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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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1—Booba

Year of Release: 2001
Director: Joyce Bernal [as Binibining 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

Booba is resented by her homely and quarrelsome twin sister Gretchen, for being her diametrical opposite: sweet, pretty, popular, shapely, and vacuous. Lola Belle, their grandmother, keeps attempting to mollify Gretchen, but the latter gets fed up and leaves their rural shack for the city. Lola Belle dies not long after, but before doing so, she tells Booba to look for Gretchen and assures her that she will always be by her side. Booba then ventures alone in Manila, trying to earn a living while occasionally spotting her sister, who keeps evading her in a huff while engaging in a range of criminal activities as a mob boss. Her attractiveness draws the attention of the wrong kind of men, although fortunately Lola Belle’s spirit shows up to warn her of trouble. While doing her job as a nightclub dancer, her workplace is raided by the vice squad, whose kindly police leader takes pity on Booba and does what he can to assist her.

2—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

As a young child, Boobita is driven out of home with her mother and siblings after her father takes in a mistress and passes on his out-of-wedlock daughter to them. The now grown-up Boobita has to earn a living in order to maintain her homebound mother, womanizing brother, and rebellious stepsister who, like their grandfather, has become an alcoholic. Although determined to find success by snagging a well-off eligible bachelor, Boobita’s lack of education proves to be a liability. The series of misfortunes that she encounters occasionally induces her to burst into song.

Two releases featuring Rufa Mae Quinto in the persona that made her a star trade on the bawdy drollery of a well-endowed woman too vacuous to realize her hotness. Sex-focused comediennes are a rarity in Philippine cinema, a condition referenced in the film via its casting of Gina Pareño, the only sexy comic star from any First Golden Age studio. In consonance with Marilyn Monroe’s irrefragable demonstration, sly intelligence distinguishes the best aspirants from all other pretenders. The establishing text, Booba, uses a name derived from the Spanish word for dimwit (further extended in English slang to mean “breast”), with the political incorrectness setting the terms for director Joyce Bernal’s irreverent approach to humor. Inasmuch as sex-focused comediennes are a rarity in Philippine cinema, both films, though unrelated to each other, foreground this condition in their casting of Gina Pareño, the only full-figured comic star from any First Golden Age studio, described as a “sex-starved lola (granny)” in Booba’s jokey opening credits. As inevitable with the cultural specificities of humor, Booba finds its parodic intentions occasionally dulled by overfamiliarity, with only its talents’ sense of conviction lifting the project through these rough spots. Quinto, however, never betrays any cognizance of superiority to her material—always a welcome perk in comic performance. The rewards of such inconspicuous discipline carried through in her next Bernal project, Super-B (2002), but it was in the one after where director and actor were able to scale heights that only Mike de Leon (replicating his home studio’s lost Manuel Conde masterpieces) was able to pull off beforehand. Included by Asian Movie Pulse contributor Epoy Deyto in “10 Gritty Asian Films That Defined a Generation’s Struggle,” Masakit sa Dibdib performs the difficult stunt of delineating a tearjerker narrative while maintaining a straight face, figuratively as well as literally, within the pop equivalent of Viennese operetta. The fact that Quinto manages to convey the naïveté essential for her character to be swiped by the casual cruelty of her social betters as well as by the sudden eruption of musical numbers (restoring the “melos” in melodrama—make sure to source the full version rather than the producer’s severely truncated remastering) provides a clue into how our compatriots managed to survive wars, dictatorships, and overseas traumas. Among several minor touches, for example, the film wittily commemorates the early-millennium Pinoy-slang reinscription of “nosebleed” to indicate the use of difficult words or expressions in English. The film as a whole might also imply another long wait before the next knockabout bombshell comes along, but that would be all up to how fast Pinas pop culture can respond to the challenge.

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Kimmy Dora: Kambal sa Kiyeme

English Translation of Subordinate Title: Twins in Silliness
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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Jay

Year of Release: 2008
Director & Screenwriter: Francis Xavier Pasion
Producers: Cinemalaya, National Commission for Culture and the Arts, & Pasion Para Pelicula Productions

Cast: Baron Geisler, Coco Martin, Flor Salanga, Angelica Rivera, Rjay Payawal, JC Santos, Jericho Espiritu, Carlo Mendoza, Karla Pambid, Peewee O’Hara, Willy Cunanan, Ernie Enrique, Joven Gabuyo, Ejie Nario, Maris Dimayuga, Francis X. Pasion

TV producer Jay Santiago goes to Pampanga to feature the family of a slain high-school teacher who shares his given name. But as he develops his story, he brazenly changes various details to heighten its overall impact, and conscripts the victim’s family into his schemes. As he forms relationships with the teacher’s family and former lover, he shows how far media can be capable of manipulating the truth for the sake of higher ratings.

How far has Philippine culture progressed as a proponent of queer lifestyles? One way of figuring out an answer is by observing the manner in which male homosexuality suffuses the narrative of Jay yet refuses to be upheld as a yardstick of social morality. One of the title characters is an apparent victim of homophobic violence, while another utilizes his namesake’s tragic outcome to promote not so much his sexual preference as his media career. The manner in which the members of the victim’s family take their cues from the media practitioner’s exploitative conduct and yield to their own baser motives demonstrates the film’s affirmation of a post-queer situation, where a villain can happen to be gay yet not be judged as flawed on the basis of his sexual preference. Jay demonstrates how such a level of cultural development enables a presentation that is at once reflexive—representing a vision of itself, the same way that the still-living Jay calls to mind the similarly named dead character—yet self-critical, casually intermingling comedic, dramatic, even horrific elements.

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Boses

English Title: Voices
Year of Release: 2008
Director: Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil
Screenwriters: Froilan Medina & Rody Vera
Producers: Cinemalaya & Erasto Films In Cooperation With UNICEF, Casa San Miguel, Department of Social Welfare and Development, Council for the Welfare of Children Secretariat, National Commission for Culture and the Arts, & Film Development Council of the Philippines

Cast: Julian Duque, Coke Bolipata, Ricky Davao, Cherry Pie Picache, Meryll Soriano, Tala Santos, Carl John Barrameda, Mailes Kanapi, Soliman Cruz

Seven-year-old Onyok is taken away from his abusive father by a social worker before being brought to a shelter. Unable to speak due to a damaged larynx, the boy meets Ariel, the brother of Amanda, the shelter’s owner and director. As Ariel teaches Onyok how to play the violin, they (and Amanda) realize that the arts can be a means to recover from trauma—not just of the victim but of everyone else touched by his situation.

Advocacy filmmaking never acquired serious attention in the Philippine context, and for good reason: it was hijacked and exploited by the Marcoses’ all-too-clever martial-law dispensation. This film restores the original ideals of the practice and demonstrates, via its intimate understanding of the dramatic potential underlying art-as-therapy methods, how effectively it could move people to strong responses, if not to action. The unmentioned assumption, however, is that the people behind the project had better be gifted with critical and self-aware skills in order to figure out what to do with the conventions of advocacy practice, which would otherwise drift toward sentimental and didactic conclusions. As proof, films produced in the wake of Boses’s success foundered badly despite their best intentions, while Boses itself managed to generate sufficient word-of-mouth and repeat viewing to become, circa the early 2010s, one of the festival circuit’s most financially successful digital-indie projects.

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Indigo Child

Year of Release: 2016
Director: Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil (with stage direction by José Estrella)
Screenwriter: Rody Vera
(Based on his stage play)
Producers: University of the Philippines Film Institute, Ladies Who Launch, Bantayog ng mga Bayani, Rey Agapay

Cast: Skyzx Labastilla, Rafael Tibayan

Jerome, now a young man, is perplexed by the situation he finds himself in. His mother, Felisa, tends to act out her traumatic experience as an activist in the underground resistance during the martial-law dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos. Because of her unstable condition, she occasionally requires medical intervention and becomes nearly impossible to communicate with. Jerome has to summon inner reserves of strength and filial devotion in order to fully comprehend the unspeakable horrors that his mother once suffered, from which she never seems able to recover.

Millennials may conceivably hesitate to consider critical presentations of the dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos because of the implication that these involve returning to a past that they never experienced in the first place. (The authoritarian terms that President Rodrigo Duterte proffers appear to be more forward-looking, in contrast—which may partly explain his appeal to the otherwise apolitical younger generation, who consequently became more receptive to the Marcos scion’s presidential aspiration.) Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil conducts her film and media practice with a concern for what shifts the future may bring. Her contribution to the call to warn contemporary audiences about the dangers inherent in a tyrannical system anticipated the limits that the long-running pandemic era would impose on media production and consumption: tight budget, intimate setting, interactive inserts, dialogue-driven arguments presented as an exchange between two players in the shortest acceptable playing time for a full-length feature. Indigo Child may sound like a throwback to the theatrical origins of early silent and sound cinema, until we take a look around at the online arrangements that have been leading to shifts in audiovisual formats, from direct address to accidental revelations in domiciliated situations: the trauma in Rody Vera’s narrative, essentially a one-act two-hander, derives as much from the child’s realization of the severity of the torture his mother experienced as from, as Vera once expressed it, “her constant denial [of her past experience] that eventually drives her to madness.” The horror plays out not as malignant external forces (the way that typical cautionary texts on the evils of fascism tend to relate). Instead it begins with one of those seriocomic ironies that families deploy when they need to cope with existing difficulties: the son ascribes his choice of college course, electrical engineering, to his mother’s continuing electroconvulsive therapy program, and proceeds from there to increasingly distressing intimate revelations, culminating with an unexpected connection with historical reality. The fact that the historical experience in question is even more horrendous is left for us to discover on our own, proof that an antifascist text does not always have to replicate the full extent of the cruelties that it references: the end credits play over actual Marcos-era protest footage then lead to the artists and producers relating the text to their personal experience before an unseen audience presumably confronting this aspect of history for the first time. It may be less effective than ensuring solid liberal education for all citizens, but Pinas cinema has long been more influential than the local system, and this is one of several instances when its impact deserves to be upheld.

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1—Foster Child

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 [as Brillante Ma. 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 Title: Grandmother
Year of Release: 2009
Director: Brillante Mendoza [as Brillante Ma. 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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One More Chance

Year of Release: 2007
Director: Cathy Garcia-Sampana [as Cathy Garcia-Molina]
Screenwriters: Vanessa R. Valdez & Carmi Raymundo
Producer: Star Cinema Productions

Cast: John Lloyd Cruz, Bea Alonzo, Derek Ramsay, Maja Salvador, Dimples Romana, James Blanco, Janus del Prado, Ahron Villena, Beatriz Saw, Nikkie Gil, Nanette Inventor, Al Tantay, Melissa Mendez, Shamaine Buencamino, Bodjie Pascua, Lauren Young

Despite frequent spats and near-breakups, Popoy and Basha have remained a couple for five years. However, when Basha finally had enough of Popoy’s domineering behavior, she ends the relationship. In time, they each find new partners. But as they try to start over, they learn that there is still something that prevents them from completely moving on from the love they once shared.

The Pinoy middle class, after enduring decimation because of the Marcos regime’s failed authoritarian experiment, recently managed to re-emerge in the current globalized era of outsourced labor, foreign direct investment, and intensifying interconnectivity. Among the several attempts to observe and chronicle this crucial paradigmatic shift, One More Chance fares better than its contemporaries, mainly because its mainstream aspirations helped it avoid the judgmental tone that the typical independent project would have succumbed to. The tight circle of yuppified characters at its center may be oblivious to the country’s—and the world’s—developmental issues, but they do manage to justify their insularity by occupying themselves with a contemporary version of courtly love. As it plays out in the film, the process appears modern in so far as the couples no longer worry about premarital relations and the main female character sets the conditions of engagement, but it also retains a nobility in terms of the male lover’s ardency and loyalty. Cathy Garcia-Sampana makes the most of her cast’s grown-up ability to convey emotional states via subtle adjustments in expressions and ironic line readings, with John Lloyd Cruz managing to utter the cheesy-sounding line “She loved me at my worst, you had me at my best” as if the fate of humanity depended on it.

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Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros

English Title: The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros
Year of Release: 2005
Director: Auraeus Solito
Screenwriter: Michiko Yamamoto
Producers: Cinemalaya & UFO Pictures

Cast: Nathan Lopez, Soliman Cruz, J.R. Valentin, Neil Ryan Sese, Ping Medina, Bodjie Pascua, Elmo Redrico, Ivan Camacho, Lucito Lopez

Twelve-year-old Maximo looks after his family of small-time crooks, including his father and two older brothers, as they live in Manila’s slums. Although openly queer, he is unconditionally accepted by his straight family members. Things get complicated when the boy develops a youthful crush on a handsome policeman, who’s been shadowing the activities of Maxie’s household. Despite his young age, Maxie has to choose between following his heart and protecting his family.

Maximo Oliveros was the justly celebrated first definitive proof that a flat-out independent-digital project can aesthetically surpass mainstream-celluloid entries. Beyond that, it has several other advantages stacked in its favor. Aside from delightfully relaxed production values and luminous performances that enable the characters to stay in the mind for long stretches, the movie also celebrates Philippine queer sensibilities without falling into the usual traps of either punishing the non-normative character or over-indulging her or his erotic fantasies. Maxie may not have been possible without the pioneering efforts of a long line of comic predecessors starting with Dolphy. In contrast with them, however, his outward flightiness masks a deep and complex—and, by film’s end, still-evolving—moral reconfiguration of a developing country’s social challenges and responsibilities, particularly toward its most vulnerable citizens.

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Minsan May Isang Puso

English Translation: Once There Was a Heart
Year of Release: 2001
Director & Screenwriter: Jose Javier Reyes
Producer: Regal Entertainment & Available Light

Cast: Ricky Davao, Jaclyn Jose, Carlo Aquino, Ana Capri, Simon Ibarra, Lui Manansala, Dekster Santos, Jiego Malvar, Dimples Romana, Marlito Ambrocio, Luz Imperial, Hope Matriano, Jaro Conde, Randolf Reyes, Val Trono, Gilleth Sandico, Nino Ignacio, Julie de Leon, Jeffrey Santos, Grace Villablanca, Tessie Villaram, Archie Cayetano, Adeth Alviar, Portia Bullecer, WRC Talents, Maru Talents Studio, Jequipros Talent Center

Simon runs a small bakery with two assistants, from which the working-class families of a neighborhood buy their breakfast buns (called pan de sal). One of these families is Emily’s, whose comatose husband has to be cared for by Boyet, her younger child, so that his elder sister can complete her studies and eventually help him return to school. Simon also maintains an exclusive arrangement with Melba, a sex professional, since he lost his family in an accident when the car he drove crashed and killed them. Simon catches one of his assistants pilfering the bakery till and dismisses her; when Boyet sees the “Help Wanted” sign, he applies for the job and endures Simon’s mean-spirited treatment in order to help his mother. Emily could not prevent her daughter from seeking comfort in her premarital relationship but winds up banishing her when she gets pregnant. As head of their respective households, Emily’s and Simon’s insistence on righteousness and independence get confronted by the realities of economic subsistence and their need for human connection.

The neorealist impulse was definitely old-hat, half a century old by the time the millennium rolled around. Yet effective local samples were hard to come by, partly because celluloid films were difficult to maintain and also because the adoption of the Hollywood practice of reserving social-realist products for awards competitions often resulted in works that did not address mass viewers as well as they impressed prestige gatekeepers. Jose Javier Reyes’s declaration that he concocted Minsan May Isang Puso as his tribute to Lino Brocka, who beat his own path to creating crowd-pleasing social dramas even at the cost of critical revulsion, helps explain how this particular sample has managed to endure since its release. The characters in the narrative attempt to attain fairly ordinary ambitions, but financial realities keep proscribing the limits within which they must function. Yet to their surprise, as well as ours, it is their exploration of these constraints that enables them to break out selectively, with sufficient consideration for others who might be affected by their decisions. The film benefits greatly from topnotch delivery by all members in the cast and reminds us never to take for granted performers who accept difficult and unglamorous roles for the sheer purpose of fulfilling their potential: no one could have seen that Jaclyn Jose and Ricky Davao would be leaving too early, but that only makes of MMIP an outing that deserves to be cherished beyond its already laudable terms.

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Kung Ako Na Lang Sana

English Translation: If It Had Only Been Me
English Title: Without You Through the Years
Year of Release: 2003
Director & Screenwriter: Jose Javier Reyes
(Based on the concept by Mary Rose Colindres, Emmanuel Dela Cruz, Theodore Boborol, Dennis Teodosio, Guia Gonzales, Tammy Bejerano)
Producer: Star Cinema Productions

Cast: Sharon Cuneta, Aga Muhlach, Christine Bersola, Mickey Ferriols, Dominic Ochoa, Jennifer Sevilla, Shintaro Valdez, Patrick Guzman, Gabe Mercado, Reggie Curley, Chat Silayan-Bailon, Butz Aquino, Banaue Miclat, Raul Montesa, Lolly Mara

Emmy has been so preoccupied with providing for her family as well as her more needful friends that she never found time for romance. When Vince, a friend from college, is disowned by his successful father because of his irresponsibility, he turns to Emmy, yet continues to falter. But only he, among Emmy’s friends, treats her as an equal, rather than his superior. When each of them arrives at the point where their relationships force them to confront their maturity, they begin to joke about winding up with each other.

Occasionally a genre piece fulfills its functions so well that it works despite its conventions and predictability. Any serious film observer would be able to anticipate that Kung Ako Na Lang Sana will be uncovering its lead characters’ compatibility with each other and bring them to a point where their differences, not just with each other but also with their family and friends, will be resolved in a climactic reunion party. Yet the film works, mainly because it never takes these elements for granted. It provides careful motivations and character consistency even in the smallest roles, and makes its few coincidences dramatically credible. Central to its success is the fact that Sharon Cuneta and Aga Muhlach had been careful in cultivating their wholesome and responsible personas, and had both reached a performance peak when they worked together, generating sparks that neither of them was able to realize with any previous screen partner. The ease with which they essay complicated roles—apparently drawn in part from their real-life conditions—would make the most jaded rom-com viewer root for them to remain together, if only for the satisfaction of watching them trade a whole lot more lines and gestures with each other.

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