A FILM program faculty member has crafted an open letter to Vice President Leni Robredo, as expressed through the visual medium more than a month after the latter announced her candidacy for the nation’s top post.
Maria Leonor, a short documentary written and directed by Seymour Barros Sanchez, is part of “To Differ Digitally 2 [TDD 2]: Love and Dissent in the Time of Pandemic” online art exhibition from the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde Center for Campus Art (CCA), which is headed by Architect Gerry Torres and the DLS-CSB New Media Cluster (NMC) led by Associate Dean Maria Sharon Mapa Arriola.
Sanchez’s work, which is an offshoot of his full-length documentary “Leading Lady” funded by Monash University Business School in Australia, probes into the Filipino voter’s psyche, and asks why Robredo continues to be one of the most trolled public officials in the country.
Collaborating with Sanchez in the project are camerapersons Ariel Alarcon, Charles Cajayon and Kristin Joy Bactad Jor; sound recordist Darwin Novicio; music composer Tonton Hernandez (with Ituloy ang Laban), voiceover narrator Eloisa Espino-Sanchez; editor, sound/graphic designer and editor John Lanbert Rafols; and creative consultant Richard Soriano Legaspi.
Sanchez’s other project, Double Pandemic, Deadly Combination, is also part of TDD 2. In the short infotainment video, teenager Elizah Bacani warns about the danger of trans fatty acids, or trans fats, especially in the time of the pandemic.
The video, which attempts to describe trans fats in simple terms, was originally written by Sanchez under the “[Un]Covering Trans Fats Media Training and Fellowship Program Cycle 3” hosted by ImagineLaw and Probe Media Foundation Inc.
TDD 2 features live action films, animation, photographs, 2-D and 3-D models as well as rigs, texts, audio, applications, software, graphic design, and illustrations. The show looks at the digital landscape as a platform to communicate constructive protest based on love and empathy. This is the second time in four years the CCA is organizing this kind of exhibit with NMC faculty.
According to curator Karen Ocampo-Flores, TDD 2 is “not only a fresh opportunity to deliver messages of social commentary through the digital medium; it is also a timely response to conditions wrought by the present scourge of [the pandemic.]”
