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!

Independencia on Facebook

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.]

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