SIXTEEN filmmakers from Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao were engaged by the National Committee on Cinema of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) to document their responses to the quarantine using the art form they are expected to struggle with in this age of isolation and virus.
What did our filmmakers do in the quarantine? What cinema can be produced in the lockdown?
When the films were completed, I received a letter from the committee through one of its members, film scholar Ramon Garilao, requesting if I can do a quick review of the works of the 16 filmmakers.
Here are my capsule reviews of ECQ: Covid-19 Filmmakers’ Diaries.
We begin with Glenn Barit’s quest for an oven in Walang Katapusang Hurno (The Endless Oven), the source of all creation in a time when all things are put on hold. A grant to make a film brings guilt because we never think of art as crucial to living. Actors disappear in this film because drawings on chins are enough to create humanity. Music moves in circle. A kitten is found but later dies.
In the home of Zurich Chan’s Soul Fish is caught in the fishbowl. Except for the shrieking baby and the father and son talking about chocolate, the main movement is in the fish swimming all by its lonesome in the aquarium. The family is preparing to attend a birthday party, which turns out to be online. The son asks: Where do we go? No one moves among the humans; the fish does not need to move. It is a being of enclosure.
Pam Miras in Lonely Girls pays tribute to a kind of loneliness and the loss of loveliness in the hair that is fast disappearing. A woman does yoga but each time she makes a position, another being manifests its presence by an unwelcome touch. A person appears and disappears; the woman feels she has no control over her body. An affliction is around her but it is beyond her mind and body.
Carlo Catu’s happiness and sorrow are all in one person as he declares Mama Joy is My Mother. Intensely personal, the filmmaker allows the camera to invade his private space. Catu’s film renders Death as the most expected but also the most unwelcome of all, a parallel to the insurmountable deaths brought about by the pandemic.
A man running brings us back to Earth. It is Keith Deligero, filmmaker and actor in his own flame—Kalayo (Flame). He chances upon a P100 bill but instead of picking it up, he takes out a thermometer to find out if the money has a fever and, maybe, infected with a virus. He runs on. Houses with lights are seen from above; a city with ambulances running here and there, and men in white protective gears form an army out to clean the cities.
The man in Kyle Fermindoza’s Kuadrado (Framed) is alone with the firmament and the sea, the primary elements of life. He constructs and attends to the most basic of shapes: squares and rectangles. He scribbles words on papers, which are made into boats. This is the world in lockdown where paper boats take on power and hope, because there is nothing else.
Arbi Barbarona in the Art of Life revisits the subject of his documentary. He finds them in evacuation centers. Long before the virus, they were already in isolation to protect themselves from the other forces. Then the virus comes, and the masks and the shield and the alcohol invade their ethnicity. A woman recites the epic and we believe she will live on with the community.
Guillermo Ocampo has the right to think positively in From Itogon to London. A natural calamity—typhoons causing landslides—kills an extractive industry like mining. Miners become coffee planters. Things are going great until the lockdown but coffee and trading connect people. The Itogon Coffee reaches London and becomes a hot commodity. There is humor and hope, even entrepreneurship, in isolation.
Bagane Fiola films in a time of uncertainty in Alimungaw (literally, confusion or uncertainty) where the only certainty is the condition of the quarantine. The filmmaker cannot stand behind the camera, he goes in front of it while the people in the location makes sure they are safe from the outsider. Once more cinema is the intruder, and the place it documents is the threatened insider.
Somewhere in Antique, Arden Rod Condez with his Random People blurs the line between the lenses of his camera and the tender, loving, sensual, candid shots of couples in love. Then death comes: an old man with his single flower and candle is in the cemetery kissing the grave of the loved one, not for the last time but so long as he lives.
Hiyas Baldemor Bagabaldo’s Kneading Nothing begins with an all-seeing eye. An animation is the only sign of life. Then comes an enumeration of all types of quarantine, as we travel through time and space. Fireworks become an expanding universe, and a voice asks: What’s beyond? The outer space matters because the inner spaces are full of deaths. Jagged lines crisscross; the colors are sharp.
Akong Pinalangga (My Beloved) is Julienne Ilagan’s rhapsody about separation and connection. With and without the virus, we have developed already the capacity to link up with our loved ones, across the sea and over distances. But people die and we cannot be with each other. We look across the screen and wish each other well, shed a tear or two, or even deny we are crying.
Or, we could explode as Khavn de la Cruz does in Gunam-Gunam x Guni-Guni (Reverie x Imagination), a loud, public peroration on education in the new normal. A voice of an elderly woman—an educator perhaps—mouths lessons and concepts that fade into senselessness. She would not stop. Children run around learning on their own, inventing their own modules, independent learners in world gone mad and free.
Mark Garcia in Nawong (Face) stages a world where figures in deathly masks move around the Earth. They preside over rituals of decay. On a deserted road, three of them walk as days are scattered about—as the period of disease goes on. A voice recites wishes and looks to a new mask of new dreams and mysteries.
Kristian Sendon Cordero revisits a film long finished and uses old footages to meditate on the tale of the Ibong Adarna. In his home where books continue to tell tales in natural isolation, the legend begins with a mystical egg. Women chant the story and conclude how the cure from the Bird is not only meant for Kings. Then the egg is cooked. In the retelling, Nora Aunor with a muted scream is a found footage, like the myth.
The solution for Adjani Arumpac is to Count. Her immediate response to the pandemic is the memory of numbers and the act of counting. Around her schools are closed but her child learns about equation. Loss is measured by numbers and not by health care. But we plant seeds, because from nature, trees and other futures grow. Domesticity comes in the form of a cat giving birth. A man climbs a staircase and a storm comes upon us.
ECQ: Covid-19 Filmmakers’ Diaries is a project of the NCCA-National Committee on Cinema, in collaboration with the University of Saint La Salle (USLS Artists Hub). It will be launched online through its Facebook page on January 22, Friday, 6 pm. Two omnibus films will be shown on demand on Vimeo on January 26.