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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
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."
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