It’s the second year of the pandemic. Not that we are celebrating affliction but filmmakers are doing a take two for the ECQ this 2022. Dubbed the Eksena Cinema Quarantine: Covid-19 Filmmakers’ Diaries 2, this project will feature 16 films chronicling how people have responded to restrictions like lockdowns and the varied if already confusing alert levels issued during the pandemic.
These 16 films were made by filmmakers Joseph Andrew Abello, Roberto Acusar Jr., Reyan Christian Amacna, Ara Mina Amor, Mervine Anjelo Aquino, Brian Jonathan Bringuer, Demie Dangla, Jean Claire Dy, Christopher Gozum, Xavier Axl Roncesvalles, Jarell Serencio, Alyssa Mariel Suico, Kevin Van Sulitas, Arlie Sweet Sumagaysay and Richard Jeroui Salvadico, Hubert Tibi, and Jasper Villasis.
The following are capsule reviews of these films:
Not a Short Film, the work of Joseph Abello, ushers us into how the filmmaker responds to the pandemic. Can the body endure being alone? Can nature be there to support man in his natural state, which is the body in motion?
Roberto Acusar’s Pangamut Gayd begins with a long shot of a mountain, and a habal- habal winding its way through a dirt road. Comic is the character but tragic is the reality about how we persist to teach despite the difficulty of making connections—online or even physically.
A blind man is isolated because he has been infected with a virus. With plastic sheet protecting the world against him, the man talks with another person at the other side of the sheet. At the end of their quarantine, the two contemplate the world: the blind man listening to the sea and the other person narrating the beauty that can be seen in Reyan Amacna’s Pinitik.
A sound brings us into the room of a young man who is playing with his pet, a rooster. Crafted as a kind of parody, Pisti Pandemic by Ara Mina Amor pokes fun at the toxicity of some people during times of emergency, which includes the tendency to hoard.
Efforts are made to deal with how the virus has impacted on commerce, with actions indicating how selling and buying went on against the health protocols imposed. Comes the realization: the problem is not about the virus but about capitalism in this work by Mervine Aquino, called Palengke Day.
Brian Bringuer’s Mel begins with nostalgia: a vinyl record of a past brings back together a family once more. Drugs not of the healing kind and a virus afflicting the land isolates only sadness but never promises any happy ending. This tribute to a mother and her son allows us to rethink what it is to be locked down with memories.
Demie Dangla’s Things I’ll Tell You creates poetry about all kinds of quarantines through fleeting images of travel and escape. What saves this meditation on the pandemic that seems to spiral down to bleakness is the mind pointing to the power of the state used not to solve the riddle of the virus but to insist on its function of control.
Structured like a lecture and epistolary, Jean Dy’s film, A Ritual of Affliction, combines live action with animation, expounding on concepts dear to structuralists and ritualists, adding doodles cut and pasted to ruminate on liminality. The lockdown shatters all notions of stability but brings also possibilities.
In the documentary of Christopher Gozum, Agno: Memories of a Forgotten River, great floods connect rivers and streams with histories of deaths and politics. Martial rule is remembered together with the destruction of nature as survival and disappearances.
Virus appears to threaten religion in a place where the church, the Dolorosa and the annual procession are as constant as faith. Xavier Roncesvalles lifts simulacra from cinema as a fan becomes both the icon of fame and faith. Nothing can stop a devotee from wearing the vestment of the Sorrowful Virgin as she turns into Anima Sola, “The Lonely Soul,” in a procession that must go on in quest of truth and love, or in quarantine of faithless lies.
Alyssa Suico’s See Us Come Together begins like a product placement then turns into a surreal critique of labor practice. The workers form a union and become empowered. Then the pandemic comes. Labor and the welfare of workers are more crucial than the afflictions brought about by the virus.
In My Day by Kevin Sulitas, the wide screen is gone; in its place is a small frame. Instead of screen presence, we are feeling a screen absence. Detachment is the order of the day. And there is no way out from a regime that kills.
The department of education issues a rule on modules and people are lost. But in Arlie Sumagaysay and Richard Jeroui Salvadico’s Mga Handum na Nasulat sa Baras, three young boys of school age take over the role of parents and even dream for them. Hope is an ideology in this film.
The river is always a metaphor for ecological health or destruction where purity and dirt commingle for eternity. In Hubert Tibi’s Ilog Bikol, the river is a place where used face masks are thrown and, floating, are gathered by a little girl who sees them as playthings and not virus settlements.
Sampung Minuto is the time limitation given to filmmaker to make their point about how they would remember the world in isolation when societies demand a reckoning. For Jasper Villasis, moments are metaphors in his film.
If loneliness and isolation can be Instagrammable, then Jarell Serencio’s Paris sa akong kasingkasing is the equivalent of beauty in sadness. Is being locked out a choice or a matter of geography and the pandemic? The NCCA-National Committee on Cinema still in partnership with the University of St. La Salle initiates ECQ2 which will feature two omnibus films out of the 16 selected films.
According to Rolando Tolentino, present chair of the NCCA-NCC: “In its second year, Eksena Cinema Quarantine is not only a showcase of the best of regional filmmaking but more so, a testament to Filipino filmmakers’ commitment to film as art and Philippine society.”