The Big Little Movie That’s Winning The World

THE first thing you realize upon meeting seasoned filmmaker Gil Merluza Portes is that he is a storyteller. In fact, the 58-year-old man is such an audible conversationalist, such a wellspring of anecdotes both personal and incidental, that he may as well be Lolo Basyang. I would not have been surprised if the other customers at the Quezon City restaurant where we had dinner had huddled closer to our table so they could listen to his stories.

The interview concerned his latest movie, Mga Munting Tinig, which will be shown again in local theaters starting July 2. The big deal this time, unlike its one-week run last October, is that the movie will be distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures-Philippine office–the first time for the local branch of the US-based multinational corporation to acquire the distribution rights to a Pinoy flick. Warner Home Video will be distributing Tinig in home video format soon after.

The Warner distributorship of Tinig–the movie itself was co-produced by Portes‚ Team-work Productions and cap Philippines Inc. (yes, as in College Assurance Plan)–is actually icing on the cake to what the film has gone through in the last eight months or so: getting screened in one international filmfest after another and, Portes reports, nearly earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.

Tinig’s overseas exhibition began in September 2002, when it was entered as an official selection at the Toronto International Film Festival, marking the movie’s world premiere. Shortly thereafter was the movie’s US debut, at the Los Angeles-based American Film Institute, which went on to hail Tinig as one of the ten "New Asian Classics". Come October, the movie had a Metro Manila run, if only to qualify as the Philippines’ entry to the recent Academy Awards. "Oscar entries are required to have a commercial run prior to submission," explains Portes of what then seemed an out-of-the-blue–read: under-promoted–local showing. Next stop, last November’s Los Angeles International Film Festival, where Tinig was an official selection.

The movie’s global unspooling resumed in January at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, where Tinig went on to win the Audience Award. In the same month, Tinig competed at the Bangkok International Film Festival. Later on, it became the closing movie at the Asian American Film Festival in Denver, Colorado. Incidentally, Denver was Portes’ port of entry when he arrived in North America in 1968 to study film at Brooklyn College in the City University of New York.

April 2003 was, by far, the headiest time for Tinig. Over in the US, the movie won the 2nd Best Picture honor at the Cleveland International Film Festival and, even better, bagged Best Feature, Director and Screenplay plums at the Palm Beach International Film Festival, with Portes sharing the writing nod with co-scripters Adolf Alix and Senedy Que.

Over here, two award-giving bodies showered the movie with trophies. The Philippine Movie Press Club (pmpc), through its Star Awards shindig, bestowed Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Child Actor (for Brian Homecillo), Editing (George Jarlego) Musical Scoring (Jay Marfil) and Production Design (Ruben Arthur Nicdao) awards on the movie. The Filipino Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (famas), for its part, gave the movie Best Picture, Director, Editing and Child Actor honors.

"I knew this movie would win awards," Portes muses, "but all the response it has gotten is overwhelming." Not bad for an unsplashy flick that not only eschews the low road to box-office success but also had a hard time getting made.

Mga Munting Tinig is the tale of Melissa (played by Alessandra De Rossi), a neophyte schoolteacher who gets stationed in the fictitious remote provincial town of Malawig.

Once there, the idealistic educator encounters frustration and resignation in her fellow teachers who belittle their profession and her students’ parents, who prefer the short-term benefit of hiring their kids as farm help over the long-term rewards of education. Fortu-nately for Melissa, her pupils are wide-eyed, hopeful, eager to learn and even dream of big-city careers. Tinig climaxes with Melissa and her more vocally-able wards joining an inter-school choral competition, the outcome of which could either raise the kids’ spirits or dash their hopes.

Portes claims that the movie is a composite of his own childhood recollections and the experiences of a niece who inspired the Melissa character. That Malawig is rife with npa constituents echoes Portes’ boyhood days in his birth place of Pagbilao, Quezon. "Sometimes we would go to the river to bathe our dog, for instance, and there would be bodies of slain Hukbalahap members floating by," he recalls.

More contemporary than Portes’ recollections are his niece’s experiences: a teacher who chose to work in a far-flung village where students are so poor, at least two siblings take turns in wearing a single uniform. Eventually she was also asked by the principal to organize a choral group among her pupils.

The Tinig script was finished at least two years ago, thanks in part to a P10,000 contribution by veteran producer Jesse Ejercito, whom Portes had previously worked with on, among others, the Vilma Santos starrer Miss X. But production proved to be a struggle. First, the script got shut out of the 2001 Manila Film Festival. "Surprisingly, suspiciously and questionably shut out," Portes laments. The Department of Education did not want to have anything to do with the movie, either.

Last year, cap saved Tinig from languishment hell, convinced that, while the institution will not figure in the story at all, "they have a responsibility to support films that champion the value of formal education," Portes relates. Still, the budget–a little under P7 million–was tight enough to warrant a mere 15-day shoot, mostly in Lucban, in Portes’ birth province.

Portes’ perseverance and all the support he got has paid off, as Tinig has blossomed into the little movie that could. In addition to the accolades, the Canadian company called Mongrel Media has snapped up the distribution rights to Tinig for Canuck consumption–the first Filipino movie in the Mongrel roster. Across the US, the film will be distributed starting this August by the New York-based Sky Island Films. Warner Bros.’ offices elsewhere in the world just might follow suit. "It will be on a case-to-case basis from hereon," hopes Portes. Plus, the movie is in the lineup of the Moscow International Film Festival this month.

In the face of all this, Portes declares he intends to keep making "small" movies. "In Denver, I was asked if Tinig would be my ‘passport’ to making bigger films," he shares. "I said, This film is not a passport. This may be a small film but its theme, of redeeming dreams, is big, universal."

Right now, the father of two grown boys by wife Estella–all are living in New York–will be shooting Homecoming, with De Rossi playing the Catalan-esque role of a sars-afflicted balikbayan. He is also raring to start Mourning Girls, a funeral-set farce about a woman and her dead husband’s mistresses. But what he’d really love to make is The Bells of Balanggiga, the script for which he penned as far back as 1986. "I wouldn’t mind retiring after that," Portes purports.

But from the way things are going, it is hoped that Portes will keep making movies–"provocative in a good or bad way, as long as it’s not boring," he describes–as long as life as we know it keeps providing him with story after story to tell.