response to the just-as-blatantly fake anti-revolutionary propaganda films churned out by Thomas Edison et al. for the US colonial government. An additional danger, that of fantasizing that Independencia is actually a piece recovered from an early-film archive (which is how the movie presents itself), may be a source of pleasure that the nostalgic-nationalist viewer can be forgiven for indulging in.

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Yanggaw

English Title: Affliction
Language: Hiligaynon
Year of Release: 2008
Director: Richard V. Somes
Screenwriters: Richard V. 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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