THE Holy Spirit has not descended upon this community somewhere in Dasmariñas, Cavite, but people here are speaking in tongues.
We are mostly inside the campus of De La Salle University for the eighth edition of Cinema Rehiyon. This is a gathering of filmmakers, film educators and critics, and other film enthusiasts made possible under the patronage of the National Commission for Culture and Arts (NCCA) with a special funding from the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP), the latter under the leadership of Ms. Liza Diño-Esguerra.
The event opened with Lem Lorca’s Water Lemon, the story of Filemon, a young man afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome, who measures the water level of the sea off Mauban each day. The story is a fairy tale, a charming medium to comment on our small towns, where everyone is expected to fit. When a concern includes matters, like global warming, the prophesizing is assigned to someone who is “not normal,” a subtle dig at who we are as people. In the end, Lemon disappears but there is no sadness, just an understanding of what lies at the horizon, an eternity we will never understand. When the film closes, we learn about those small towns our knowledge of which is dissipated because we are forced to embrace the big, irrational picture of the big nation.
There are no big national cinemas in this gathering called Cinema Rehiyon. That is what those outside Manila know.
Young and middle-aged filmmakers from as far and as small as Nabunturan in Compostela Valley in Mindanao and those in the periphery of the great Manila—Bulacan, Laguna, Cavite, Rizal—are telling their stories without the burden of manifesting a national language. Their languages just happen to be the core of what has been imposed upon the imagined nation.
The screenings in the many venues inside the De La Salle campus are a fantastic display of variances, variations and varieties. If you have been immersed in Manila without clan connection to any of the Mindanao or Visayas communities, then the languages used in the short films, documentary and full-length feature films are foreign languages. Where then lies this much-vaunted notion of national cinema? If Manila be the base and basis of what is happening in the Philippine republic, we might, as well, have a category of Best Foreign Language within our midst. In this conversation, the southernmost tip of Luzon, the Bikol region, suffers the most problematization. Not Visayas but not Tagalog either, the region is fit to fight its own cultural independence, a move that Visayas and Mindanao are expected anytime to understand and support.
In forums and Q and As, several languages fly and many a thousand stereotypes about the islands of the South and the hinterlands are shattered, formed, reformed, interrogated and negotiated.
The whole surrounding reeks of rebellion, not the kind that calls for suspension of any writ but one that demands a closer look from those who believe in forming a real republic and inducing a sociopolitical glue to construct a nation.
The second night of the film conference saw a parade of short films, all with horror themes. Do not take the terrifying at face value. One filmmaker explains his “inspiration” to do a film about human-ingesting monsters by talking about death squads and extrajudicial killings.
Cinema has just become a terrific metaphor for what is happening to this land. The true horror is not about phantasms running after pregnant women but in the poverty draining the land and the ugly politics munching on the viscera and exuviae of the haunted population.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano