Elehiya sa Dumalaw Mula sa Himagsikan (2011)

Minggu, 11 September 2011

Elehiya sa Dumalaw Mula sa Himagsikan (2011)

Elehiya sa Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan (Lav Diaz, 2011)

English Title: Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution

Originally planned as a one minute short for Nikalexis.MOV, a program of short films dedicated to the memory of slain critics Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc that featured short works by directors like Raymond Red, Rico Maria Ilarde and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz’s Elehiya sa Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan (Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution) grew both in length and concept, turning into a film that is ponderous and perplexing but is still grounded on very familiar emotions of melancholy and despair. It is undoubtedly a film that sprung from spontaneity, with Diaz literally writing the film as he was shooting it with a cast of actors and friends who are willing and ready to take in complex roles in a very short period of time.

Walang Alaala ang mga Paru-paro (Butterflies have no Memories, 2009), Diaz’s one-hour meditation on the moral and environmental changes in an abandoned mining town in the island of Marinduque, is evident in its struggle to communicate the spare and pained aesthetics that Diaz is most famous for within an hour. As a result, the film feels unduly hurried, rushing to arrive at its beautiful conclusion. On the other hand, Elehiya sa Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan, despite clocking at only one hour and twenty minutes, is deliberately structured and less beholden to its narrative. The film is told in three parts, with each part pertaining to each of the three visits of the time-travelling visitor from when the country was fighting for independence from Spain.

The three parts are themselves divided into seemingly incongruent storylines. A prostitute (Sigrid Bernardo) patiently waits for a customer. A musician (Diaz) plays various melodies for nobody. Three petty criminals (Dante Perez, Evelyn Vargas, and Joel Ferrer) are preparing for a heist. A woman (Hazel Orencio) from the country’s past suddenly appears in a busy marketplace, venturing then to fountains, rivers and other watery places. The storylines eventually converge, revealing characters whose lives are consumed by desperation, forcing them to venture into territories that compromise relationships and whatever remains of their fractured humanity.

Clearly, the prostitute and the petty criminals, with their botched attempt to drift out of their sorry lots, are only victims of a country that has sadly devolved from what it was originally intended to be by the revolutionaries who risked lives for freedom. Diaz does not create characters that are evil by nature. Like the trio of kidnappers of Walang Alaala ang mga Paru-paro, the ox-cart driver of Heremias (2006), or the displaced farmer and miner of Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family, 2004), his characters are drawn to extreme actions naturally by an evil society, corrupted by systems that have remained unchanged or adopted through several years of abject complacency or lack of identity.

In one of the rare close-ups in Diaz’s entire filmography, the visitor from the past directly looks at the audience, her face aching with heavy emotions of regret and sadness, the same regret and sadness that pervades the musician’s solitary strumming. It is a hauntingly beautiful dream sequence, unsettling in the way it directly confronts with images bursting with the most wistful of emotions. Dreams are said to be products of unprocessed memories. The dream in Diaz’s film seems to be the product of a nation’s unprocessed memories, burdened with a decades’ worth of tireless but unmerited struggles.

Elehiya sa Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan is clearly Diaz’s lament to what the country and its citizens have become. More importantly, it is also his ode to those who continue with the revolution, notwithstanding their songs being unheard, their images being unseen, and their impassioned calls being unfelt. It is everything Diaz stands for. It is everything Tioseco stood and wished for.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

On Lav Diaz

Senin, 18 Oktober 2010

On Lav Diaz

On Lav Diaz

Lav Diaz, considered by many as the figurehead of what Philippine independent cinema should be, started his career as filmmaker under the auspices of Regal, one of the biggest and most prolific film studios in the country. The films he made for Regal and its subsidiaries, from Serafin Geronimo, Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcion (Serafin Geronimo, Criminal of Barrio Concepcion, 1998) to Hesus Rebolusyonaro (Hesus the Revolutionary, 2002), bear a voice that can’t simply be relegated in a passé concept of cinema as entertainment and commodity. As expected, none of the films he made for the commercial film studio made money, but it earned for the country a true artist, uncompromising even in the face of capitalist demands.

Batang West Side (West Side Avenue, 2001), about a Filipino-American investigator who wrestles with personal demons while examining the murder of another Filipino-American in New Jersey, unshackled Diaz from the restraints of commercial filmmaking. Clocking at five hours, the film pursued an aesthetic that is like no other in Philippine cinema, where the camera, mostly unmoving, demands patience and contemplation, because the film itself requires it. Diaz’s next films, Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family, 2004), Heremias (2006), Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos, 2007), and Melancholia (2008), whose running times ranges from nine to twelve hours and themes explore a spectrum that begins with the very personal and ends with the political or the philosophical, reinforces Diaz’s role in cinema. He is indeed one of the most essential filmmakers to have ever come out of the Philippines.

It is indisputable that Diaz is talented. He has an innate ability of sustaining even the most stubborn of interests with just one unmoving and monochromatic image. Take any of the staggered shots in any of his post-Batang West Side films, where depth, detail, and drama are encompassed with economy of aesthetics, and one would immediately notice that Diaz’s reflexes as a filmmaker is not bound by the limitations of what can be capture onscreen. Perhaps what drives Diaz’s cinema to go beyond the cursory demands of why cinema was invented in the first place, is his faith in it, that cinema is not twenty four lies per second, as Jean-Luc Godard would put it, but is actually twenty four or more not-so-convenient truths per second. If Diaz’s faith in cinema is unburdened by cynicism, why then can’t he demand the same faith from his audience? Truth be told, Diaz’s film may be bleak and therefore taxing to Hollywood-fed sensibilities, but the reward of not just sitting through his cinema, but taking part in his cinema, is priceless.

(Written for Lav Diaz's profile as fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.)

Walang Alaala ang mga Paru-Paro (2009)

Senin, 07 Desember 2009

Walang Alaala ang mga Paru-Paro (2009)

Walang Alaala ang mga Paru-Paro (Lav Diaz, 2009)
English Title: Butterflies Have No Memories

The picture that Lav Diaz paints of an island decades after a mining company that brought to the island temporary prosperity left its shores is one draped in astounding bleakness and melancholy. As Martha (Lois Goff), the daughter of the Canadian CEO of the mining company, returns to the island she regards as her home, as according to her, she was practically born and raised there and that its residents are essentially her second family, she brings with her reawakened memories of a former abundance that is all replaced by penury and idleness. The past becomes an unhealthy preoccupation as the villagers repay her fondness with shame, indifference, and bad intentions, with three of the most affected of the mine's unrepentant beneficiaries, Mang Ferding (Dante Perez), former head of security of the mine, Willy (Willy Fernandez), Martha's childhood friend who now sells salt bread for a living, and another one of the mine's former employees (Joel Ferrer) whose yearly ritual of having himself nailed to the cross is for the return of his wife, conspire to kidnap her for a hefty ransom.

The village is deceptively quaint. The villagers go about their daily chores and vices, idly gallivanting or selling their wares during the day and drowning their dilemmas with alcohol at night. There is a sheen of normalcy, one that is ready to give way to madness should it be disturbed. It is this quaintness, this suspicious quietude, that makes Martha's visit a particularly awkward one, one that is birthed from good intentions but due to the intertwining of communal and personal histories, circumstances, and a hopeless longing for a distant prosperous past, can only result in bringing out the worst from humanity.

Diaz's Walang Alaala ang mga Paru-Paro (Butterflies Have No Memories), a short film commissioned by the Jeonju International Film Festival for the tenth edition of its annual digital project, while a mere fraction of the director's famously long films in terms of running time, is equally potent in its depiction of fractured souls struggling within a world broken by men and their acts. Diaz's depiction of a town suddenly left blighted with the departure of a lucrative mining project is reminiscent of the typhoon-ravaged provinces of Kagadanan sa Banwaan ning mga Engkantos (Death in the Land of Encantos, 2007); Diaz, in one sequence, surveys the ghostly town, littered with abandoned barracks and offices, and dead quiet with the trees and other growth seemingly afraid to move with the wind, and this particular sequence has the same gloomy energy of a sequence in Kagadanan sa Banwaan ning mga Encantos where Diaz exposes the landscapes left barren by typhoon Reming.

However, the desolation in Walang Alaala ang mga Paru-paro, much more than physical, is psychological, deeply rooted into a community promised of certain comforts only to be betrayed and left in a state of destitution and dejection. In a way, the devastation is graver because there are no clear edifices and structures to construct and repair, as the discontent of a community that once enjoyed the benefits of the progresses promised by capitalism and free trade is far more difficult to remedy. As in Melancholia (2008), where the depression of losing loved ones and not knowing where their bodies are if ever they are already dead is only temporarily mended by traveling to a faraway town and completely transforming themselves into various characters, the mental and psychological torture of the characters in Walang Alaala ang mga Paru-Paro seek to repair their sorry lots in life with an act that echoes the desperation that has been repressed since the mine's closing only to be awakened by Martha's visit.

Although Diaz pinpoints the mines as culprit to the village's present state, he clearly does not absolve the villagers from fault. The villagers are perpetually suffering, seemingly trapped in a constant search for redemption: with Ferding relying on memories of a former wealth and glory to provide both fleeting comfort and frustration; Willy persisting in his meager livelihood; and the third of the trio relying on religion for alleviation; and all three of them washing their sins and memories with cups of cheap brandy and idle chatter. Walang Alaala ang mga Paru-paro has the trio in the middle of executing their devious plans, in a sudden halt. Wearing Moriones masks, handmade headgear worn by the faithful in a yearly festival as attrition for all the sins they have committed, the trio are met by a swarm of butterflies in the middle of the forest, leading to Willy to breakdown and give up.

Diaz does not explain further nor does he need to; the event, whether or not it stems from an authentic change or heart or a mere inconvenience of human emotionality, whether or not it foils the plan or not, articulates a power far greater than the social wretchedness, the poverty, and the environmental deterioration inflicted by the mines, and the relationship humanity has with that power. A palpable entity in all of Diaz's films (as the other party in Heremias' culminating pact in Heremias (2006) and whose complete absence has transported the characters in Melancholia into an infinite limbo of madness and sadness,) this power, whether it is the same entity that forces the religious man to lie face down inside the chapel or not, does not offer instant redemption but only reminds the characters of their humanity, even in the midst of corruption.

Melancholia (2008)

Sabtu, 18 Oktober 2008

Melancholia (2008)

Melancholia (Lav Diaz, 2008)

Lav Diaz's Melancholia is an eight-hour meditation of sorts on the maddening persistence of sadness in this world, can logically be divided into three parts and an epilogue. The first part details the experiences in Sagada of Julian (Perry Dizon), Alberta (Angeli Bayani) and Rina (Malaya Cruz) as they refashion themselves into different drastic identities as part of the radical process that Julian created in order for them to cope with the losses of their loved ones. The second part is set in Manila, with Julian and Alberta living their real lives and addressing the scenarios and situations that accompany their melancholic predicament. The third part is the prologue to Julian, Alberta and Rina's prolonged tale of sadness, where deep within the forests of Mindoro, a band of leftist fighters, which includes Alberta's husband Renato (Roeder Camanag), is struggling with the psychological and spiritual torture of both practical and existential defeat while being hunted down by military operatives.

Melancholia is most probably Diaz's most difficult film for the lone reason that Diaz affords little or no comfort to his viewers. There is very little humor to the film and the story, grounded by philosophies and ideas that might be too personal or hard to grasp, branches into different and sometimes convoluted directions. However, as with most of Diaz's films, the reward of completing one is not in the pleasure of sitting through eight hours of his trademark black and white aesthetics and seemingly endless ramblings and conversations, but in the lingering and often valid points that Diaz would have you digesting and exploring for a far longer period of time.

I. Transformations and Transgressions in Sagada

Julian lets Alberta and Rina watch his sex performers

Alberta becomes Jenine, a prostitute who does massages for 300 pesos and other services for more. Julian turns into a pimp who for the right price can stage live sex shows within the privacy of a hotel room. Rina is a Catholic nun who wanders around town with her charity basket, begging for money for charity. They would bump into each other on occasions: with Jenine handily getting some change to put into the nun's charity basket before fleeting away to her destination, or the pimp taking photographs of the nun before mouthing slogans about the futility of living in a country and a world that is practically hell, or Jenine being courted by the pimp to do business for him. In Sagada, they do not know each other. Though in reality, they are all survivors who have subscribed to the extremist idea that in order to cope with the fact of having a loved one disappear and be presumed dead, they should shed their identities and see the world through the eyes of another.

The three would eventually meet at the same time as the three of them seek shelter from the rain inside an abandoned building in the middle of the town. The line that separates truth and fiction are blurred, as Jenine and the pimp recount their respective histories as if the personalities they inhabited are real. It may be argued that fictionalizing one's life story may be an easy feat. However, it is the disturbing direction of their conversation when the nun arrives in the abandoned building that gives the prolonged scene a harrowing distinction. The pimp starts cornering the nun, berating her of the futility of her efforts within the spectrum of evil that has consumed the world. In the background, Jenine is amused at the lopsided confrontation, wherein the nun coyly mutters meaningless quotes while the pimp expounds on the the world's state of hopelessness. Defeated, the nun escapes the scene as the two admitted sinners rejoice in their triumph.

The nun is the only one to surrender and give up. It seems that in a world that has been enveloped by sadness, it is the meek, and pure that fall first as victims. In Rina's transformation as a nun, she has seen the world from the vantage point of innocence, and the continuing acts of evildoing, apathy, and madness may have dealt upon her despair and hopelessness. Her transformation seems easiest as compared to being a whore or a pimp, since it seems less taxing to roam the streets begging for alms. However, the transgression in her existence, upon seeing the state of the world through the eyes of a person who was tasked to save it or at least ease its pain and being unable to do anything, is far more damaging. Her transformation deviates the most from the world. Her assumed identity is an aberration, especially in a landscape that has forgotten virtues.

Diaz posits an intriguing concept: that survival is earned by those who swear allegiance with truth, and truth is what we see in this world: melancholia, death, amorality, and atheism. There is truth in sex, the way the pimp's sex performers copulate in the total absence of love, hate, or any other emotion. There is truth in prostitution, the way our bodies have turned into mere commodities and stripped of any religion-labeled value. The nun, at one point of the segment, visits a widowed mother she had the opportunity to converse with while begging for alms. Inside the church, the mother sings a melody while the nun observes in the background before leaving. Outside, she walks away, answers her phone and tells her friend that she is okay. During that moment, upon being exposed the utter futility of faith, she finds a semblance of comfort, although temporary since later, she would take her own life in a final act of despair.

II. Patricia's Song

Patricia sings of searching

Diaz forwards the story further, detailing the lives of Julian and Alberta weeks after their stints as pimp and whore, respectively, in Sagada. Julian is a publisher in Manila who often dreams of her dead wife Patricia (Cooky Chua). Alberta, on the other hand, is a school principal who while coping with the disappearance of her husband, has to take care of her ward Hannah (Yanyan Taa), a teenager who was rendered parentless when both her parents were abducted and killed by government officials. Hannah, to address her situation, repels Alberta's acts of kindness by repeatedly escaping from her protection and prostituting herself.

Julian chats with an old friend (Bodjie Pascua), an author who pitches his manuscript for publication. In their conversation about the story of Julian's friend's book, Diaz expounds his passion for cinema, correlating his philosophies on truth with art. According to the friend (whose language is not dissimilar to Diaz's), our basic concept of Philippine cinema has been grounded on lies and escapism. The only way to dispel this harmful imposition against culture is through a drastic change, fueled by pain and passion as the main character of the book, a famed director who after losing his lover, reforms into a producer of independent films while acknowledging his homosexuality, has gone through.

In Julian's dream, Patricia sings of her endless search against the backdrop of coldness and pain in the world. The song sets the mood and tone of the film. In a sense, the song summarizes the characters' need to search: for their lost loved ones, for a reason behind the sadness and the madness of the world, an impossible happiness or contentment, for Hannah, for truth. Melancholia's landscape is familiar (city streets, humble abodes, riverside parks), but its characters are placed in a situation where they have turned into desperate searchers, fueled at first by grief and longing and then by some other force or motivation that is as elusive as their targets. The repercussions of their exercise in Sagada are faint (although Rina's suicide becomes the trigger of Julian's deep contemplation) if not damaging as opposed to being the cure to their collective sadness. Even the discovery of the remains of some victims of political killings failed to release them from their collective burdens. In the end, they are still looking for sense and direction and all at once, the familiar places start to look like alien landscapes, enunciated by the violence of the rain or the discomfort of the night. These places convert into limbo.

This persistent searching is true to the theme of Diaz's cinema, which would often allude to some kind of redemption or release in the conclusion, whether it be in the form of Juan Mijares' acceptance of his and his nation's past in Batang West Side (West Side Avenue, 2001), or the wayward oxcart-driver's deal with God in Heremias (2006), or Hamin's release from the world's madness through death in Kagadanan sa Banwaan Ning Mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos, 2007). However, in Melancholia, the characters are trapped in limbo (in fact, an offshoot of Melancholia which makes use of some footage made for the film is aptly entitled Purgatorio (2008), referring to the eternal state of being neither here or there of the family left behind by the victims of political killings) and are seemingly in a directionless search for something that can never be found.

III. No Redemption for the Poet-Warrior

Renato is chased into the forest

Renato writes in his diary "Why is there so much sadness and too much sorrow in this world? Is happiness just a concept? Is living just a process to measure man's pain? Are we ever going to see each other again? I'm not afraid of death. I'm more afraid that I won't see you again.'" Renato, a leftist activist who left his wife to fight a war of principles, is now being chased into the forest by military operatives who want him and his comrades silenced.

Diaz painstakingly details the final few days of this band of men who are merely prolonging their assured demise under their enemies. Some of them start to falter, giving way to insanity and defeat, enveloped by the lurking senselessness of their struggle amidst a world drowned by indifference and apathy. He writes further "I now realized the lyrical madness to this struggle. It is all about sadness. It is about my sadness. It is about the sorrow of my people. I cannot romanticize the futility of it all. Even the majestic beauty of this island could not provide an answer to this hell. There is no cure to this sadness."

Renato writes words of despair. Strangled by his impending capture and death, he starts to rationalize the bitter truth that beneath the illusions and promises dealt by momentous beauty, emotions, and moments of fleeting happiness, is a world that is barren and replete of hope. His and his comrades' deaths come swiftly in a moment where one of them, in an act of desperation, expresses surrender. Their deaths did not release them from purgatory. Instead, as we have learned from the film's previous scenes in Sagada and Manila, their deaths are black holes that pull loved ones into a void, a metaphoric limbo where they undergo futile searches for logic and reason, goals that have been rendered implausible by the realities of pain and suffering in this world .

The sequence in the forest does not provide redemption for Alberta either. She still does not know where her husband's remains were left. She has not read the words Renato has written in his diary. All she knows is that her husband is gone and most probably dead. There is yet no closure for the victims, only closure in Diaz's circle of melancholia, where the man-made, or more accurately, governmental act of depravity and cowardice has caused the never-ending cycle of sadness and madness to begin.

IV. Epilogue

Alberta and Julian meet again

The riverside park at nighttime, dimly lit by streetlamps that scarcely dot the walkpath, serves as Diaz's stage for his confounding finale. Alberta searches for Julian among the men and women (performance artists who contort their bodies into unusual shapes and positions) that populate the park's spaces. Cryptic phrases, recited in hypnotic cadence, are thrown in reply to Alberta's fervent questioning. She finally locates Julian, alone and seated in the dark, dissheveled in appearance and obviously in the same trance-like state of the park's curious residents. From Alberta and Julian's conversation, we can glean that Julian has turned into a monster, consumed by his own search for the truth, eaten up by the pain and sadness that he has tried to cope with, and ironically, embraced it to create. Julian has become God, the personification of the melancholy and insanity of the world, the only things that can be labeled as definite truths in a world that deceives us with illusions of joy and beauty. He walks away, claiming that he is no longer Julian. Alberta is left alone.

Although the film can be seen as Diaz's definitive statement (and it probably is, Diaz being very vocal on politics) on the desaparecidos, the numbers of which have risen during Macapagal-Arroyo's term as president, and the families they have left in stasis, there is definitely something deeper: a philosophical or existential query that Diaz throws to his viewers on the basis of the world's current status. Melancholia aims to expound on truth by distorting it (where Julian, Alberta and Rina assume fake identities in Sagada as coping mechanism to battle their sadness), disrespecting it (where the trio start living and believing their assumed identities), mutating it (where the trio can no longer discern the line that divides reality and illusion), and finally, spiting it (where truth, as personified by Julian, shows itself as pitiful and pathetic).

2008 .MOV International Digital Film Festival

Senin, 29 September 2008

2008 .MOV International Digital Film Festival

Roxlee Eye.MOV

2008 .MOV International Digital Film Festival (September 20 - October 7, 2008)

I. Ultimo and Khavn De La Cruz

One of the most memorable screenings in the fourth edition of the Cinemalaya Film Festival is that of Khavn De La Cruz's Ultimo (2007). There were less than thirty people in the Tanghalang Huseng Batute, a small performance theater housed inside the Cultural Center of the Philippines. To call Ultimo a film (which it technically is not, as with all of De La Cruz's filmless films) is a disservice to De La Cruz's ambition. The film is essentially a montage of slightly related or totally unrelated shots around La Palma in the Canary Islands. The verses of Mi Ultimo Adios (My Final Farewell), the poem Jose Rizal wrote before being executed by the Spanish colonizers for his revolutionary ideals, serve as intertitles to the black and white, silent feature. While the film is screening, De La Cruz plays the piano as the words of Rizal's poem are being disarranged and repeated to serve as cadence to the performance. A dancer performs to cap the experience.

While at first, Ultimo feels hefty, disjointed, and pretentious, as the minutes fly by with the incoherent black and white images flickering onscreen with the dancer twisting her body in various shapes and words are recited in rhythm as De La Cruz's melodies become more enraged, one can't help but get swept into the hypnotic madness and enjoy the experience. Rizal's most famous poem was honored and raped at the same time and one leaves the performance in a speechless fervor, unable to describe the ultra-sensory experience that was ingeniously orchestrated by De La Cruz. De La Cruz has been described as a Renaissance Man: a filmmaker, a musician, a poet, a writer, a visual artist (and the list goes on and on). I am quite sure that the thirty of us sitting and watching intently inside the Tanghalang Huseng Batute would agree.


Khavn De La Cruz's Ultimo (2007)

II. "dot-mov" and Blinding the Eye of the Storm

De La Cruz is also a film festival director and his film festival bears the many facets of his creative personality. .MOV is only partly a film festival. It is also a celebration of music, of art, of the tightly knit community that has been ushered by the so-called digital revolution.

His .MOV (pronounced as "dot-mov") International Digital Film Festival was established in 2002, and became the springboard for some of the most talented young filmmakers of the country. Raya Martin, whose Now Showing (2008) premiered in the Cannes' Director's Fortnight this year and directed several other internationally acclaimed features like Autohystoria (2007) and Maicling Pelicula Nañg Ysañg Indio Nacional (A Short Film About the Indio Nacional, 2005), debuted his short Conscientious Object-Or: The Reality of Olaf (2002) in the festival. Similarly, John Torres, director of Vancouver-winner Todo Todo Teros (2006) and Sherad Anthony Sanchez, director of CinemaOne-winner Huling Balyan ng Buhi (Woven Stories of the Other, 2006), gained recognition for the shorts they premiered in .MOV, Tawid Gutom (2002) and Iyak ni Maria (2002), respectively. There is little doubt that the little known film festival took part in the growth of these filmmakers. In fact, these filmmakers, along with Lav Diaz, have become the frontrunners of the Philippines' digital revolution.

In pursuit of its slogan of blinding the eye of the storm, the 2008 edition of the film festival, set during the typhoon-frenzied week of September 30 to October 7, 2008, would have patrons braving the heavy rains to to attend the festivals following programs:

DIGITAL DEKALOGO 10X10.MOV | presents ten of the best foreign digital full-length films from the past 3 years.

1 “A Walk Into The Sea: Danny Williams And The Warhol Factory” by Esther B. Robinson ( USA , 2007) [Best Gay Film in the Berlin International Film Festival]

2 “Re-Defining Video” by Kyle Canterbury ( USA , 2007) [19-year old avant-garde boy genius]

3 “Days Of The Turquoise Sky” (Kurus) by Woo Ming Jin ( Malaysia , 2008) [starring Malaysian actress Carmen Soo of “Kahit Isang Saglit” (A Time For Us)]

4 “Cinnamon” by Kevin Everson ( USA , 2006) [about drag racing in Black America]

5 “Head Trauma” by Lance Weiler ( USA , 2007) [a psycho supernatural horror flick]

6 “En La Cama” by Matias Bize ( Chile , 2005) [Spanish erotica]

7 “Honor De Cavalleria” by Albert Serra ( Barcelona , 2006) [A hauntingly serene & moving experimental take on "Don Quixote”]

8 “Yves” by Olivier Zabat ( France , 2008) [A different perspective on the mentally handicapped]

9 “The Sun and Moon” by Stephen Dwoskin (USA/UK, 2008) [A film fairy tale, a personal adaptation of “Beauty and the Beast”]

10 “A Prima Vista” by Michael Pilz ( Austria , 2008) [A meditative cinematographic journey, a poetic documentary]

This will be presented by ten of the best local filmmakers who have pushed the boundaries of cinema in their own unique ways: Ato Bautista (Blackout, 2007), Jeffrey Jeturian (Kubrador (The Bet Collector, 2006)), Jim Libiran (Tribu (Tribe, 2007)), Auraeus Solito (Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005), Adolf Alix (Adela, 2008), Raya Martin (Now Showing, 2008), Sherad Anthony Sanchez (Ang Huling Balyan ng Buhi (Woven Stories of the Other, 2006)), Ditsi Carolino (Riles (Life on the Tracks, 2003)), Manny Montelibano (Ligaw Liham (Letters of Nor, 2007)), John Torres (Todo Todo Teros, 2006).

SHORTS.MOV | features works from the two most prestigious short film festivals in the world: shortfilms from Clermont-Ferrand ( France ) and music videos from Oberhausen ( Germany ). The 3rd SILVERSHORTS Shortfilm Competition presents the new Philippine filmmakers to watch out for --- the twenty finalists from both the student and open divisions.

TRIBUTE.MOV | premieres the new films and presents the early works of local digital indie heroes: Kidlat Tahimik, Roxlee, & Lav Diaz. Roxlee’s graphic novel “Planet Of The Noses”, Kidlat Tahimik’s DVD “Perfumed Nightmare”, and Lav Diaz’s soundtrack CD “Impiyerno” will also be launched.

WORKSHOP.MOV | offers Rotterdam International Film Festival programmer Gertjan Zuilhof (“Celebrating the End of Cinema”), Slovenian film critic Nika Bohinc, Kidlat Tahimik (“Sariling Duende”), Roxlee (“Digital Animation”), and Lav Diaz (“Coffee Q&A”). The workshops will be complemented by equally inspiring facilitators such as Quark Henares, Tado Jimenez, Alexis Tioseco, Ramon Bautista, and Erwin Romulo.

FILMCONCERT. MOV | screens Pinoy classics such as Manuel Conde's Genghis Khan (1950), the first Filipino film to compete in Venice, FH Constantino's Sandata at Pangako (Arms and Promises, 1961), an actioner starring Fernando Poe, Jr., Jose Climaco's Biglang Yaman (Sudden Wealth, 1949), a comedy starring Pugo and Tugo, and Carlos Vander Tolosa's Giliw Ko (My Love, 1939), the oldest surviving Filipino film, accompanied with new live soundtracks by Pedicab, Cynthia Alexander, The Brockas, Khaven De La Cruz and Lolita Carbon & Radioactive Sago Project.

AFTERPARTY.MOV | ends each night with a bang at the indie-place- to-be Cubao X, courtesy of music and entertainment from top notch events, media organizations and talent management groups.

EXHIBIT.MOV | Paintings. Photos. Installations. No Screens.

More details on the film festival can be found here.

Woo Ming Jin's Days of the Turquoise Sky (2008)

III. Opening Night and The Shorts of Kidlat Tahimik, Roxlee, and Lav Diaz

The entrance to the cinemas of Robinson's Galleria is rearranged to accommodate a few high tables, a buffet of pasta, chicken, meatloaf, red wine and most importantly, warm San Miguel Beer (served with a glass of ice, for those who prefer their beers cold), and a horde of filmmakers, press people, friends, and enthusiasts. For the more sociable, the mood of the event is perfectly informal: a proper introduction to the eclectic festivities that will follow.

Ventriloquist Ony Ocampo and his hilariously profane wooden friend Nonong were the perfect hosts for the night, introducing the major contributors with delightful irreverence (Nonong asks Martin, "what is indie?," and the young director tells the puppet "I don't know, ask Alexis Tioseco" before finally saying "anything that is anti-Mother Lily (owner of the Philippines' oldest mainstream studio and perpetrator of the Philippine masses' continued maleducation)"). The real highlight of the night is the first in the film concerts in the series. As The Brockas (composed of Khavn De La Cruz, Lav Diaz, John Torres, Roxlee, and Earl Drilon) perform, short silent works of Kidlat Tahimik, Roxlee and Lav Diaz, the festival's three honorees, screen.

Kidlat Tahimik's Father Videomaker Meets Tatay Videomaker is essentially a video-diary of the filmmaker's meeting with a family presumably of filmmakers. Wading through the incoherent images of video cameras, feathers floating in the courtyard pool, and Tahimik in his traditional bahag and performing various roles as filmmaker, storyteller, father and icon, the short film is more of a visual invitation to discover Tahimik's generous persona than anything else.

Seeing Roxlee's shorts for the first time onscreen is a grand experience. His portion of the night opens with Son and Mama, about a mother who leaves her dog with her son only to find out that the son has poisoned the dog. Juan Gapang (Johnny Crawl) follows. The short shows the titular character, a bizarre creation with his pageboy hairdo and his body painted white, crawling around Metro Manila. Lizard intersperses images of social and political turmoil with the silhouette of a lizard and a bag-headed man walking to and fro, and bumping into the walls of his cell. Juan Gulay (Johnny Veggie) is a hilarious take on a vegetable-worshipping farmer who allows a painter to his home. Finally, we have Hatakan (Pull) which documents a Catholic procession of men pulling crosses and carriages that house statues of saints, all for repentance. Roxlee's shorts, stylish and almost animated in their visualization of chaos and madness, are satirical of the Filipino psyche. Roxlee paints the nation's obsessions, vices, and sins into the malformations, the aberrations, and bizarrities that populate his works.

The night is capped by Lav Diaz's Purgatorio (Purgatory, 2008), a haunting filmic statement on the Philippine government's unspoken rule of dispatching political enemies. The short film starts with a man (Perry Dizon) aimlessly walking by the river. The dimness, the black and white imagery, the man's unkempt appearance, assure that he remains anonymous. Diaz cuts to a woman (Angeli Bayani), her face in utter distraught, who is also wandering about by the river. Unlike the man's aimless treading, she seems entirely possessed by a goal, a hopeless search for someone or something. The two long takes of the two walkers is followed by a sequence that consists of a vehicle traveling past a mountainside road and a group of Aeta tribespeople dancing in a circle. In the center of the circle are two men, motionless and presumably dead. The short ends with the discovery of human bones in the middle of the forest, before completing the cycle with the shot of the man in his aimless walking. Diaz's short encapsulates the melancholy felt by the mothers, the communities and the entire nation of those who chose to speak and were killed for doing so.