By this time, the Cultural Center of the Philippines would have been packed already with cineastes. But like all film festivals, the Cinemalaya 2020 opens not in that tomb-like monument by the sea but online. A virus has something to do with that.
Some of the entries in the competitive section have made the rounds of other film concourses and regional festivals. These films, which come from the periphery, are outright winners in their fresh vision and daring. I have known some of these films in competitions, where I had the opportunity to sit as part of the jury. Here are some of them:
Tokwifi talks about a 1950s star—a mestiza—caught inside a TV set. A man from Bontoc takes care of her even as the star realizes he does not know how to kiss. Dense in narrative, Tokwifi nevertheless peels off layer after layer a discourse of identities, loss of one’s homeland, and cultural change, leaving in its most pristine form a tale of love and nostalgia for the vanishing. The bonus of this piece is the knowledge that the narrator—the filmmaker Carla Pulido Ocampo—migrated from the lowland and relocated to express a respect for the other cultures. Who has the right to imagine the indigene? Everyone says Ocampo, for therein lies the search of the self that is expanded to selves. Then and only then can we talk of a nation. In the meantime, let us be content with the story of lovely stars falling from the skies and beguiling us with their borrowed allure. The kiss is optional.
Utwas (literally, “to emerge” in Hiligaynon) makes us gasp for breath for the cinematography that captures the endlessness of the sea. The blue expanse provides the backdrop for a young boy trying to learn how to dive and stay long under the sea. His mentor is his father, a fisherman who will pass on that work to his son. A great portion of the film shows us also how the sea, the provider of bounty, can be finite given the narrowmindedness of man. The young boy will soon discover in the depth the mystery of the sea that is no more about its preservation than its destruction. The tandem of Kat Sumagaysay and Richard Jeroui Salvadico is behind Utwas.
Pabasa sa Pasyon examines a cultural phenomenon without the heavy handedness of a free TV documentary. Visual and dramatic, the images pile on images stressing that there is no anachronism but only beliefs and more beliefs in contrapuntal rhythms with each other. The filmmaker, Hubert Tibi, has an eye for the discordant and the mordant: characters dressed in costumes that approximate ancient periods, the Cross always a silent presence before chanters and believers, and the singing that dares us to see in it the story of a God and those who attempt to maintain their belief in the inscrutability of the divine.
The other films are curated for exhibition. These films are the following:
Buding ang Babayi nga Naglutaw, by the sheer title of it, enchants. It is a film about a woman who floats. The town “fool” or addict sees it. Other people witness Buding levitating in her room.
Even Buding’s husband sees her up there, the body ethereal (for how else does one explain a human being countering gravity?) almost reaching the ceiling of her home. Rashomonesque in technique, this short film avoids the theme of truth being relative (Kurosawa Akira already explored the poetry of that matter). What Buding does is to bring the mystery of the event to the theme of a woman neglected by a husband and this small society who takes for granted wives pushed to the margins. The film is graced by sincere and engaging performances. Mark Raymund L. Garcia, a writer, directs Buding. The said film is a product of a progressive film community in Sagay City in Negros Occidental.
Kyle Jumayne Francisco is a master of silences. In his previous work, Whereabouts, the love between two young men becomes the greatest unsaid. In Gulis (translated as “Lines”), the story revolves around the difficult story of a young man who has HIV. Coming out is enough a terrible ordeal; now this young man is about to tell his father that he is infected with the condition that is oftentimes linked to the promiscuity of particular sexual orientation. In a series of framings where the young man and his father are demarcated, one feels that it is not only the young man that is isolated but also his father. The late Menggie Cobarrubias, one of the early victims of Covid-19, is a compelling presence in this film.
Tarang (translated as “Life’s Pedal”) is the latest work of Arvin Alindogan Belarmino. Here, we are once more in the neighborhood of pimps and prostitutes. A husband in this film peddles his wife. The same man would approach another man to ask if his daughter is “ripe for the business.” One may think this short film is again one of those exercises in poverty porn but think again. Life is pornographic in Belarmino’s lenses: society f–ks people!