Here are the nominees for the 33rd Gawad Urian night 2010

Here are the nominees for the 33rd Gawad Urian night 2010
3 Nominations for Independencia

Best Music

Teresa Barrazo, Kinatay
Dan Gil, Last Supper No. 3
Lutgardo Labad, Independencia
Gauss Obenza, Hospital Boat
Francisbrew Reyes, Dinig Sana Kita
Francis de Veyra, The Arrival

Best Production Design

Bryan Bajado, Hospital Boat
Deans V. Habal, Bakal Boys
Brillante Mendoza, Kinatay
Brillante Mendoza, Lola
Danny Red, Himpapawid
Digo Ricio, Independencia
Mic Tatad and Giselle Andres, Last Supper No. 3

Best Cinematography

Dax Canedo, Hospital Boat
Ruben H. Dela Cruz, Bakal Boys
Emman Pascual, Engkwentro
Odyssey Flores, Kinatay
Odyssey Flores, Lola
Sol Garcia, Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe
Joni Guttierez, Anacbanua
Jeanne Lapoirie, Independencia
Raymond Red, Himpapawid

Asian American Film Festival, San Francisco

Description
Independencia: Asian American Film Festival Film - Feature | March 12 | 7-8:20 p.m. | Pacific Film Archive Theater
Sponsor: Pacific Film Archive
Rising young director Raya Martin, a favorite of the Cannes Film Festival, continues his daring historical trilogy on the history of the Philippinesthe acclaimed Indio Nacional was the first installmentwith the mesmerizing black-and-white Independencia, an investigation of American colonialism and simultaneously a re-creation of a lost era in Philippine cinema. Set during the American occupation of the early twentieth century, Independencia is shot like a classic Hollywood drama, complete with glistening black-and-white deep-focus photography, softly diffused close-ups, and elaborately fake sets. Merging an elemental plot (a man, a woman, and a child hide from American patrols in the jungle rains) with mesmerizing images (the films deep 35mm beauty recalls such studio-era exotica as I Walked with a Zombie or Shanghai Express, with French cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie casting a dazzling spell of dark shadows and diffused light), Independencia provides a meditative discourse on culture, history, colonialism, and the legacy (and disappearance) of cinema itself.

Jason Sanders



http://eventful.com/events/independencia-asian-american-film-festival-/E0-001-028607542-7

NYFF reviews

Nostalgia vies with protest in a young experimental filmmaker's movie about colonialism

In this film 24-year-old Raya Martin, the first Filipino director to be chosen for a Cannes Cinefondation film-making workshop, shows the ambition of the very young. He takes on the entire history of colonization in the Philippines as his subject. And he comes from a country that has been colonized and dominated by Spain, then the US, then Japan, then the US again. But Independencia, whose 35 mm camera work is by the French cinematographer Jeanne Lepoirie, and which if you can really separate the two is more remarkable for its lovely evocative black and white look than for its narrative, approaches its subject indirectly. Skillfully appropriating the style of long-ago local studio films (silents, and early talkies) and reveling in their artificiality, soft focus and fixed camera positions, it depicts a young man (Sid Lucero) and his aging mother (Tetchie Agbayani), who slip off into the forest to live in hiding because they feel an invasion is coming -- the invasion of the Americans. (This is not merely symbolic, but happened during the various invasions, that Filipinos escaped and lived dangerous hidden lives in the hinterlands.)

The look evoked is of the films made during the American occupation, while the events take place during the same time. The forest/jungle that dominates the scenes is lush and gorgeous and luminous. The son and mother find an abandoned shack and live there. The son later finds a wounded and raped girl (Alessandra de Rossi) and takes her back to the shack. Later his mother dies. The story jumps forward, after the brief interruption of a segment from a mock-propaganda film justifying American soldiers shooting a boy who steals in a village market, meant to take the place of an old style cinema intermission break, to some years later when the young woman and the son are now living together as husband and wife and have a young son -- or rather, are raising the boy with whom she was pregnant when she arrived (Mika Aguilos). Since he is light-skinned, perhaps he was fathered by an American, and that indeed is indicated by a fugitive line of dialogue earlier.

There are several important sequences of oral storytelling, and a pungent speech in the film's Tagalog language in which the little boy describes exploring and seeing a golden man by a river whose hair and body are so bright he can't look at them. (A savior, or a white oppressor? The boy's father?)

The film, which is rich in insect sounds throughout (as well as intrusive music) ends with a spectacularly loud and lightening-filled typhoon when the little family is broken up. The little boy is left alone and driven over a cliff by the invaders.

At the risk of seeming superficial, one has to say that the visuals are what sing in the film; the narrative is allusive and symbolic and you can make what you want of it, but the images provide immediate rewards. As Deborah Young writes in her Hollywood Reporter review, "Though everything is obviously shot on a studio set with potted plants and a painted backdrop, the effect is to cast the characters into a magical world that can be both quaint and wondrous." Moreover the whole film shows the beauty of shooting with a lens that has a shallow depth of field, and the evocation of silent-era film-making at times is remarkable. Independencia is an experimental work (Raya Martin has spoken of being inspired by Stan Brakhage's painted images in his final shots of the boy, with the colorless landscape suddenly painted red), but visually it is stimulating to the imagination, and the apparent simplicity belies the richness of the effects. Like many a talented young artist, Martin seems self-absorbed, pretentious and naive, proclaiming at Cannes that he hoped people would get "to die for their country and for cinema." Time will tell if his talents will bear solid fruit or get lost in showy gestures. Meanwhile, he has ideas more mainstream cinematographers may want to steal.

Independencia is the second in a trilogy, following A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (2005), which dealt with the struggle for independence from Spain in the late 19th century and was made in the style of silent films.

Shown at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard series (along with a short, Manila, shown out of competition). Seen as part of the main slate of the New York Film Festival, October 2009.

_________________
©Chris Knipp 2010

http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1372

NYFF Fan review

Independencia (Raya Martin, Philippines) - If last year’s inclusion of Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis at NYFF introduced New York to an uprising in Filipino cinema, Independencia displays the wildly different kinds of work being done right now. Independencia was one of two films Martin, age 25, had at this years Cannes Film Festival where the Best Director prize was won by fellow countrymen Mendoza for his controversial film Kinatay. With Independencia, Martin shows some real promise, even while the film never completely works. Set in the Filipino jungle in 1943, a family awaits the arrival of American troops into their country. A bit obviously, the family waits for most of the film until a massive storm finally comes and sends the characters in different directions. Martin, above all else, does what he can to achieve the look of a 1940s Hollywood film, complete with beautifully hand drawn sets that give Independencia a remarkable look while creating an undercurrent of the American invasion of Filipino culture. Still, this concept only goes so far, as the flowing cinematography overwhelms this small amount of dramatic tension given to the actual plot in the first two-thirds of the film. The storm sequence is rather tremendous and won me over for Independencia as a whole. Wonderfully executed, Independencia ends with the mood and attitude it needed to sustain throughout. Though its not a complete success, its shows some real complex thinking from Martin about his films and should help in turning Martin’s idea around on him by finally bringing a larger Filipino presence to the US film scene. B-

http://www.out1filmjournal.com/2009/10/nyff-2009-trashing-conceptsconceptual.html

Independencia wins 2 Prizes-- Critic's Prize and Jury Prize at Valdivia Film Festival!

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

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.

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.