AN interesting project under the National Commission for Culture and the Arts has recently been completed under its Sine Halaga Project. The products are short films made by selected filmmakers who received grants to do films that will contain one or a complex of values upheld and recognized by human groups or communities in the country.
The values did not come as some mystical concepts but were products of research systematically identifying—and updating—values that run dominant across social classes. The task of course was never easy. Studies of values are complex because one has to assume that a monolithic set of values is not anymore a realistic way to appraise what people consider important. And yet, a revisit of values yields often new ways of seeing the world around us, and how people see themselves in relation to that world or worlds.
The idea therefore for filmmakers to do films that are expected to showcase no less a human valuation was akin to asking artists to tread the dangerous and sensitive path between propaganda and the arts, between being a preacher and being a free spirit. It was (and I rarely use this word) a challenge for these filmmakers therefore to create narratives that will satisfy cinematic requirements and, at the same time, be excitingly and freshly instructive.
Being one of the jurors who had to go through the respective story treatment and screenplay, I was frankly excited not only how the artists/filmmakers could shake off the notion of conjuring messages and at the same time navigating the difficulties of creating cinemas in the pandemic. The latter was our worry. Life is short and art is fleeting, alright, but we were not ready to lose life over the arts.
Well, the results are here and they are available through Vimeo for everyone to see. The landscapes are varied, the approaches disparate. If I were to divide the films that made it to the list, I sense a very strong dichotomy between filmmakers who observe from outside and those who allow the audience to be swept by the stories within. The latter can be disarming.
Are there clear tendencies from these new voices? I would not call them tendencies but rather well-developed positions against linear storytelling. Quirkiness seems organic to all but the keen eye for the mythic or folkloric are exuberantly present. The marked differences between the filmmakers who employ the myths of the land in which they site their cinema and those who openly utilize the “native” beliefs as trope and technique to advance their stories are where the filmic excellence can be located, examined, even questioned.
We can begin with Zig Dulay, the lowland poet of the Aeta indigene. Dulay makes films that are as soft-spoken as his persona (if you know him) as they can be deceptively simple. In a cinematography that spends significant time away from the actors as if observing them as well as respecting them, the filmmaker reminds us how films are really images first, sound second, and the dialogues mediating spaces (contour, expansiveness, mystery) and time. When Dulay gives us close-up shots of Itan, the boy who wants to go to school, it is a camera that never judges. It is up to us to comment, to pause and to listen when the children shout over the mountains, past the valleys the loudest prayers and wishes because their god may not be able to hear at all their words. Zig Dulay is singular in this aspect.
Where silence and calmness are the virtue in Dulay’s Black Rainbow, Ralston Jover gives fear a grating and menacing sound, and suffuses a black color to a life that is bereft of stability. In Hadlok (Scared), a man who is left behind because his wife has to work abroad assumes the role of the mother to his two daughters. A neighbor threatens them every day to the point of blocking their entrance and exit to their own home. The youngest daughter believes in aswang (translated as “ghoul” in the film), turning a terrifying figure into a trope for freedom and spaces. The aswang is the ultimate threat, not the neighbor and not the society. Where problem of human habitations is not addressed by the local government and where the policemen resort to incarceration, Jover tells us the supernatural means is the scary strategy and the aswang can be a solution.
Tender—and most human—is the aswang in the universe of Arden Rod Condez, where Dandansoy, a song of farewell and return, turns into a metaphor and a moment. Here is an old mother, frail and alone. She has no way to contact her daughter who works abroad and avoids not only coming home but recognizing her birthright. The mother then asks a young man to do an “ermail” (e-mail) for her. It is for her daughter to know that she is going home to Payaw to die. But the old woman needs a companion and the young man in the Internet café is that person.
If the filmmaker is only doing a send-up of this creature called aswang, then the film fails. But, no, the filmmaker has deconstructed and reconstructed this hideous being into a mother whose wings become frail if one finds no meaning anymore in flying. What is the lesson here? We have never allowed the aswang on-screen to soar as a symbol and a sweet subversion. We have latched on to the Western concepts of horror and terror, forgetting that our own notions of the terrifying borders on the insidiously caring. Diaspora, after all, and forgetting loved ones are really forms of witchcraft.
Sine Halaga is organized and facilitated through the Negros Foundation. Elvert C. Bañares, himself a recognized experimental filmmaker, is the national project director; Tanya B. Lopez is the project manager. Both serve as supervising producers for the project. The review of the other films in Sine Halaga will continue next week.