Cinemanila + Digital = Surreal

This being a few notes on the shorts in competition as well as competing films in the Eighth Cinemanila International Film Festival held for almost two weeks this month.

The standout for the pre-screening committee for local short films was easily The Ballad of Mimiong’s Minon, which also was the longest in the field of eight at 35 minutes. A folk singer down on his luck seemingly loses his guitar to fleeting elements of a bygone era, including a blind minstrel who is there one minute, gone the next, but blind as a bat to everything except the music he plays and the village in which he lives, nonexistent perhaps except in the artist’s imagination.

Other high scorers were Hopia Express and One-Man Show.

Hopia Express is an improbable love story between a Chinese immigrant working as hopia attendant at Eng Bee Tin deli in Binondo, and a call center employee working the nightshift in Ortigas Center. How their paths intersect and eventually diverge beyond recall is the stuff short stories are made of.

One-Man Show tells the lonely tale of the solo vaudeville act in a medium slowly being eased to extinction. The actor playing the solitary showman essays the role well in bittersweet restraint, once bitten twice shy of the klieg lights. What happens when the last note of the song and dance dies down? This tribute of a short makes sure that a light never goes out.

Five more short films are vying for the Ishmael Bernal young directors award in Cinemanila, including one from a Filipino based in Hawaii and another based in New Zealand. The Fil-Hawaiian Grandma’s Recipe is a healthy change of pace with its wry humor and relaxed clip, a parable of the cooking contests our transplanted kababayan indulge in as a means of evoking memories of home. The Fil-Kiwi Embers has as subject matter a more universal concern, that of a wife waiting for her soldier hubby to return, and the black and white digital can only heighten the alienation felt by the viewer who however cannot but sympathize with the heroine in distress.

Some thesis projects at the UP College of Mass Communication help round off the list, with Sakdal Laya employing the method of dance and theater grafted to the footage, same with Misteryo sa Hapis with its monotone of the rosary used as backdrop for a gay son coming to terms with his father’s death. Both use minimal, sparse dialogue, and the reason they succeed is because of their confidence in the power of visuals to tell a story.

Finally Buog completes the young filmmakers program, a 30-minute short on a victim of child abuse who finds a mysterious playmate in a lighthouse. The obscurely named director Milo fills in the real-time pace with long lingering shots of surf and horizon, sort of like a compressed Lav Diaz except that unlike Diaz, Milo is not averse to close-ups.

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Never have we seen a more dizzying array of films, each with its own way of viewing things, as this year’s batch of international full-length features, which includes two homegrown entrees and movies from Korea, China, Ireland, Thailand and Hong Kong.

Not since the martial law era Imeldific filmfests, when we traveled downtown to Makati Cinema Square to watch films like the uncut Eau Te Amo, have we been exposed to such divergent fare. Filmfests like Cinemanila are the next best thing to actually traveling around the globe.

But far from being Imeldific, the festival maintains and even nurtures its guerrilla like mindset. There’s after all beauty in the underground and the underappreciated, if not altogether unpublicized.

The Wind that Shakes the Barley is frenetic in its exposition of a political fable on the Irish Republican Army, and the accents of the actors may find one wondering if the film is not in need of subtitles even if already in English. It is a powerful but understated movie, and how the divide and rule maxim is brought to the fore amid the idyllic Irish highlands.

Taking Father Home from China is linear in structure but plot is hardly conventional, as the young man in search of his dad is helped out by father figures in strangers he meets in the city. So it would come as a mild shock that the son slays the father in the end, but to say that the film is about parricide is an oversimplification. Long panoramic shots with well-framed composition echo camera work of the greats, and use of the great flood as cathartic motif may suggest something about communism, or maybe not.

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance from Korea is in turn lyrical and bloody, sort of like a cross between Kill Bill and the telenovela sing-song accents we hear. The lead actress has a sympathetic face that holds true despite the wear and tear of prison life. Structurally the movie is daring with flashbacks, cut to future, and sideways narration, that it sometimes may seem confused but actually isn’t. It stakes a case for the impressionable and the constant classical soundtrack subdues the simmering violence within.

Everlasting Regret from Hong Kong is based on a novel chronicling the life and times of an extraordinarily pretty woman from pre-communist Shanghai through the cultural revolution till the post-Mao period. The political turbulence of the times is only suggested as the woman goes through a series of affairs – with a Kuomintang officer, a dandy businessman, and an impulsive young man many years her junior – until finally the former model meets her sad accidental end as old big band melancholy music plays in the background. The narrative experiments with the time element, though the effect is not jarring, thanks to the stabilizing presence of the photographer, the woman’s platonic friend.

From Thailand, Citizen Dog takes a walk on the surreal, fanciful side, complete with blind musicians playing the rocking title song, animation sequences, a motorcycle-riding ghost, a talking, cellphone toting bear, a smoking midget, sex on a crowded bus, a grandmother reincarnated as a gecko and a mountain of plastic that becomes a tourist spot. Plain folks are the unlikely heroes in this pop comedy of Thai manners, named as one of the 10 best films last year by Time magazine critic Richard Corliss.

Two from the local side are Jeffrey Jeturian’s Kubrador and Lav Diaz’s Heremias: Unang Aklat ng Alamat ng Prinsesang Bayawak. Enough plaudits have perhaps already been said about Kubrador, which continues to do the rounds of filmfests abroad, same with the nine-hour Heremias, just slightly shorter than the same filmmaker’s Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino.

Kubrador explores three days in the life of Amy, jueteng bet collector, while Heremias details the journeys both internal and external of the lead character, although the excessive length of the movie caused one critic to comment: "That guy is nice but often pretentious."

Still the two films, while not expected to run away with the top prizes, do the country proud and prove the industry is at least within breathing distance if not at par with the rest of the region.

"Pinagsasabong ni direk Tikoy (Aguiluz, festival director) si Lav at si Jeff," a member of the secretariat said, suggesting that we may have stumbled on our generation’s new Brocka and Bernal, a formal changing of the guards in the eighth staging of the guerrilla-inspired Cinemanila.

(Cinemanila runs until Nov. 15 at selected SM Cinemas and Greenbelt.)