16th Valdivia International Film Festival 2009 from 15 - 20 October 2009
Se cierra el telón
There are no translations available.
Con la presencia de autoridades e invitados especiales, la organización del Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia cerró su décimo sexta versión.
Durante la noche del 20 de octubre, con una ceremonia en el Aula Magna de la Universidad Austral de Chile, se dio por terminada la fiesta del cine en la región de Los Ríos. Esto tras una intensa semana, llena de actividades culturales, conferencias y lo mejor del cine chileno e internacional.
El evento fue conducido por los actores de la recién estrenada película de Cristian Jiménez, ‘Ilusiones Ópticas’: Iván Álvarez de Araya y Paulina Eguiluz. Con su carisma, los animadores conquistaron a los más de 400 asistentes que fueron a despedir la jornada.
Luego de escuchar la canción ‘Valdivia en niebla’ de Patricio Mans, interpretada por Juan Pablo Miranda y Álvaro Morgan, se proyectó un pequeño resumen de lo que fueron los pasados seis días.
Por supuesto, se dieron a conocer los ganadores de las diferentes categorías en competencia.
Competencia Oficial Largometraje
Mejor Película: La Pivellina, de Rainier Frimmel y Tizza Covi.
Mejor Director: Esmir Filho por Os Famosos e os Duendes da Morte.
Premio Especial del Jurado: Independencia de Raya Martin.
Premio de la Crítica: Independencia de Raya Martin.
Competencia Oficial Cortometraje
Mejor Cortometraje: Goleshovo de Ilian Metev.
Menciones especiales del jurado:
Lucía de Niles Atallah, Joaquín Cociña y Cristóbal León.
Despair de Galina Myznikova y Sergey Provorov.
Competencia Oficial Gente Joven
Mejor Cortometraje Categoría Gente Joven: El Hijo, de Carlos Leiva.
Sección Work in Progress 2009
Ganador: Metro Cuadrado de Nayra Ilic.
Foro de Inversiones y Sesiones de Coproducción
De Jueves a Domingo de Dominga Sotomayor (Chile).
Marimbas del Infierno de Julio Hernández Cordón (Guatemala).
2º Concurso de cortometrajes HD Videocorp-VGL-VTR
Ganador: La ley del Hielo, Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago.
Mejor Película Chilena - (Voto del Público)
Premio TVN: La Nana de Sebastián Silva.
Premio Movie City: El Poder de la Palabra de Francisco Hervé.
Como ocurrió en varias oportunidades dentro de la semana, la organización del FICV le dio la oportunidad a la Federación Plataforma Audiovisual, para leer el Manifiesto de los Audiovisualistas de Chile por la Ley de TV Digital.
Tras las premiaciones, el público fue convidado a disfrutar la película belga ‘Lost Persons Area’, de Caroline Strubbe. Mientras, los invitados partieron a un cóctel en la prestigiosa Cervecería Kuntsmann.
http://www.ficv.cl/f16/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=1&lang=en
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Into the Woods by Michael Joshua Rowin
Into the Woods
by Michael Joshua Rowin
Independencia
Dir. Raya Martin, Philippines, no distributor
Raya Martin does not lack for ambition. A rising young star of Filipino cinema with seven films chronicling the history of his country already under his belt, Martin initially received laudatory notices for 2005’s A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or the Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos), has completed the first two parts of a planned “Box Office Trilogy” (Now Showing and Next Attraction), and now with this year’s Independencia can claim to be the first filmmaker to represent the Philippines in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard competition. He’s all of 25 years old. Independencia is obviously the work of a promising filmmaker, yet even while it displays confidently sumptuous imagery in the service of a cleverly ironic critical indictment of cultural colonialism, it also betrays an incoherence and incompleteness that a more seasoned talent would most likely not commit to celluloid.
The film opens on a small marketplace in the Philippines before the turn of the 20th century. It’s shot in a very specific quality of luminescent black-and-white that reminds of certain 1920s and 30s Hollywood cinema—gauzy, diffuse, a little dreamy. Cannon shots startle the marketplace crowd, and soon a mother (Tetchie Agbayani) and son (Sid Lucero) are shown packing their belongings to escape the oncoming chaos of the revolution against Spanish rule. The only thing they need to bring on their journey, according to the mother, is their faith.
Into the woods they flee. But the forest is conspicuously phony: beautifully painted backdrops blend with lifelike plants and trees in the foreground, amplifying the setting’s artificiality. A cabin left behind by the Spanish provides their new home, one they must restore to properly live in. A third person joins their party: The son discovers in the forest a young woman (Alessandra de Rossi) who is suggested as having been raped by American soldiers (“Wait ’til they hear what you did to that girl,” an offscreen voice says in English), and brings her back home. The mother develops a disturbing jealousy toward this stranger, dreaming—in a superimposed sequence that plays out above her sleeping head—of her only child taking the young woman from behind on a luxurious bed. Before she dies during a powerful squall, mom will also dream of repeatedly slapping the young woman. The young woman has meant no ill-will, but she has quickly succeeded the mother, and is soon seen pregnant and in the throes of birthing pains.
In a moment recalling the fake malfunction that bifurcated Tropical Malady, Independencia is abruptly interrupted when the film is made to look as if it’s sliding away from the projector lens (A Short Film is also, from what I’ve read, similarly divided). A colonialist propaganda newsreel is briefly shown in its place, explaining in an English voiceover the necessary actions of an American soldier who shot a local boy on the pretense of shoplifting. When we return to the main narrative it is many years later, and the son is now a longhaired father with a son (Mike Aguilos) of his own. The forest has become thoroughly part of the grown man: he explains to his boy that the reason they dwell apart from civilization is that townspeople are warlike, a point he illustrates by telling a story about two villages that once fought over hunting grounds until they all killed each other. But even his family’s isolation cannot stave off war, and it encroaches when Americans enter the forest during their siege of a nearby community.
Independencia works best as a metacinematic allegory of cultural resistance and perseverance in the face of imperial domination. Using classical Hollywood syntax, Martin links the United States’ inherited occupation of the Philippines with the emergence of that superpower’s greatest ideological weapon: the movies. The fake newsreel, featuring a villainous soldier sporting a preposterously false moustache, makes the connection explicit, but Martin also exaggerates soundstage illusion to mock Hollywood’s exotic fantasies, even as he simultaneously re-enlists that illusion in the service of a shimmering, lush myth closer to indigenous and oral storytelling traditions.
Unfortunately Independencia ends up with a ton of thematic loose ends. What is the significance of the mother’s Freudian sexual envy to the rest of the story? What of the son’s desire to reach the sea and become a fisherman? What happened to the precious amulet the son speaks of as a lost heirloom once owned by his revered father? The son wishes to recover it to ward off the Occidental invaders—does the climactic, strobe lightning storm mean it’s fallen into the hands of an unworthy possessor? Is the dark specter with a hand-drawn outline around it the savior referred to as the forest’s protector (and supposedly glimpsed by the child at one point)? If so, is its power ferocious or negligible? These questions seem to be left hanging due not to ambiguous intent but directorial sloppiness—at only 77 minutes, Independencia contains either a strangely inordinate amount of filler or a poorly conceived narrative (as co-written by Martin and Ramon Sarmiento), with a rushed ending that bafflingly conflates colonial repression with natural disaster.
Despite all these problems, Martin’s proficiency with lighting, mise-en-scène, and sound design is never in doubt, not exactly faint praise for someone who’s just reached the quarter-century mark. Even if the available evidence shows he can build properly on some ideas more than others, Martin clearly possesses a visual intelligence that portends terrific exploration and originality, two qualities that almost guarantee refinement.
by Michael Joshua Rowin
Independencia
Dir. Raya Martin, Philippines, no distributor
Raya Martin does not lack for ambition. A rising young star of Filipino cinema with seven films chronicling the history of his country already under his belt, Martin initially received laudatory notices for 2005’s A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or the Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos), has completed the first two parts of a planned “Box Office Trilogy” (Now Showing and Next Attraction), and now with this year’s Independencia can claim to be the first filmmaker to represent the Philippines in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard competition. He’s all of 25 years old. Independencia is obviously the work of a promising filmmaker, yet even while it displays confidently sumptuous imagery in the service of a cleverly ironic critical indictment of cultural colonialism, it also betrays an incoherence and incompleteness that a more seasoned talent would most likely not commit to celluloid.
The film opens on a small marketplace in the Philippines before the turn of the 20th century. It’s shot in a very specific quality of luminescent black-and-white that reminds of certain 1920s and 30s Hollywood cinema—gauzy, diffuse, a little dreamy. Cannon shots startle the marketplace crowd, and soon a mother (Tetchie Agbayani) and son (Sid Lucero) are shown packing their belongings to escape the oncoming chaos of the revolution against Spanish rule. The only thing they need to bring on their journey, according to the mother, is their faith.
Into the woods they flee. But the forest is conspicuously phony: beautifully painted backdrops blend with lifelike plants and trees in the foreground, amplifying the setting’s artificiality. A cabin left behind by the Spanish provides their new home, one they must restore to properly live in. A third person joins their party: The son discovers in the forest a young woman (Alessandra de Rossi) who is suggested as having been raped by American soldiers (“Wait ’til they hear what you did to that girl,” an offscreen voice says in English), and brings her back home. The mother develops a disturbing jealousy toward this stranger, dreaming—in a superimposed sequence that plays out above her sleeping head—of her only child taking the young woman from behind on a luxurious bed. Before she dies during a powerful squall, mom will also dream of repeatedly slapping the young woman. The young woman has meant no ill-will, but she has quickly succeeded the mother, and is soon seen pregnant and in the throes of birthing pains.
In a moment recalling the fake malfunction that bifurcated Tropical Malady, Independencia is abruptly interrupted when the film is made to look as if it’s sliding away from the projector lens (A Short Film is also, from what I’ve read, similarly divided). A colonialist propaganda newsreel is briefly shown in its place, explaining in an English voiceover the necessary actions of an American soldier who shot a local boy on the pretense of shoplifting. When we return to the main narrative it is many years later, and the son is now a longhaired father with a son (Mike Aguilos) of his own. The forest has become thoroughly part of the grown man: he explains to his boy that the reason they dwell apart from civilization is that townspeople are warlike, a point he illustrates by telling a story about two villages that once fought over hunting grounds until they all killed each other. But even his family’s isolation cannot stave off war, and it encroaches when Americans enter the forest during their siege of a nearby community.
Independencia works best as a metacinematic allegory of cultural resistance and perseverance in the face of imperial domination. Using classical Hollywood syntax, Martin links the United States’ inherited occupation of the Philippines with the emergence of that superpower’s greatest ideological weapon: the movies. The fake newsreel, featuring a villainous soldier sporting a preposterously false moustache, makes the connection explicit, but Martin also exaggerates soundstage illusion to mock Hollywood’s exotic fantasies, even as he simultaneously re-enlists that illusion in the service of a shimmering, lush myth closer to indigenous and oral storytelling traditions.
Unfortunately Independencia ends up with a ton of thematic loose ends. What is the significance of the mother’s Freudian sexual envy to the rest of the story? What of the son’s desire to reach the sea and become a fisherman? What happened to the precious amulet the son speaks of as a lost heirloom once owned by his revered father? The son wishes to recover it to ward off the Occidental invaders—does the climactic, strobe lightning storm mean it’s fallen into the hands of an unworthy possessor? Is the dark specter with a hand-drawn outline around it the savior referred to as the forest’s protector (and supposedly glimpsed by the child at one point)? If so, is its power ferocious or negligible? These questions seem to be left hanging due not to ambiguous intent but directorial sloppiness—at only 77 minutes, Independencia contains either a strangely inordinate amount of filler or a poorly conceived narrative (as co-written by Martin and Ramon Sarmiento), with a rushed ending that bafflingly conflates colonial repression with natural disaster.
Despite all these problems, Martin’s proficiency with lighting, mise-en-scène, and sound design is never in doubt, not exactly faint praise for someone who’s just reached the quarter-century mark. Even if the available evidence shows he can build properly on some ideas more than others, Martin clearly possesses a visual intelligence that portends terrific exploration and originality, two qualities that almost guarantee refinement.
At the New York Film Festival: Independencia
At the New York Film Festival: Independencia
Posted by Andrew Schenker on Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 2:25 PM
Raya Martin's Independencia played on Sunday afternoon at the New York Film Festival. The film is currently without distribution.
Although it occasionally gets carried away by its own reflexive spirit, Independencia is far more than the cute formal exercise its premise suggests. As he spins his myth-like tale of three generations of Filipino villagers hiding out in the forest from the threat of occupying Yankees, director Raya Martin fits his colonialist story with a colonized aesthetic to match. Understanding the ways in which cultural imperialism is often grounded in the cinematic image—a point he perhaps stresses too hard through a mid-film mock-propaganda newsreel—he steeps the picture in the look of early Hollywood silents, an appropriate framework through which to process the experience of the colonized Filipinos who were likely exposed to these very movies. But for all the studied artificiality of the film’s look—the use of the 4:3 frame, matted backgrounds, a subtle flicker effect—Martin’s images can’t be reduced to mere model-mimicry. Simply put, they’re too lovely: oozy, silvery glimpses of trees, bodies, faces that look like something, not so much ripped from the studio era, but out of some hazy dreamscape instead.
Unfolding sometime in the early part of the 20th century, the film begins with a mother and son fleeing the danger of the city for the relative seclusion of a tropical forest. They're joined by a battered woman seeking asylum, and the three live in relative peace in a makeshift shack until the mother succumbs to illness. Then, after a few scratches on the screen and a few frames of white leader mimic a reel change, we jump a couple years ahead, with the son and woman living in the same forest, now married and raising a child of their own. Throughout it all is the constant threat of the Americans, their presence never overstated, but always felt. When they finally do arrive, they seem like a foreign conception of U.S. soldiers: their voices sound like Filipinos trying to speak American English and their actions are uniformly brutish. It’s as if they were called into being by the cinematic imagination of the oppressed. And, in a way, they are, since it’s Martin, reflecting on his country’s legacy, who has created them.
Ultimately, Independencia doesn’t really take us deep into the workings of the colonial situation—after registering its initial insight about cultural hegemony and the film image, it’s content to simply present the Americans as the enemy. Instead it proceeds by a certain strain of mythologizing, seemingly drawn from oral tradition—we see the father pass it on to his son—which imagines the struggle in terms of allegorical figures like “the man in the river” and “the evil army” while the villains are kept largely off-screen. When an actual threat finally emerges, it’s preceded by an earth-rending thunderstorm which, in its monumentality, seems like the real enemy—and whose presentation, with its images of figures curled up against the rain and its claps of thunder, wind and swirling strings on the soundtrack, represents the film’s aesthetic peak—rather than the soldiers whose brief presence immediately follows the storm. In moments likes this, Martin succeeds in conjuring up a smoky dreamworld—which we recognize at last as the world of the movies—and then, summoning the weight of history, tears a rude hole through its gauzy fabric.
Posted by Andrew Schenker on Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 2:25 PM
Raya Martin's Independencia played on Sunday afternoon at the New York Film Festival. The film is currently without distribution.
Although it occasionally gets carried away by its own reflexive spirit, Independencia is far more than the cute formal exercise its premise suggests. As he spins his myth-like tale of three generations of Filipino villagers hiding out in the forest from the threat of occupying Yankees, director Raya Martin fits his colonialist story with a colonized aesthetic to match. Understanding the ways in which cultural imperialism is often grounded in the cinematic image—a point he perhaps stresses too hard through a mid-film mock-propaganda newsreel—he steeps the picture in the look of early Hollywood silents, an appropriate framework through which to process the experience of the colonized Filipinos who were likely exposed to these very movies. But for all the studied artificiality of the film’s look—the use of the 4:3 frame, matted backgrounds, a subtle flicker effect—Martin’s images can’t be reduced to mere model-mimicry. Simply put, they’re too lovely: oozy, silvery glimpses of trees, bodies, faces that look like something, not so much ripped from the studio era, but out of some hazy dreamscape instead.
Unfolding sometime in the early part of the 20th century, the film begins with a mother and son fleeing the danger of the city for the relative seclusion of a tropical forest. They're joined by a battered woman seeking asylum, and the three live in relative peace in a makeshift shack until the mother succumbs to illness. Then, after a few scratches on the screen and a few frames of white leader mimic a reel change, we jump a couple years ahead, with the son and woman living in the same forest, now married and raising a child of their own. Throughout it all is the constant threat of the Americans, their presence never overstated, but always felt. When they finally do arrive, they seem like a foreign conception of U.S. soldiers: their voices sound like Filipinos trying to speak American English and their actions are uniformly brutish. It’s as if they were called into being by the cinematic imagination of the oppressed. And, in a way, they are, since it’s Martin, reflecting on his country’s legacy, who has created them.
Ultimately, Independencia doesn’t really take us deep into the workings of the colonial situation—after registering its initial insight about cultural hegemony and the film image, it’s content to simply present the Americans as the enemy. Instead it proceeds by a certain strain of mythologizing, seemingly drawn from oral tradition—we see the father pass it on to his son—which imagines the struggle in terms of allegorical figures like “the man in the river” and “the evil army” while the villains are kept largely off-screen. When an actual threat finally emerges, it’s preceded by an earth-rending thunderstorm which, in its monumentality, seems like the real enemy—and whose presentation, with its images of figures curled up against the rain and its claps of thunder, wind and swirling strings on the soundtrack, represents the film’s aesthetic peak—rather than the soldiers whose brief presence immediately follows the storm. In moments likes this, Martin succeeds in conjuring up a smoky dreamworld—which we recognize at last as the world of the movies—and then, summoning the weight of history, tears a rude hole through its gauzy fabric.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
We were all very honored and happy that ‘Independencia’ won not just one but two prizes— Grand Prize in the Southeast Asian Competition
http://showbizandstyle.inquirer.net/entertainment/entertainment/view/20091004-228264/Lea-Salonga-sings-for-Ondoy-victims
Only in Hollywood
Lea Salonga sings for ‘Ondoy’ victims
By Ruben V. Nepales
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:34:00 10/04/2009
Filed Under: Celebrities, Ondoy, Flood
Most Read
LOS ANGELES—“Ondoy” may have wrought terrible devastation to our country but in its wake, something beautiful and profound arose: the unprecedented support Filipinos all over the world have shown to help the flood victims and relief efforts in every way possible.
Also thanks to the Internet and texting technology, Pinoys galvanized together in an instant fashion. The outpouring of “Bayanihan” spirit, 21st century style, is very moving.
Take the case of Lea Salonga’s special fund-raising performance for the tropical storm victims on Monday, Oct. 12, 7:30 p.m. at The Philippine Center’s Kalayaan Hall located at 556 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Lea, her friend Victor Lirio, the good folks of the Ayala Foundation USA and the Philippine Consulate General were able to organize the event in less than 24 hours!
We’ll let Victor, Diverse City Theater Company artistic director, tell the story. Here is his e-mail account:
Heartbreaking news
“The event was planned just last night (Wednesday evening, Sept. 30). Earlier yesterday, I was in communication via e-mail with Deputy Consul General Millie Thomeczek, expressing my desire to do something for the victims. I had been consumed by all the news about the calamity, and the photographs online were simply heartbreaking.
“I knew Lea was scheduled to be in town for concert engagements in upstate New York. But I also knew that she had very limited time due to work. At 5:15 p.m. yesterday, I was in a meeting with Bob Perlstein, Lea’s legal counsel and who is helping me with a deal memo for another project. Bob told me he spoke to Lea who expressed the same desire to do something for the storm victims. So while I was in Bob’s office, I called Lea and left a message on her voicemail. I found out later that she was already on an LA-bound flight.
“At around 8:30 p.m. last night, Lea called me. She had just landed in LA. We talked about the victims of the storm and the insufficient help and relief available to them. She said, ‘We definitely have to do something, no matter how small.’ She was originally scheduled to leave earlier, but she changed her schedule so she can do a benefit event. So we agreed on a date and logistical things.
“At 10:47 p.m. last night when I got home, I e-mailed Consul General Cecil Rebong, Millie, Ayala Foundation (AF) USA president Vicky Garchitorena, secretary (New York Team) Marilyn Abalos and officer Ronna Sieh. By 11:33 p.m., I had received an e-mail from Vicky confirming her support. By 11:48 p.m., I was communicating with Ronna regarding logistical arrangements. A few minutes after midnight, I had almost simultaneous responses expressing support from Millie, Marilyn Abalos and Consul General Cecil Rebong. All Millie needed to do was to confirm the Kalayaan Hall’s availability, which she did at 10:30 a.m. the following day. By 2:40 p.m., we had sent out the announcement.”
In a joint statement, Victor and Lea revealed details of the special performance: “There are limited seats. To RSVP, e-mail rsvp@diversecitytheater.org. Donation: $50 general admission; VIP Donation: $150+ which includes a pre-show cocktail reception. All proceeds to benefit the typhoon relief fund.
“If you are unable to attend but would like to make a donation, visit http://www.af-usa.org. Go to ‘Donate Now’ and select ‘AF-USA Typhoon Relief Fund.’ For check donations, make checks payable to Ayala Foundation USA and mail them to 255 Shoreline Drive, Suite 428, Redwood City, CA 94065. Please put ‘flood victims’ on the memo portion of your check. For questions, please e-mail ronna.sieh@gmail.com.”
Bangkok win
Arleen Cuevas, back home from Thailand where “Independencia,” which she produced and Raya Martin directed, won two prizes, e-mailed us her thoughts: “We were all very honored and happy that ‘Independencia’ won not just one but two prizes— Grand Prize in the Southeast Asian Competition and the Netpac Jury award, and also happy that Sherad Anthony Sanchez’s ‘Imburnal’ won Special Mention as well. We were glad that there was a strong Filipino presence in the festival this year, with three Filipino films in competition. I also co-produced the other Filipino entry, ‘Aurora,’ directed by Adolfo Alix Jr. which was also in competition. And Brillante Mendoza was one of the jurors in the Main Competition...
“Raya is in New York for the New York Film Festival,” she disclosed. “Independencia” is an official entry in that ongoing festival. “I talked to Raya who wished he was in Bangkok with us.
“There were no speeches during the awarding ceremony,” Arleen said. “It was a straightforward event with Princess Ubolratana of Thailand giving out the awards...”
Before flying to Bangkok, she attended the Vladivostok International Film Festival where “Independencia” was in competition.
Arleen is glad to be back home. “Yes, we were all affected by Ondoy,” she disclosed. “I live in Manila (very near España, UST area) and my area gets flooded all the time. It was good our immediate families and friends were safe.”
E-mail the columnist at rvnepales_5585@yahoo.com and read his blog, “The Nepales Report,” on http://blogs.inquirer.net/nepalesreport.
Only in Hollywood
Lea Salonga sings for ‘Ondoy’ victims
By Ruben V. Nepales
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:34:00 10/04/2009
Filed Under: Celebrities, Ondoy, Flood
Most Read
LOS ANGELES—“Ondoy” may have wrought terrible devastation to our country but in its wake, something beautiful and profound arose: the unprecedented support Filipinos all over the world have shown to help the flood victims and relief efforts in every way possible.
Also thanks to the Internet and texting technology, Pinoys galvanized together in an instant fashion. The outpouring of “Bayanihan” spirit, 21st century style, is very moving.
Take the case of Lea Salonga’s special fund-raising performance for the tropical storm victims on Monday, Oct. 12, 7:30 p.m. at The Philippine Center’s Kalayaan Hall located at 556 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Lea, her friend Victor Lirio, the good folks of the Ayala Foundation USA and the Philippine Consulate General were able to organize the event in less than 24 hours!
We’ll let Victor, Diverse City Theater Company artistic director, tell the story. Here is his e-mail account:
Heartbreaking news
“The event was planned just last night (Wednesday evening, Sept. 30). Earlier yesterday, I was in communication via e-mail with Deputy Consul General Millie Thomeczek, expressing my desire to do something for the victims. I had been consumed by all the news about the calamity, and the photographs online were simply heartbreaking.
“I knew Lea was scheduled to be in town for concert engagements in upstate New York. But I also knew that she had very limited time due to work. At 5:15 p.m. yesterday, I was in a meeting with Bob Perlstein, Lea’s legal counsel and who is helping me with a deal memo for another project. Bob told me he spoke to Lea who expressed the same desire to do something for the storm victims. So while I was in Bob’s office, I called Lea and left a message on her voicemail. I found out later that she was already on an LA-bound flight.
“At around 8:30 p.m. last night, Lea called me. She had just landed in LA. We talked about the victims of the storm and the insufficient help and relief available to them. She said, ‘We definitely have to do something, no matter how small.’ She was originally scheduled to leave earlier, but she changed her schedule so she can do a benefit event. So we agreed on a date and logistical things.
“At 10:47 p.m. last night when I got home, I e-mailed Consul General Cecil Rebong, Millie, Ayala Foundation (AF) USA president Vicky Garchitorena, secretary (New York Team) Marilyn Abalos and officer Ronna Sieh. By 11:33 p.m., I had received an e-mail from Vicky confirming her support. By 11:48 p.m., I was communicating with Ronna regarding logistical arrangements. A few minutes after midnight, I had almost simultaneous responses expressing support from Millie, Marilyn Abalos and Consul General Cecil Rebong. All Millie needed to do was to confirm the Kalayaan Hall’s availability, which she did at 10:30 a.m. the following day. By 2:40 p.m., we had sent out the announcement.”
In a joint statement, Victor and Lea revealed details of the special performance: “There are limited seats. To RSVP, e-mail rsvp@diversecitytheater.org. Donation: $50 general admission; VIP Donation: $150+ which includes a pre-show cocktail reception. All proceeds to benefit the typhoon relief fund.
“If you are unable to attend but would like to make a donation, visit http://www.af-usa.org. Go to ‘Donate Now’ and select ‘AF-USA Typhoon Relief Fund.’ For check donations, make checks payable to Ayala Foundation USA and mail them to 255 Shoreline Drive, Suite 428, Redwood City, CA 94065. Please put ‘flood victims’ on the memo portion of your check. For questions, please e-mail ronna.sieh@gmail.com.”
Bangkok win
Arleen Cuevas, back home from Thailand where “Independencia,” which she produced and Raya Martin directed, won two prizes, e-mailed us her thoughts: “We were all very honored and happy that ‘Independencia’ won not just one but two prizes— Grand Prize in the Southeast Asian Competition and the Netpac Jury award, and also happy that Sherad Anthony Sanchez’s ‘Imburnal’ won Special Mention as well. We were glad that there was a strong Filipino presence in the festival this year, with three Filipino films in competition. I also co-produced the other Filipino entry, ‘Aurora,’ directed by Adolfo Alix Jr. which was also in competition. And Brillante Mendoza was one of the jurors in the Main Competition...
“Raya is in New York for the New York Film Festival,” she disclosed. “Independencia” is an official entry in that ongoing festival. “I talked to Raya who wished he was in Bangkok with us.
“There were no speeches during the awarding ceremony,” Arleen said. “It was a straightforward event with Princess Ubolratana of Thailand giving out the awards...”
Before flying to Bangkok, she attended the Vladivostok International Film Festival where “Independencia” was in competition.
Arleen is glad to be back home. “Yes, we were all affected by Ondoy,” she disclosed. “I live in Manila (very near España, UST area) and my area gets flooded all the time. It was good our immediate families and friends were safe.”
E-mail the columnist at rvnepales_5585@yahoo.com and read his blog, “The Nepales Report,” on http://blogs.inquirer.net/nepalesreport.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Independencia’ wins two major awards in Bangkok
Only in Hollywood
‘Independencia’ wins two major awards in Bangkok
By Ruben V. Nepales
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 03:06:00 10/03/2009
Filed Under: Cinema, Awards and Prizes
LOS ANGELES — News of Raya Martin’s “Independencia” winning the Grand Prize in the Southeast Asia Competition and the Netpac (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) at the just concluded seventh Bangkok International Film Festival provides a much-needed boost after the terrible devastation wrought by Ondoy.
Arleen Cuevas, who produced “Independencia,” accepted the awards during the closing ceremonies held last Wednesday at the Chatrium Suites Bangkok. Raya is attending the New York Film Festival, where his American Occupation-set drama will also be entered.
Interestingly, this first Filipino film to compete in the Un Certain Regard section in the Cannes Film Festival shows a violent storm that has a profound impact on a family played by Sid Lucero, Alessandra de Rossi and Mika Aguilos.
Arleen flew to Bangkok from Vladivostok, where “Independencia” competed in the seventh Pacific-Meridian International Film Festival. She posted in her Facebook page that the very first question she was asked during the Q&A with the audience after the film’s screening was, “Why is there is so much rain in the Philippines (as shown in the movie)?” This was before Ondoy struck, so Arleen’s post drew amused comments, including one from this columnist.
Another Philippine entry, Sherad Anthony Sanchez’s “Imburnal,” along with Malaysia’s “Call If You Need Me,” won the Special Mention Prize in the Southeast Asia Competition of the Thai film festival, which hopes to champion films from the region. The Special Jury Prize went to Thailand’s “Nymph.”
Rock icon
Berlin-based journalist and film critic, Vincenzo Bugno, Singaporean filmmaker, Royston Tan, and Thai indie rock icon and poet, Tul Waitoonkiat, made up the jury for the Southeast Asia Competition.
As we write this, Arleen is flying back to the Philippines. She promised to e-mail us about “Independencia’s” triumph once she’s home.
Brillante “Dante” Mendoza served as a juror in the main competition along with Chinese filmmaker, Li Yang, and Thai stage and movie director, Ekachai Uekrongtham. Dante and his two colleagues gave the top prize to an entry from Belgium, Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth’s “Altiplano,” which was described by Screen Daily as “a hyper-stylized environmental drama set in a Peruvian village.”
The other winners in the main competition were China’s “The Search,” which clinched the Special Jury Prize and Canada’s “I Killed My Mother,” which bagged the Special Mention honors.
Incidentally, we’ve been able to watch some of the Cannes entries by filmmakers whom Dante edged out for the Best Director award. These include Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” and Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon,” which won the Palme d’Or. These are excellently crafted films, so we can’t wait to see “Kinatay,” the film that Dante won for and made him the first Filipino to win the Cannes’ coveted Best Director plum.
The filmmaker, who is reported to have a large following in Thailand, just got back to the Philippines. “Medyo pagod pa ako,” he wrote via e-mail. “Nag-alala ako while I was in Bangkok, kasi a lot of people were texting me, asking if we were OK.” We asked Dante to share his thoughts on being in the jury, and he obliged:
“It’s not easy judging other filmmakers’ work, because you can’t help judging them from your own point of view. Kasi mahirap maging director, lalo na kung ang pelikula ay galing sa Third World countries like ours. I’m saying this because the festival had good choices. But, I’m happy because most of my choices won, like ’The Search’ and ’I Killed My Mother.’
Long discussion
“We had a long discussion over the Grand Prize winner, ‘Altiplano,’ because of the use of religion in the film. Coming from a Catholic country, I pointed out some of its flaws, which my fellow jurors, Li Yang and Ekachai Uekrongtham, who are both Buddhists, didn’t quite understand—like the use of images, etc. But in the end, we agreed to give the prize to ‘Altiplano,’ which was also screened at the Critics Week in Cannes.
“I’m very happy but not surprised that Raya bagged the Grand Prize in the Southeast Asia Competition. In fact, biniro ko sina Adolf (Alix Jr.) na dapat makuha natin ang Grand Prize, Special Jury at Special Mention, pati Netpac. Nagkatotoo nga. There’s no doubt the Filipino independent cinema now has a very strong presence, not only in Asia, but in the whole world as well.
“Kapapanalo lang ni Pepe (Diokno) sa Venice, at eto na naman ang kay Raya. Pinoy indies are in focus at the Pusan and Thessaloniki International Film Festivals. I’m very sure that more Filipino independent productions will win in festivals. ’Serbis’ also won the Grand Prize in the Southeast Asia Competition last year. I was given a retrospective in Brazil early this month. Another retrospective will be given to my films in Lisbon, Portugal early next year. This year is indeed the golden year of Filipino independent films.”
We say, “Mabuhay!,” to Dante’s sentiments. We sure could use some good news at this time.
E-mail the columnist at rvnepales_5585@yahoo.com, and read his blog, “The Nepales Report,” on http://blogs.inquirer.net/nepalesreport.
TimeOut New York review
Timeout New York
New York Film Festival 2009
Like Josef von Sternberg’s island adventure Anatahan (1953), Raya Martin’s weather-beaten melodrama is one hallucinatory emotional hothouse. During the 1898 American invasion of the Philippines, a mother (Tetchie Agbayani) and son (Sid Lucero) retreat to the woods. They eke out a meager existence until another woman (Alessandra de Rossi) arrives and pushes the family dynamic in a more feral direction. The 77-minute feature is divided into two parts, separated by a mock newsreel (at once satirical and horrific) that portrays a murder committed by an American soldier as if it were a Keystone Cops short. The comic and the tragic constantly intertwine: Martin uses the vernacular of early silent and sound films to explore how this particular bit of history is remembered and resonates through to the present. He saves his biggest flourish for the finale, when color intrudes on the elegant black-and-white aesthetic with an enlightening, blood-red vengeance. Sunday, Oct 4 at 3pm—Keith Uhlich
Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/film/78907/independencia#ixzz0Sso8D3gj
Wise Kwai's Thai Film Journal Capsule review of Independencia
Wise Kwai's Thai Film Journal
Capsule reviews
Independencia
Raya Martin stylistically mimics the look and feel of a stagey old black and white movie, with flickering movement and painted backgrounds, yet it's a lush and gorgeous thing to look at and listen to. Compared to other Filipino films I've seen, it's so clean. The story is about a mother and son (Tetchie Agbayani and Sid Lucero) who retreat to the woods in advance of the American invasion of the Philippines in the late 19th century. The son finds an abandoned young woman, presumably raped by a hilariously mustachioed American soldier, and soon the mother passes away. Not long after that, the couple has a mixed-race boy they call their son, and so another generation of Filipinos begins. Will it be free? (5/5)
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Independencia and Imburnal win awards in 7th Bangkok International Film Festival
Independencia and Imburnal win awards in 7th Bangkok International Film Festival
Jocelyn Dimaculangan
Friday, October 2, 2009
07:05 AM
Rating
Filipino filmmakers bring good news to their countrymen as thousands recover from the destruction brought about by typhoon Ondoy.
The black-and-white film Independencia bagged two prizes in the 7th edition of the Bangkok International Film Festival. Imburnal was given a Special Mention in the filmfest that took place in Thailand from September 24-30.
Independencia was the Grand Prize winner in the Southeast Asian Category and the recipient of the NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) Jury Prize Award. The period film set during the American colonization of the Philippines stars Sid Lucero, Tetchie Agbayani, and Alessandra de Rossi.
Meanwhile, the 2008 Cinema One entry Imburnal shared the Special Mention honor with Malaysian James Lee's Call If You Need Me.
Another Filipino indie film, Aurora, also competed in this year's edition of the Bangkok IFF.
The jury of the Southeast Asian Category was composed of Vincenzo Bugno, Royston Tan, and Tul Waitoonkiat.
Independencia producer Arleen Cuevas informed PEP (Philippine Entertainment Portal) that the Philippine delegation was composed of herself, Imburnal director Sherad Anthony Sanchez, Aurora director Adolfo Alix Jr., Imburnal producer Ronald Arguelles of Cinema One, and director Senedy Que.
Brillante Mendoza served as a jury member in the main competition of the Bangkok IFF and his obra Kinatay was screened in the non-competition section.
The Piolo Pascual-starrer Manila will also be screened in the Southeast Asian Panorama section. It was recently announced that the film, co-directed by Adolf and Raya, would compete in a separate film festival that will take place in Warsaw, Poland. (CLICK HERE to read related article.)
The jury awarded Independencia the Grand Prize in the Southeast Asian category "for its strong cinematic expression. The film is visually adventurous with humor, expressing historical aspects while also very friendly to the audience."
Meanwhile, Imburnal earned a Special Mention "for putting together a very risky concept with complicated sociopolitical background, and for the director's courage and bravery."
The NETPAC Award was given to Independencia "for its cinematic creation exploring the history of the Philippines and the history of Philippine Cinema within the limited space and with a few characters."
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Raya Martin's "Independencia" and "A Short Film about the Indio Nacional" rare back to back screenings from September 14-19 at U.P. Cine Adarna
Raya Martin's "Independencia" and "A Short Film about the Indio Nacional"
rare back to back screenings from September 14-19 at U.P. Cine Adarna
Raya Martin’s critically acclaimed films “Independencia” and “A Short Film about the Indio Nacional” will be screened at University of the Philippines Cine Adarna from September 14-19, 2009. The two films form the first two parts of a planned trilogy. The concept of the trilogy has two basic premises: first, that each film will be set in (not necessarily about) a particular period of struggle in Philippine history (the Spanish, American, and Japanese occupations); and second, that each will be made in an aesthetic prevalent to the period in question. Their narratives aren’t causally linked, only thematically. The third film is in pre-production.
Raya Martin's “Independencia”, is the first Filipino film to screen in Un Certain Regard, an Official Selection section of the Cannes Film Festival 2009. The film stars Sid Lucero, Alessandra de Rossi, Tetchie Agbayani and Mika Aguilos.
"Independencia" has been invited to several international film festivals namely Munich, Brussels, Toronto, Bangkok, Vladivostok, Rio, Calgary, Sitges, Sitges, New York, Pusan, Valdivia, Antalya, Vienna and more.
Meanwhile, "A Short Film about the Indio Nacional (Or the Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos)" which is Raya's first film, won the Best Film at Pesaro Film Festival in 2006. Both films are shot and will be screened on 35mm film.
The films are directed by Raya Martin, one of the most talent young filmmakers in the Philippines, whose films have been garnering critical acclaim both in the Philippines and around the world. His other film Next Attraction won the Grand Jury Prize in the Cinemanila International Film Festival 2008, and another work, Now Showing, was selected for the Director's Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival last May 2008.
The films are presented by Cinematografica Films. The screenings are dedicated to Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc.
The schedules are:
A SHORT FILM ABOUT THE INDIO NACIONAL, SEPT 14-16, 5 PM
INDEPENDENCIA, SEPT 14-17, 7 PM and SEPT 18-19, 1 PM
"Independencia" Synopsis, 35mm, 77 minutes:
Early 20th century Philippines. The sounds of war signal the arrival of the Americans. A mother and son flee to the mountains, hoping for a quiet life. One day, the son discovers a wounded woman in the middle of the forest, and decides to bring her home. Years pass. Man, woman and child live in isolation from the growing chaos all over the country. But a coming storm soon threatens their existence, and American troops draw nearer.
See the trailer. http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=r5rVvv9s8z4
" A Short Film about the Indio Nacional" Synopsis, 35mm film, 96 minutes:
Set in the 1890s brewing revolution of Filipinos against Spain, "Maicling pelicula nañg ysañg indio nacional " is a collection of silent film actualities revolving around an indio, the common man during the colonial times.
See the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCzECZ2eL4g
Quotes about Raya Martin.
"There is no doubt this is the work of a great filmmaker." –Emmanuel Burdeau, Editor-in-chief, Cahiers du Cinéma
"Raya Martin bases his work - without plagiarism - on the earliest forms of filmmaking. In fact, he reinvents silent film." –Gertjan Zuillhof, International Film Festival Rotterdam
"Raya Martin's beautiful paean to the common man, or 'indio,' of the period is a fascinating work that intermittently rewards patience and confirms Martin's place as a talent to watch." –Jay Weissberg, Variety Magazine
"Indio fills in an historical gap. It does so with constant invention and poetic beauty." –Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope
Raya Martin By Alexis A. Tioseco
ya Martin
By Alexis A. Tioseco
The brand of social realism espoused by the better films of Lino Brocka (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975; Insiang, 1976; Orapronobis, 1989), has become the dominant form of socially conscious filmmaking in the Philippines over the past four decades. This form of filmmaking was important for its time: when the government had control of the media, to tackle social issues directly through cinema meant to lift a blindfold. But as the means of communication become more difficult to suppress, society no longer attempts to hide its corruption and moral bankruptcy the way it once did. Faced with a population inundated daily with the misery of reality—from television, newspapers and neighbours, to what one sees on the streets on one’s daily commute—the challenge of a socially committed artist is to make their viewer feel, with a renewed intensity, what surrounds them. Two valid propositions for today’s filmmaker: to encourage a greater understanding of what is by examining in detail its context (as in the work of Lav Diaz) or to encourage thoughts of what can be by appealing to the imagination (as in the work Raya Martin). As Chris Marker said not so long ago, “Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”
“What will you do with all your liberty?” poses one character to another at the end of Martin’s feature debut A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (2005). The young theatre actor to whom it is addressed simply looks confused, and the eager revolutionary who asks it runs into the forest expecting battle, but is greeted instead by an empty field, and the shadow of evening falling.
This question could very well be considered the starting point for Independencia (2009), one of two films of Martin’s premiered in Cannes 2009. (Independencia screened in Un Certain Regard, while, Out of Competition in a Special Screening there was Manila, a two-part homage to Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal, co-directed with Adolfo Alix Jr. Martin directed the Bernal tribute).
Indio Nacional and Independencia form the first two parts of a planned trilogy. The concept of the trilogy has two basic premises: first, that each film will be set in (not necessarily about) a particular period of struggle in Philippine history (the Spanish, American, and Japanese occupations); and second, that each will be made in an aesthetic prevalent to the period in question. Their narratives aren’t causally linked, only thematically.
Indio Nacional is made with the elements of pre-20th century reality: silent, shot on black and white 35mm stock with a stable camera, utilizing title cards to describe the action or represent dialogue. Much of the film follows three characters during the last days of the Spanish occupation in the Philippines (mid-1890s) with scenes of daily life spliced in between. However, there is also a prologue: three extended shots, in digital, colour, and with sound, of a restless woman, unable to sleep. She tosses and turns in her small hut, the room illuminated only by a candle, before waking up her companion and requesting a story. The story he tells isn’t your typical bedtime story; it’s a profound allegorical tale about nationhood and sacrifice, and the teller can hardly contain his emotions as he tells it. When this sequence takes place is undefined; it is distinct from the rest of the film, but it sets the mood for what follows.
Set during the American occupation, Independencia is made in the style of a ‘30s Hollywood studio film: shot entirely on a set, featuring painted backdrops, thick make-up on the actors’ faces, and an exaggerated acting style. Significantly, he took something out of the typical Hollywood studio film, as well: their blatant racial stereotyping. Independencia opens with a beautiful sequence of a celebration in a small town interrupted by the sounds of war encroaching. A jarring cut introduces us to our eventual protagonists for the film’s first half, a mother (Tetchie Agbayani) and son (Sid Lucero), who we see inside their home packing their things to leave. As she blows out a candle the screen fills with black and a drum kick signals the credits. The tone of the film is set, and also its rhythm: the action is engaging but the cuts are brisk, almost awkward: Martin wants to both absorb you, and keep you conscious of what he’s doing. Even stronger examples of this consciousness appear later on: in the satiric newsreel that divides the films two halves, and a startling moment when a character turns and addresses the camera: “I hear the sound of the Americans. They are very close. Listen.”
Martin isn’t attempting to make a historical film in Independencia, to make claims about a history and a relationship with America that remains convoluted and charged. What he is doing is using this artifice, these obvious lies, to create a new truth. As Cocteau wrote: “I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is composed of truths which become lies, mythology of lies which become truth.”
Indio Nacional began with a myth—the story the husband tells the wife at bedside—and Independencia ends with one. The second half of the film focuses on a family: a man (the son now grown up), a woman (a stranger he finds in the forest), and a child. The child belongs to two worlds. His skin (light) and features are of those of a child of mixed blood, that of his mother and the American soldier (heard but not seen) who raped and abandoned her in the forest (implied but not depicted).
The child is curious, constantly gets lost (but never harmed) while exploring the forest, a space to which, as the film progresses, he seems to belong to more and more. As the Americans draw near, a violent storm erupts, claiming the lives of the parents. Embraced by nature, the son survives. As morning breaks, a bird comes to rest gently with him, suggesting further his unique relationship with nature.
Shortly after, he is discovered by two American soldiers (one bearing the now infamous Teddy Roosevelt moustache), together with their Filipino ally. The Filipino, surprised, perhaps, by his having survived the storm, asks him: “Where did you come from, boy?” and, looking to the heavens, “Up there?”
The child breaks free from the Americans (who duly cock their rifles and fire at him), and climbs a rock, escaping to the top of a mountain. As the camera tracks forward, the artificiality of the set comes into closer view. He glances around himself briefly, and then slowly leaps. At this moment, the sky lights up: turning from yellow to an intense blood red (in pseudo “painted on celluloid” fashion, an ode to Brakhage, Martin claims), waves emanate and quiver, the sound of the wind intensifies, the voices of a children’s choir fill the soundtrack, and the film ends.
The film clearly believes the child is gifted—even his cloak appears coloured in the final shot—but whether he survives the fall or not is no longer of consequence. What is important is the implication behind his decision: that he alone has decided his fate, and not another.
The remnants of American culture are everywhere in the Philippines, its influence obvious in the twang with which many speak, the style in which many dress, and the ideas many have of what cinema should be. Like the young boy in Independencia, the traces of American culture are still in our system, if not in our blood. But how we choose to live now, what we choose to do with our independence, with our liberty, is our decision.
Chinua Achebe writes: “Did not the black people in America, deprived of their own musical instruments, take the trumpet and the trombone and blow them as they had never been blown before…And the result, was it not jazz?” In Independencia Martin has crafted a film that uses a mode of filmmaking, an instrument, popular to American cinema of the period, and subverts it, playing it for his own end, and in the process creates something strikingly original, something new.
http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs39/spot_tioseco_alexis.html
By Alexis A. Tioseco
The brand of social realism espoused by the better films of Lino Brocka (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975; Insiang, 1976; Orapronobis, 1989), has become the dominant form of socially conscious filmmaking in the Philippines over the past four decades. This form of filmmaking was important for its time: when the government had control of the media, to tackle social issues directly through cinema meant to lift a blindfold. But as the means of communication become more difficult to suppress, society no longer attempts to hide its corruption and moral bankruptcy the way it once did. Faced with a population inundated daily with the misery of reality—from television, newspapers and neighbours, to what one sees on the streets on one’s daily commute—the challenge of a socially committed artist is to make their viewer feel, with a renewed intensity, what surrounds them. Two valid propositions for today’s filmmaker: to encourage a greater understanding of what is by examining in detail its context (as in the work of Lav Diaz) or to encourage thoughts of what can be by appealing to the imagination (as in the work Raya Martin). As Chris Marker said not so long ago, “Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”
“What will you do with all your liberty?” poses one character to another at the end of Martin’s feature debut A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (2005). The young theatre actor to whom it is addressed simply looks confused, and the eager revolutionary who asks it runs into the forest expecting battle, but is greeted instead by an empty field, and the shadow of evening falling.
This question could very well be considered the starting point for Independencia (2009), one of two films of Martin’s premiered in Cannes 2009. (Independencia screened in Un Certain Regard, while, Out of Competition in a Special Screening there was Manila, a two-part homage to Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal, co-directed with Adolfo Alix Jr. Martin directed the Bernal tribute).
Indio Nacional and Independencia form the first two parts of a planned trilogy. The concept of the trilogy has two basic premises: first, that each film will be set in (not necessarily about) a particular period of struggle in Philippine history (the Spanish, American, and Japanese occupations); and second, that each will be made in an aesthetic prevalent to the period in question. Their narratives aren’t causally linked, only thematically.
Indio Nacional is made with the elements of pre-20th century reality: silent, shot on black and white 35mm stock with a stable camera, utilizing title cards to describe the action or represent dialogue. Much of the film follows three characters during the last days of the Spanish occupation in the Philippines (mid-1890s) with scenes of daily life spliced in between. However, there is also a prologue: three extended shots, in digital, colour, and with sound, of a restless woman, unable to sleep. She tosses and turns in her small hut, the room illuminated only by a candle, before waking up her companion and requesting a story. The story he tells isn’t your typical bedtime story; it’s a profound allegorical tale about nationhood and sacrifice, and the teller can hardly contain his emotions as he tells it. When this sequence takes place is undefined; it is distinct from the rest of the film, but it sets the mood for what follows.
Set during the American occupation, Independencia is made in the style of a ‘30s Hollywood studio film: shot entirely on a set, featuring painted backdrops, thick make-up on the actors’ faces, and an exaggerated acting style. Significantly, he took something out of the typical Hollywood studio film, as well: their blatant racial stereotyping. Independencia opens with a beautiful sequence of a celebration in a small town interrupted by the sounds of war encroaching. A jarring cut introduces us to our eventual protagonists for the film’s first half, a mother (Tetchie Agbayani) and son (Sid Lucero), who we see inside their home packing their things to leave. As she blows out a candle the screen fills with black and a drum kick signals the credits. The tone of the film is set, and also its rhythm: the action is engaging but the cuts are brisk, almost awkward: Martin wants to both absorb you, and keep you conscious of what he’s doing. Even stronger examples of this consciousness appear later on: in the satiric newsreel that divides the films two halves, and a startling moment when a character turns and addresses the camera: “I hear the sound of the Americans. They are very close. Listen.”
Martin isn’t attempting to make a historical film in Independencia, to make claims about a history and a relationship with America that remains convoluted and charged. What he is doing is using this artifice, these obvious lies, to create a new truth. As Cocteau wrote: “I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is composed of truths which become lies, mythology of lies which become truth.”
Indio Nacional began with a myth—the story the husband tells the wife at bedside—and Independencia ends with one. The second half of the film focuses on a family: a man (the son now grown up), a woman (a stranger he finds in the forest), and a child. The child belongs to two worlds. His skin (light) and features are of those of a child of mixed blood, that of his mother and the American soldier (heard but not seen) who raped and abandoned her in the forest (implied but not depicted).
The child is curious, constantly gets lost (but never harmed) while exploring the forest, a space to which, as the film progresses, he seems to belong to more and more. As the Americans draw near, a violent storm erupts, claiming the lives of the parents. Embraced by nature, the son survives. As morning breaks, a bird comes to rest gently with him, suggesting further his unique relationship with nature.
Shortly after, he is discovered by two American soldiers (one bearing the now infamous Teddy Roosevelt moustache), together with their Filipino ally. The Filipino, surprised, perhaps, by his having survived the storm, asks him: “Where did you come from, boy?” and, looking to the heavens, “Up there?”
The child breaks free from the Americans (who duly cock their rifles and fire at him), and climbs a rock, escaping to the top of a mountain. As the camera tracks forward, the artificiality of the set comes into closer view. He glances around himself briefly, and then slowly leaps. At this moment, the sky lights up: turning from yellow to an intense blood red (in pseudo “painted on celluloid” fashion, an ode to Brakhage, Martin claims), waves emanate and quiver, the sound of the wind intensifies, the voices of a children’s choir fill the soundtrack, and the film ends.
The film clearly believes the child is gifted—even his cloak appears coloured in the final shot—but whether he survives the fall or not is no longer of consequence. What is important is the implication behind his decision: that he alone has decided his fate, and not another.
The remnants of American culture are everywhere in the Philippines, its influence obvious in the twang with which many speak, the style in which many dress, and the ideas many have of what cinema should be. Like the young boy in Independencia, the traces of American culture are still in our system, if not in our blood. But how we choose to live now, what we choose to do with our independence, with our liberty, is our decision.
Chinua Achebe writes: “Did not the black people in America, deprived of their own musical instruments, take the trumpet and the trombone and blow them as they had never been blown before…And the result, was it not jazz?” In Independencia Martin has crafted a film that uses a mode of filmmaking, an instrument, popular to American cinema of the period, and subverts it, playing it for his own end, and in the process creates something strikingly original, something new.
http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs39/spot_tioseco_alexis.html
Friday, September 11, 2009
2 RP entries in Toronto film fest
Only in Hollywood
2 RP entries in Toronto film fest
By Ruben V. Nepales
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:35:00 09/10/2009
TORONTO—No two films could be as different from each other as the two Philippine entries in the ongoing Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF): Raya Martin’s “Independencia” and Mike Sandejas’ “Dinig Sana Kita (If I Knew What You Said).” But that’s a good thing. It is time for more variety in our country’s film festival entries.
When we commented via e-mail about his refreshing choices, Raymond Phathanavirangoon, TIFF’s Southeast Asia programmer, said, “I’ve seen quite a number of shaky handheld cams running-through-the-slums films in the last few years. I’m frankly looking for new angles and new stories coming from the Philippines. That said, if it’s done well, I’ll consider it.
“But I’ve even said this to indie filmmakers in Manila when I was there—in order to sustain the ‘Philippine New Wave,’ films must also be able to cross over into the mainstream. It’s been years since ‘The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros’ which made an impact internationally and became an indie local hit. ‘If I Knew What You Said’ is, to me, a crowd-pleasing film that really could move the audience, whether in Makati or in Toronto. I’m not sure if audiences here will be surprised or not, but they will hopefully enjoy it.”
We’ll find that out when the film—Mike Sandejas’ teen romance between a rebellious girl rocker (Zoe Sandejas, Mike’s own daughter) and a deaf boy who loves to dance (Romalito “Rome” Mallari, hearing impaired in real life) — is screened in Toronto on September 11, 3:30 p.m. (AMC 7), September 13, 4:30 p.m. (AMC 2) and September 19, 11:00 a.m. (AMC 10).
“Independencia,” which made history as the first Filipino film to be shown in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival last May, is a family drama set in the early 1900s that mimics the early silent films. Raymond is dedicating the screenings to Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc, the film critics who were killed in Quezon City last week. The programmer said, “They deserve recognition for all they have done for cinema. Plus, they were very close to Raya and very much championed ‘Independencia.’ ”
Raya has decided not to attend the TIFF because of this tragedy. He also did not answer our questions about “Independencia” in the TIFF for this column—we understand.
The screening dates: September 12, 12:45 p.m. (Scotiabank Theatre 3), September 13, 6:15 p.m. (AMC 5) and September 17, 7 p.m. (Varsity 2).
“Independencia” producer Arleen Cuevas told me via e-mail that in the Philippines, the film will be shown back to back with Raya’s first feature, “A Short Film About the Indio Nacional,” at the UP Film Center from September 14 to 19. These two films are part of Raya’s planned trilogy.
On how he eventually chose “Dinig ... ” and “Independencia,” Raymond explained: “‘Independencia’ is an intelligent, beautiful formalist piece that questions the art of cinema itself. And it tackles a period that is rarely examined in Western media — the invasion of the Philippines by the Americans. That said, it is very accessible despite its deeper dimensions since it takes the guise of the Filipino melodrama ...
“As for ‘Dinig ... ’ the director (Mike) obviously understands young people well, and the two leads are really charming. Of course, the fact that it tackles the subject of the deaf and their struggles adds an important dimension as well.”
We asked Mike, whom we interviewed via e-mail before he left Manila for Toronto, what he thought of his work’s chances in international film fests since RP entries usually showed the gritty, seamy side of life. “Honestly, it was all we had — hope,” said the law school dropout who learned filmmaking by working as a producer/production manager for such Filipino filmmakers as Mike De Leon, Gil Portes and Lav Diaz. “We knew we were going against the flow. We were not out to prove anything about Filipino cinema. I just wanted to do something that expressed my passion for my craft and my advocacy for the deaf. I felt that I was being led to do this film because it was a mission of sorts ... ”
Bucking the trend
“I have nothing against films with darker themes,” said Mike of bucking the trend. “I just thought that maybe with this film, we can thematically widen the spectrum of Philippine independent films. We are happy to be going to the TIFF. Maybe we are opening a door of sorts to some Filipino filmmakers who share similar themes and sensibility. Maybe foreign audiences want to see something else. Maybe it’s time we did show something else.”
As the father of a teenage girl, we had to ask Mike—how challenging was it to direct Zoe? Raising a young daughter is a challenge in itself but to have to direct her as well? “It was challenging because we are both strong-willed artists and often disagree on things at home,” admitted the father of four girls (Zoe is the eldest). “Putting aside our relationship as father-daughter and bringing a professional attitude to the set was tough. I had to push her abilities in some scenes. I had to be her director. She had to grow up fast. She’s only 16.”
“The easy part of it was that I love my daughter so much,” continued the proud dad whose film “Tulad ng Dati (Just Like Before)” won the Cinemalaya Best Film prize in 2006 and went on to compete in the Pusan IFF New Currents Section. “Thus, the care and diligence I exercised in raising her was the same I did for her in the film. Every thought and emotion she had, I shared with her as we did the film. We learned so much about each other as we worked together. She knew my style and way of thinking in filmmaking and followed it. It was like being a basketball coach with a great point guard. Making the film made us much closer. I am happy that other filmmakers have been asking about casting her in their films.”
(To be concluded on Saturday)
Thursday, August 27, 2009
A TIFF Programmer Talks INDEPENDENCIA
A TIFF Programmer Talks INDEPENDENCIA
Posted by Todd Brown at 7:59pm.
Posted in Film News , Drama, South Asia, Toronto Film Festival 2009.
[The Toronto International Film Festival’s south-east Asia programmer Raymond Phathanavirangoon has been giving us a guided tour of his selections for the big festival and today he checks in with some thoughts on Independencia.]
Hi all, after my brief explanation on the director’s cut of NYMPH, the next one I’d like to introduce is Raya Martin’s INDEPENDENCIA, a critical darling when it screened in Cannes earlier this year. Apart from being selected for TIFF, the film has also recently been invited to the New York Film Festival. It’s a title that will surely be popular among festivals and cineastes.
Fans of Guy Maddin will find lots to like here, from the clever use of early silent film techniques and hand-painted backdrops to the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography and lush score. But this ain’t MY WINNIPEG (or MY MANILA); the genius of this film comes from the rich evocation of Filipino traditional folklore and melodrama, using visual tricks as well as a hilarious American propaganda piece to make its point. It’s also a rare glimpse of the colony back in the late 19th/early 20th century. See, at the time the Philippines declared independence from the Spanish, but only to be sold under the table to the Americans. INDEPENDENCIA takes place during the eve of the American invasion and follows a mother and son as they set out to escape the occupation to live in the jungles.
Definitely it’s one of the most unique films in the festivals. And director Raya Martin will be attending, so please do come by and say hi!
Saturday, August 22, 2009
MOVIE POSTER OF THE WEEK: "INDEPENDENCIA"
21AUG09 PICTURE
MOVIE POSTER OF THE WEEK: "INDEPENDENCIA"
by Adrian Curry
Independencia, just recently selected for the New York Film Festival, is 25 year old Filipino auteur Raya Martin’s seventh feature and hopefully the film to make his name in the States. Martin is part of what Mark Peranson, back in 2005, called the “first ripples” of a Filipino New Wave, a wave that seemed to be cresting, or at least gathering speed, at this year’s Cannes where Brillante Mendoza won the best director award for Kinatay, and Martin had two films in the official selection, this and Manila (co-directed with Adolfo Alix Jr). Until Mendoza’s Serbis last year, there had only ever been one Filipino feature in the history of the New York Film Festival: Lino Brocka’s Insiang in 1976.
Set in the early 20th Century during the American occupation of the Philippines, Independencia is entirely shot on studio sets with painted backdrops (you can see the trailer here). All of Martin's films, as far as I can tell, are heavily stylized, adopting the dominant aesthetic of the period of Filipino history he is dealing with (whether silent cinema, or portrait photography, or Hollywood studio productions) and Independencia has earned comparisons to Murnau, Von Sternberg and Guy Maddin.
When I contacted Raya Martin to ask him about his astonishing poster he told me that there are “two things I love more than, say, editing a film: thinking of a title and designing a poster. So I usually already have ideas even when I’m just shooting it. I came across an old postcard photo of a woman with a hole as a head. It looked like paper eaten by a cockroach overnight in place of her face. Somehow there was also comfort in that creepy looking picture. So we decided to do something like that.”
The result has an almost J-Horror quality, though also saying something potent about the obliteration of history. In the Philippines, however, since the actors are well known, the official poster, while striking, is rather more conventional.
[Many thanks to Raya, and to Joe Bowman whose invaluable round-up of posters of nearly every film in Toronto, Venice and the NYFF alerted me to this.]
http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/932
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Independencia review by http://oggsmoggs.blogspot.com/
Independencia (Raya Martin, 2009)
On June 12, 1898, a group of self-proclaimed generals and their supporters declared independence for an archipelago who has been under Spanish rule for more than three centuries. Since then, the archipelago has been the colony of the Americans for more than four decades and the Japanese for around three years before being granted by the Americans who rescued the islands from the clutches of the Japanese with independence on July 4, 1946. In an effort to acknowledge the sacrifices of the revolutionaries who strove for freedom from the Spanish, the Philippine government transferred Independence day from July 4 back to June 12, notwithstanding the fact that the waving of the Philippine flag by the momentarily victorious generals was more symbolic than real, given the fact that at that moment, the Americans have bought the islands, along with Puerto Rico, from the Spanish as if it were real estate. Thus, it is not very surprising that the concept of independence has been nothing but an elusive euphamism for most Filipinos. It is easily mistaken for patriotism, love for country, or worse, radicalism. With more than a century since the Filipinos declared for themselves independence, can this nation truly consider itself independent?
Last June 12, 2009, Raya Martin came home from Cannes to screen his aptly titled film Independencia to his countrymen. Martin, who alongside several internationally acclaimed Filipino filmmakers like Lav Diaz (Melancholia (2008) and Kagadanan sa Banwaan Ning mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos (2007)) and Brillante Mendoza (Kinatay (Slaughtered, 2009) and Serbis (Service, 2008)) have been accused of making films for foreign audiences instead of his fellow Filipinos, is unrelenting in his art but nevertheless values truth above visual and narrative pleasures. Martin creates films about concepts that matter to him. He seeks to recreate a historic past that he, and most other Filipinos have been deprived of (Maicling Pelicula Nañg Ysañg Indio Nacional (A Short Film About the Indio Nacional, 2005), where short film vignettes of ordinary Filipinos during times of peace and war; and Autohystoria (2007), where the murder of revolutionary Andres Bonifacio and his brother is reenacted as a contemporary tale of political salvage), or his own personal memories (Now Showing (2008), a film that is divided into two parts: the first part about a girl's whimsical childhood and the second part about the girl living out her life borne out of his joyous past as punctuated by a traumatic event that separates the two parts), or filmmaking (Next Attraction (2008), also a film that is divided into two parts: the first part is about a film crew making an independent production and the second part shows the film they made).
Independencia is largely composed of nuances and minute details. The story is simple. A mother (Tetchie Agbayani) and his son (Sid Lucero) retreat into the middle of the jungle as American troops start invading the towns. Mother and son lead an austere yet satisfying life away from civilization until the son finds a woman (Alessandra de Rossi), injured and presumably raped by the Americans. The mother dies of illness. The man and the woman, along with her son (Mika Aguilos) start living together peacefully in the middle of the jungle. There are no heroes, no resounding acts of patriotism, and no rousing marches or melodies. Perhaps the most conspicuous element of Independencia is the aesthetics that it borrows from early American talkies. Shot entirely inside a sound studio that is refashioned into a jungle with painted backgrounds, plants, birds, and other creatures and sound effects that realistically capture the atmosphere, the film is oftentimes breathtaking to look at, with cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie making use of artificial lighting to create haunting images that compliment Lutgardo Labad's momentous score.
There's a reason behind Martin's use of borrowed aesthetics. As with Maicling Pelicula where Martin makes use of silent film aesthetics as reaction to a recorded history that is predominantly centered on the privileged instead of the masses, Independencia's aesthetics marks as both an indignation of the cinematic culture that the Philippines has been deprived of (either by ignorance or deplorable film archiving, given the fact that most pre-war Filipino films have been lost to decay) and a commentary on the hypnotizing and bamboozling effect of what seems to be America's most enduring gift to the Filipinos: the love for cinema. In the middle of Independencia, the film gives way to a fake news reel about a kid who was shot dead by an American soldier for pilfering crops from a vendor. Accompanied with humorous sarcasm and satire, the reel is nonetheless telling of the mis-education that the Americans have inflicted on the Filipinos, to the point that the latter is willing to digest the blatantly illogical and immoral to please their colonial masters.
Independencia tackles the concept of independence in its most unadulterated form, where both mother and son sacrifice the comforts of colonial living, of so-called civilization to live in the jungle. By stripping themselves of their colonial past, they become subjects of nature and the elements. Beliefs transform as pre-colonial lore, with passed-on tales of powerful talismans and golden skinned deities, become redundant conversational devotions. Their sexual impulses, left unhindered by concepts of religion and morality, occupy both their idle time and dreams. The familial unit remains. More than the familial unit are traces of their former lives made apparent in their subconscious thoughts: the mother dreams of an intense sexual encounter while the son dreams of fighting a war. Independence remains an elusive concept, even to a family who was forced to give up the comforts of colonial living and learned to love the mystic allure of the jungle. Tainted, perhaps forever, with foreign influence, death seems the inevitable freedom.
The pale-skinned boy, presumably the son of the woman with her American aggressors, is the lone character that is truly independent. Born in the jungle with only tales from his known father and mother as guidance to the world, the boy's curiosity expands as he grows older. The Americans are slowly making their way into the jungle. As the jungle becomes less of a haven for the family, their choices get slimmer. For the couple, the rationale of keeping themselves freed from colonial rule is blurred by the demands of the tough times as food is becoming more scarce and a devastating storm is brewing. For the boy, the allure of what's out there seems natural and understandable, considering that the color of his skin hardly matches the skin of both his mother and father. However, the boy chooses independence and sacrifices his life for it. Martin marks the boy's sacrifice with striking colors, meshing style and substance together in a sublime sequence of tremendous beauty and emotion.
According to this reviewer who had the pleasure of seeing Independencia in Cannes, Martin introduced the film to his audience with a wish that people would be able "to die for their country, and for cinema." Morbid as it sounds, Martin's wish proves to be a logical solution to a world where people have forgotten to be independent and cinema has forgotten its role as recorder of culture and history. If death is the only measure to gain this independence, then let us be brave enough to slit our own throats or force ourselves in exile, symbolically. Lest we actually know the pains and pleasures of living outside the mainstream, of living without the influences that mutate the virtues that bind us as human beings, then we cannot honestly consider ourselves truly independent.
On June 12, 1898, a group of self-proclaimed generals and their supporters declared independence for an archipelago who has been under Spanish rule for more than three centuries. Since then, the archipelago has been the colony of the Americans for more than four decades and the Japanese for around three years before being granted by the Americans who rescued the islands from the clutches of the Japanese with independence on July 4, 1946. In an effort to acknowledge the sacrifices of the revolutionaries who strove for freedom from the Spanish, the Philippine government transferred Independence day from July 4 back to June 12, notwithstanding the fact that the waving of the Philippine flag by the momentarily victorious generals was more symbolic than real, given the fact that at that moment, the Americans have bought the islands, along with Puerto Rico, from the Spanish as if it were real estate. Thus, it is not very surprising that the concept of independence has been nothing but an elusive euphamism for most Filipinos. It is easily mistaken for patriotism, love for country, or worse, radicalism. With more than a century since the Filipinos declared for themselves independence, can this nation truly consider itself independent?
Last June 12, 2009, Raya Martin came home from Cannes to screen his aptly titled film Independencia to his countrymen. Martin, who alongside several internationally acclaimed Filipino filmmakers like Lav Diaz (Melancholia (2008) and Kagadanan sa Banwaan Ning mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos (2007)) and Brillante Mendoza (Kinatay (Slaughtered, 2009) and Serbis (Service, 2008)) have been accused of making films for foreign audiences instead of his fellow Filipinos, is unrelenting in his art but nevertheless values truth above visual and narrative pleasures. Martin creates films about concepts that matter to him. He seeks to recreate a historic past that he, and most other Filipinos have been deprived of (Maicling Pelicula Nañg Ysañg Indio Nacional (A Short Film About the Indio Nacional, 2005), where short film vignettes of ordinary Filipinos during times of peace and war; and Autohystoria (2007), where the murder of revolutionary Andres Bonifacio and his brother is reenacted as a contemporary tale of political salvage), or his own personal memories (Now Showing (2008), a film that is divided into two parts: the first part about a girl's whimsical childhood and the second part about the girl living out her life borne out of his joyous past as punctuated by a traumatic event that separates the two parts), or filmmaking (Next Attraction (2008), also a film that is divided into two parts: the first part is about a film crew making an independent production and the second part shows the film they made).
Independencia is largely composed of nuances and minute details. The story is simple. A mother (Tetchie Agbayani) and his son (Sid Lucero) retreat into the middle of the jungle as American troops start invading the towns. Mother and son lead an austere yet satisfying life away from civilization until the son finds a woman (Alessandra de Rossi), injured and presumably raped by the Americans. The mother dies of illness. The man and the woman, along with her son (Mika Aguilos) start living together peacefully in the middle of the jungle. There are no heroes, no resounding acts of patriotism, and no rousing marches or melodies. Perhaps the most conspicuous element of Independencia is the aesthetics that it borrows from early American talkies. Shot entirely inside a sound studio that is refashioned into a jungle with painted backgrounds, plants, birds, and other creatures and sound effects that realistically capture the atmosphere, the film is oftentimes breathtaking to look at, with cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie making use of artificial lighting to create haunting images that compliment Lutgardo Labad's momentous score.
There's a reason behind Martin's use of borrowed aesthetics. As with Maicling Pelicula where Martin makes use of silent film aesthetics as reaction to a recorded history that is predominantly centered on the privileged instead of the masses, Independencia's aesthetics marks as both an indignation of the cinematic culture that the Philippines has been deprived of (either by ignorance or deplorable film archiving, given the fact that most pre-war Filipino films have been lost to decay) and a commentary on the hypnotizing and bamboozling effect of what seems to be America's most enduring gift to the Filipinos: the love for cinema. In the middle of Independencia, the film gives way to a fake news reel about a kid who was shot dead by an American soldier for pilfering crops from a vendor. Accompanied with humorous sarcasm and satire, the reel is nonetheless telling of the mis-education that the Americans have inflicted on the Filipinos, to the point that the latter is willing to digest the blatantly illogical and immoral to please their colonial masters.
Independencia tackles the concept of independence in its most unadulterated form, where both mother and son sacrifice the comforts of colonial living, of so-called civilization to live in the jungle. By stripping themselves of their colonial past, they become subjects of nature and the elements. Beliefs transform as pre-colonial lore, with passed-on tales of powerful talismans and golden skinned deities, become redundant conversational devotions. Their sexual impulses, left unhindered by concepts of religion and morality, occupy both their idle time and dreams. The familial unit remains. More than the familial unit are traces of their former lives made apparent in their subconscious thoughts: the mother dreams of an intense sexual encounter while the son dreams of fighting a war. Independence remains an elusive concept, even to a family who was forced to give up the comforts of colonial living and learned to love the mystic allure of the jungle. Tainted, perhaps forever, with foreign influence, death seems the inevitable freedom.
The pale-skinned boy, presumably the son of the woman with her American aggressors, is the lone character that is truly independent. Born in the jungle with only tales from his known father and mother as guidance to the world, the boy's curiosity expands as he grows older. The Americans are slowly making their way into the jungle. As the jungle becomes less of a haven for the family, their choices get slimmer. For the couple, the rationale of keeping themselves freed from colonial rule is blurred by the demands of the tough times as food is becoming more scarce and a devastating storm is brewing. For the boy, the allure of what's out there seems natural and understandable, considering that the color of his skin hardly matches the skin of both his mother and father. However, the boy chooses independence and sacrifices his life for it. Martin marks the boy's sacrifice with striking colors, meshing style and substance together in a sublime sequence of tremendous beauty and emotion.
According to this reviewer who had the pleasure of seeing Independencia in Cannes, Martin introduced the film to his audience with a wish that people would be able "to die for their country, and for cinema." Morbid as it sounds, Martin's wish proves to be a logical solution to a world where people have forgotten to be independent and cinema has forgotten its role as recorder of culture and history. If death is the only measure to gain this independence, then let us be brave enough to slit our own throats or force ourselves in exile, symbolically. Lest we actually know the pains and pleasures of living outside the mainstream, of living without the influences that mutate the virtues that bind us as human beings, then we cannot honestly consider ourselves truly independent.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
By EMMA KATE SYMONS
Real to Reel
Philippine cinéma vérité: Acclaimed abroad, banned at home
MANILA - Brillante Mendoza, the fearless director at the forefront of a new wave of Filipino independent cinema, is accustomed to extreme reactions to his films.
When "Kinatay" premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the movie critic from National Public Radio in the U.S, John Powers, refused to attend because he said the film promised "no fun at all just brutal nastiness." Veteran critic Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun-Times pronounced it the worst film ever shown at Cannes. Other critics denounced "Kinatay" ("The Butchered") -- which follows a day in the life of a young criminology student who gets caught up in the rape, murder and cutting up of a prostitute's body -- as "wretched" and "unwatchable."
Center Stage Productions/Swift Productions
But Mr. Mendoza was vindicated. The festival's programmers compared him with cinéma vérité legend, the late American actor and film director John Cassavetes, and awarded the Filipino the best director prize. He edged out such established names as Hollywood's Quentin Tarantino and Ang Lee, and Spain's Pedro Almodovar, as well as South Korea's Park Chan-wook and China's Lou Ye.
"It's a tough film to watch and a tough film to make," Mr. Mendoza concedes of his latest work. The film revolves around a criminal gang of police officers who answer to an ex-convict. It features a lengthy scene shot from inside a moving van as the gang prepares to rape, stab and dismember the woman before scattering her body parts around Manila. The director says he deliberately set about unsettling the audience by bringing them on "a journey into darkness" alongside the main character, Peping, the criminology student. "It was not because I wanted them to go home terrified. I want people to be disturbed...by making them see that the world isn't as safe as it seems. Here is a normal person like any one of us but at one point he is trapped."
Agence France-Presse
Mr. Mendoza's film is the first from the Philippines to snare an award at prestigious Cannes. The victory is another sign that the nation's thriving independent filmmakers -- who made about 50 films last year -- have arrived on the global silver screen.
He is also the first Asian director to be included in the official competition two years in a row after his film "Serbis" ("Service") was nominated in 2008. While "Serbis" missed out at Cannes, that year Philippine independent films garnered at least 28 awards for everything from scriptwriting to acting at other international festivals from Korea's Pusan to Paris.
Behind their red-carpet success lies a combination of factors. For a start, the Philippines, with its mix of cultural influences from Spanish and U.S. colonialism, ethnic diversity and distinction as Asia's only largely Catholic country, offers a vivid backdrop for creative filmmakers. An often corrupt and colorful political and business elite presiding over a nation beset by poverty, violence and a separatist conflict on the southern island of Mindanao adds to the rich pickings for story lines. Consider the tale of Joseph Estrada, a one-time action movie star who built his political appeal on playing scrappy underdog roles. He won the presidency in 1998 and was ousted in a military-backed popular uprising after serving less than half his six-year term. Convicted of taking kickbacks from illegal gambling rackets, a charge he denied, Mr. Estrada was then pardoned by his successor -- and now wants to make a political comeback.
Center Stage Productions/Swift Productions
In recent years, digital technology also has played a crucial role by lowering the costs of filmmaking, enabling a wave of new young indie directors to flourish. Plus, they have forged ties with French film production companies, with their access to state funds, and French festival organizers, which has helped bring their work to international attention. Yet, ironically, the Philippines' strict censorship laws prevent most of these edgy films from being shown in commercial cinemas at home.
All the acclaim from abroad comes as the country's film industry celebrates the 50th anniversary of its first recognition at an international festival. Once home to a big film studio system, today there are only two major studios left. Documentary-style films by notable Filipino directors as Lamberto Avellana began winning international awards in the 1950s. But it was really with the emergence of socially and politically conscious filmmakers such as Lino Brocka in the 1970s that the Philippine independent cinema took off.
Mr. Brocka's powerful melodramas depicting poverty and political resistance put him in conflict with the oppressive regime of former President Ferdinand Marcos, who tried to ban some of his films including "Insiang" and his Cannes-nominated "Bayan Ko" ("My Country").
Influential French producer and director Pierre Rissient brought Mr. Brocka's work to Cannes in the late '70s, kickstarting a film movement in the Philippines that is independent both for its lack of backing by the big studios and for its controversial subject matter.
Today, the 49-year-old Mr. Mendoza is the brightest star in what French film director and scriptwriter Rebecca Zlotowski calls the "constellation" of Philippines art-house film. Following Mr. Mendoza is a diverse band of mostly younger directors, ranging in age from early 20s to early 50s, who often collaborate and have helped confirm their country's status as a darling of the international festival circuit over the past few years. Among them are Raya Martin, Adolfo Alix Jr., Sherad Anthony Sanchez and Lav Diaz, the so-called father of this family of experimental filmmakers who eschew traditional narrative techniques.
"Despite the youth of most of these directors, they are making very mature cerebral radical films," says Ms. Zlotowski, a member of the selection committee for this year's Cannes Director's Fortnight, which runs parallel each year to the festival and spotlights full-length feature films, short films and documentaries. "The common denominator of all these films is their attention to social problems such as homosexuality, adoption, delinquency and poverty and their documentary style." The Filipino filmmakers, she adds, "are actually contributing to the ongoing breaking down of the distinction between documentary and fiction" that is occuring in movies globally.
Agence France-Presse
Three Filipino films were among the official screenings at Cannes this year including Mr. Martin's "Independencia," a film about colonialism and independence in the Philippines, which was chosen for the Un Certain Regard or experimental section.
Also in the special screenings lineup was "Manila," a joint project by Messrs. Alix Jr. and Martin. The film is a tribute to cult Philippine directors Mr. Brocka and Ishmael Bernal, another leader of the earlier wave whose extraordinary 1982 epic tale of rural religious hysteria "Himala" ("Miracle") last year won the CNN Asia Pacific Screen Awards Viewers Choice Award for best Asia-Pacific film to date. It stars local heartthrob Piolo Pascual, who also co-produced the film.
Arleen Cuevas, the producer behind both "Manila" and "Independencia," contends that Filipino film is currently "the most exciting in Asia" because of its diversity ranging from the experimental style of Mr. Martin to the socio-realism of Mr. Mendoza. "Filmmakers are doing different kinds of cinema and there are different kinds of vision and style, but all are coming from one country," she says.
Unlike the younger directors such as Messrs. Martin and Alix Jr. who went to film school, Mr. Mendoza is self-taught. Often labeled neorealist in style, he left a job in advertising production design in 2004 to work on his first film "Masahista" ("The Masseur") set in Manila's male massage parlors. It won a Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno International Festival in Switzerland in 2005.
Committed to telling the stories of what he terms the 90% of Filipinos who "don't live in decent conditions," Mr. Mendoza offers no apologies for making his critics and audiences uncomfortable with his detailed explorations of the seamier side and double standards of life in the Philippines.
Agence France-Presse
In 2008, "Serbis," about a dilapidated family cinema turned porn-screening hall that has become a market for rent boys and their clients, garnered awards at international film festivals. After it opened at Cannes, there was outrage in some quarters over its graphic sex scenes and a notorious moment of the lancing of a festering boil on the buttocks of one of the characters.
"You can't always please everyone especially with my kind of stories," Mr. Mendoza says. "They are not really entertaining stories. They make you want to think."
It isn't just programmers and audiences at continental European film festivals who are taking notice of the innovative cinema coming out of Manila as well as the provinces. Mindanao native Mr. Sanchez, 24, won the top prize at the Korean Jeonju International Film Festival in May for "Imburnal" ("The Sewer"). The film was produced by Ronald Arguelles.
The jurors praised the film -- which opens with a nearly eight-minute single shot of a boy lying in one of the sewers -- as an "innovative, experimental, even miraculous work." They also called it a "unique blend of documentary and fiction, which returns us to the fundamental question of the past and the future: What is cinema?"
Mr. Sanchez's poetic four-hour meditation on the lives of delinquent teens hiding out from vigilante murderers in the sewers of Davao also received the Netpac prize, awarded by the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema at Jeonju.
Festivals in North America, including New York's, now frequently feature Filipino filmmakers' works and the UCLA Film & Television Archive recently ran a retrospective of Mendoza films in Los Angeles. Last year, the Paris Cinema International Film Festival, a mid-tier event on the annual global festival calendar, gave Philippine films a boost by featuring them exclusively as the country of honor.
The Philippines' strict censorship rules and a distribution system that favors safe Hollywood films or local commercial blockbusters mean most of the indie films making their mark abroad won't be screened in the cinemas of this country of 90 million people, more than half of whom are under the age of 25.
Mr. Sanchez's "Imburnal," in a dialect of the Visayan language spoken in Davao, was given an "X" rating before its canceled premiere at the Cinemanila International Film Festival last year, upsetting international jurors and festival-goers alike. It was eventually shown in a censored version but has never received general distribution. The film was rejected for distribution three times by the censorship board because of its "objectionable presentation of poverty."
"Every time a Filipino film director wins an award somewhere, we always go back home and share the same sentiment -- frustration that our films can't be distributed back here," says Mr. Sanchez. "It's strange because you don't fulfill your main objective, which is to share your film with the people of your own country."
Marlon Rivera is president and chief creative officer of Publicis advertising agency in the Philippines and the producer of "100," which shares the same premise as the popular 2007 Hollywood film "The Bucket List." The Philippine film focuses on a terminally ill woman who decides to do 100 things she has always wanted to do before dying. With its slick production style, and focus on the milieu of wealthy young professional Filipinos in Manila, "100" is considered more "mainstream" than most Philippine independent cinema. It was screened at the Marrakesh International Film Festival and experienced critical and commercial success in the Philippines.
Mr. Rivera says a "new Puritanism" has overwhelmed the Philippines in the past decade resulting in much heavier-handed censorship rulings. For "100," directed by Chris Martinez, to be shown at a commercial cinema, a sex scene in the film had to be limited so that only a small portion of the naked back of a woman could be seen.
"Aurora," a new film by Mr. Alix Jr., 30, hasn't been released in the Philippines because it was slapped with an "X" rating by the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board, which was created by decree under former President Marcos. "It is about a social worker who is kidnapped in the south by bandits but in the middle part of the film she is raped. Well the censors said it was too explicit so they banned it."
Independent filmmakers also are criticized for their "negative" presentations of the hard lives of ordinary Filipinos. After Mr. Mendoza won the best director prize at Cannes, a columnist in the daily Manila Bulletin railed that "Kinatay" might dampen tourism to the Philippines.
"I don't think I'm showing a bad image of the Philippines," Mr. Mendoza says in response to such criticism. "I think I'm showing the reality of life in Manila and in the Philippines. This is really happening."
Somewhat unexpectedly, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, known to be a social conservative in the Philippines, applauded Mr. Mendoza's Cannes success. She even tried to draw a parallel between his art and her brand of "moral" politics.
"Director Mendoza's winning movie depicts social realities and serves as an eye-opener for moral recovery and social transformation, which my administration has been pursuing even early on my presidency," Ms. Arroyo said in a public statement, without commenting on the censorship that keeps Mr. Mendoza's films off local screens.
The annual French Film Festival in Manila held this month hoped to avoid confrontation with the censors with a plan to "bring Cannes to Manila" by screening local films and international films that had been shown at the festival. Instead, organisers saw one of the French films, Benoit Jacquot's "A Tout de Suite" given an "X" rating so it couldn't be shown.
Festival organizers wanted to show "Kinatay" for the first time to a Filipino audience but backed down before an inevitable battle with the censorship board. Mr. Mendoza refused to subject his film, which is in Filipino, or Tagalog, with English subtitles, to the censor's cutting room. "I don't want to give them the privilege of cutting my film again," he says, referring to earlier cuts made to his "Serbis" film.
Marc Fabian B. Castrodes, a lawyer who is a member of the censorship board says films screened for noncommercial, limited use such as for private educational purposes aren't subject to classification. So, Mr. Mendoza is taking another tack: "I am taking ("Kinatay") to universities and schools where I can explain that there is such a thing as alternative cinema in the Philippines."
—Emma Kate Symons is a Bangkok-based writer.
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