FROM Bacolod, where we attended the Cine Negrense and the out-of-town meeting of the Executive Committee on Cinema of the National Commision for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), Patrick Campos and I traveled to Iloilo. It was the first time for the two of us to take the ferry, a leisurely one-hour ride. Well, we considered it leisurely given our de-facto status as tourists in our own homeland.
We were going to Iloilo upon the invitation of Elvert Bañares, festival director of the annual CineKasimanwa: The Western Visayas Film Festival and a fellow member of NCCA committee on cinema.
It’s difficult not to compare Bacolod and Iloilo, especially if one had been to the two cities in the span of a week. Bacolod seems to be city hurtling fast into the future, with its old sites fast disappearing. Iloilo is one city that appears to be holding on both the past and the future, with entire districts devoted to tall, handsome buildings even as its old neighborhoods remain unaltered.
Patrick and I were booked in a hotel, called Harbortown Hotel. One night, while I was looking for a convenience store, I turned around the corner and found myself on a street with three honky-tonk bars.
The hotel itself, while quite small, is a well-appointed one. It has a narrow café that hugged the wall of the building. On my last morning, at an early breakfast at 6 am, the café was filled with an eerie but lovely assortment of piped-in music. Put yourself in the mist of early morning. With the rest of the city still asleep or barely waking up, I was relishing my toast and corned beef, while Frank Sinatra sang that dirge of a ditty, “One for My Baby and One More for the Road.” It was followed by Christmas carols that sounded so sad at those hours.
Iloilo is one lovely place for a film festival. The city feels like one contiguous location for a shoot. The old houses are plentiful and the marketplaces look like they never moved out of the past. In the public market stands a coffee shop that, I was informed, is a meeting place for journalists, filmmakers and artists. There in that coffee shop, one can have a choice of mild, regular, or strong brewed coffee.
There is an overall feeling of grandeur, a bigness that hugs and welcomes in Iloilo. If the city is a film, it would be a sweeping melodrama, with lots of action and a hint of horror and nostalgia.
There were two films I managed to watch given the busy schedule we had: Raymund Salao’s Dalitan and Kyle Fermindoza’s Manggagarab. Both had their premiere in the Cinema 7 of SM City Iloilo.
To be candid, I was surprised with the gloss of Raymund’s film. Munding, as he was fondly addressed by Elvert, was my tour guide for a day.
He was fun and managed to hide his anxiety as his film was nearing its first screening that day, the second of December.
Dalitan, which literally means “poisonus” or “venomus,” is a heist and a caper, which managed to engage the audience that night. There was no awkward moment in the fight scenes. The audience was the better judge that night: Some false moves or corny action and laughter instead of tensed silence would have ensued. Remove the Ilonggo dialogue and you could take the film as one of the better action films made.
Outside the cinema, I saw Raymund with a young guy in jacket. The latter turned out to be the menacing, long-haired guy in the film. In person, he looked young after having shorn the long hair.
There was another long-haired guy in the festival—Kyle Fermindoza. Lean and youthful looking, Kyle is the director and lead of Manggagarab, a film about witch-slayers. I use the term “slayer” because earlier, I had shown footages of Yojiro Takita’s Ashura, a post-modern take on the Buddhist notion of hell and passion. Takita is the director of the acclaimed Departures.
As with Raymund, looks can be deceiving when it comes to regarding Kyle. Self-effacing and very soft-spoken, Kyle, who plays the witch-killer, transforms himself into a strong-jawed and muscled avenger onscreen, Half-seriously, I told Elvert that Kyle must be the new sex symbol of Ilonggo cinema—that is, if there was one year ago.
In Kyle’s narrative, witches are feral. They fight humans and eat them. When they run, they are ape-like in agility.
Dalitan and Manggagarab make uncanny use of sound and music. If these two films are an indicator of the future, then regional films are moving from the languorous and poetic to more visceral filmmaking. These are heady times for regional, independent cinema. As for Patrick and I, we had the privilege to conduct our lecture-workshop in the cinematheque of the University of the Philippines Visayas. The structure has the feel of 1950s movie palaces. The chairs are from an old moviehouse. Posters of films during the heydays of Hollywood gild the walls to the screening room.
CineKasimanwa runs for 17 days beginning December 1 and covers the entire Panay Island, which is composed of Iloilo, Antique, Aklan, Capiz and Guimaras. The poster of the festival includes the name of Bacolod. On the festival poster, a water buffalo with an antler stares from a blue field. This singular mascot may well stand for the beast that is CineKasimanwa threatening to run across the entire island. Like the beast that doesn’t look like any other animal, the festival in Iloilo refuses to be defined it seems and, certainly, strong enough not to be tamed by other festivals.
CineKasimanwa takes its name from “banwa,”which denotes a town, location or community. The festival celebrates diversity and kinship in the region. It is suppored by the Film Development Council of the Philippines, National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Department of Tourism and various local government units and educational institutions.
