THE pandemic has not stopped filmmaking altogether. In the periphery, filmmakers give me this sense that they merely paused for the first few months of the lockdown and it was back to fleshing out their imagination, taking slices of realities from the pre-filmic universe and turning them into movies.
As a film critic and film educator, I became part of two short film festivals and one film education workshop in this month alone. The two festivals took place in Ozamiz, in Northern Mindanao, and Buhi, an interior town in Camarines Sur, respectively; the film appreciation and education workshop happened in the frontier city of Tabaco, in Albay.
Facilitated by Eric Basmayor Valeriano, the film appreciation workshop was in preparation for the first Tabaco City Short Film Festival. Thus, the name Pelikulab, with the workshop serving as pre-production. The filmmakers come from the different offices of the city. To be held in June, the films will take the place of the musical presentations that the government would usually hold for the fiesta of the city. Behind this great idea is the incumbent mayor, Krisel Lagman Luistro, herself a passionate advocate of arts and culture in the region.
The cineANIMO Film Festival of La Salle University in Ozamiz follows the new template of regional film festivals: it now integrates in its competition an Open Category, which means that any filmmaker from other parts of the country can join the concourse. The festival retains a student category, which is not limited to the place that sponsors the competition.
Chairing the jury was a privilege as it enabled me to access new works both from professional and amateur filmmakers. This term “amateur” is almost outdated given how skills, narrative styles and positionalities—both social and political—could not be correlated with a person being a beginning filmmaker or a veteran. Access to technologies and tales to tell has leveled the playing field already.
In Ozamiz, the plots of the short films ranged from philosophical to ecological, from the nostalgia and lack of closure in the repressive 1980s to the localities and their cultures.
Basura, from Roberth Fuentes, was an exhilarating illustration of how garbage takes over the life of humans. The short film presents a man in a garbage site, whirling and writhing as if in a dance, as the plastic and cellophane fly out of the ground and stick to his body until he becomes a gyrating lump of garbage. All this time, the film would do a cut-to-cut look at the world of men and women using plastic in their lives, in livelihood, in food.
Copping the Best Film was Tugbang sa mga Buhat (literally, “As to Deeds,” which alludes to a gruesome act in the film). The film directed by Hiro Saint Joshua Apus documents the life of a man who assists women in child deliveries in a remote village. Dodong has a wife who is pregnant. Unknown to the wife, the husband also does abortion. Gripping, the story is well constructed, using old literary devices like foreboding and, in the absence of long dialogues, the film subsists on darkening horizons and a house bereft of lights. The realism of the performance was such that I had to ask the organizers whether the lead actors as well as the supporting ones were “actors” or residents of that remote barangay. You could almost smell the unwashed clothes of the pregnant woman and the husband and the dank, damp scent of the forest with ponds and streams black and stagnant. That was how realistic the look of the film was.
Then I was told the lead actors were played by Louie Logronio and Abby Gale Masambo-Bantayan, two government employees connected with the Tourism Council of Nabunturan, in Compostela Valley. Both were judged Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively. The next question was the location: where did they find such a desolate, distant place? Having been to Nabunturan, I was informed that the area was just near the town itself.
Buhi, where the second film festival had me as Chair of the Jurors, has always been described as an “interior” town. The inhabitants of the place prided themselves in that interiority and isolation. Imagined as it may be (there are now other routes by which one can reach the town), the lakeshore town with its piquant language has the right to that claim of singularity. That distinction is theirs to embrace; it makes their work—the films—magical. I should know: Buhi is the hometown of my father and it is part of me.
Three short films stood out in the competition: Asog (referring to the mountain that looms over the town, which is also the name given to pre-Spanish male shamans who dressed as women), Ing-ing (Whispers), and Lindeng (Shade, as of a tree).
Asog, directed by Jay Ramon Arroyo, looks into the sensitive issue of incest and male abuse. At the center of the story are the siblings—one is a girl and the other is a transwoman. In the film, the lake becomes a dark element from which the two would escape. It is significant to note how the LGBTQIA+ voices are alive among the youth of this town and in this film, compelling with the gritty performance of the lead actor/actress, Carl Anthony (Camarla) Gabalfin.
Ing-ing and Lindeng alert us to what bothers our young men and women. In Ing-ing, the young man hears voices and he does not know what to do with them. He feels alone and, in gracefully edited scenes, he ends up in spaces that are not within his control. The film was given a Special Mention certificate.
Lindeng is also about voices, and the shadows that haunt this young man. The terrifying thing is that he is conscious of the shifts in his behavior. He shares this one day to his friend who listens and never judges him. Confident with his narrative, the director relies on the traditional framing of the faces of these two friends whose candor also made them vulnerable.
Amid the brooding point-of-view often adopted by young filmmakers, the director and scriptwriter of Lindeng dared to take the less popular stand of how the young do possess human agency, and that they can act on their fate. The lead, Angelo Espiritu, and the supporting actor, Jose Dominic Gabalfin, were both declared the best in their category. Declared Best Director was John Mark Laguardia who directed Lindeng.
Ely was voted online as the People’s Choice.
The Nakabuhi Short Film Festival is a project of Project Susog, in collaboration with Savage Mind: Arts, Books, Cinema, Kamarin Art Gallery, Fundacion Luis Cabalquinto, and the Local Government Unit of Buhi, led by Mayor Margie Moran-Aguinillo.