EIGHT short films and three documentaries made it to the list of nominees for the Gawad Urian Best Short Film and Documentary.
The short film as a form and medium is important in that it remains the gauge for understanding the pulse of the peripheries. The themes that preoccupy the filmmakers are elements that are rarely portrayed with such candor and sincerity by Manila-based filmmakers looking to the provinces and towns as a fieldsite for their cinema. Here are the short films and their contents:
Zig Dulay, who has already developed a full-length feature on the Aeta in Paglipay, visits once more the same community in Black Rainbow. He introduces us to Itan, a 12-year-old boy who dreams of becoming a lawyer so that he can understand the documents that are imposed on his community, pushing them to give up their ancestral lands on the mountain so that mining can take place.
A winner in the Cinema International Film Festival is Trishtan Perez’s short film, i get so sad sometimes. It is the story of a high-school teenager who spends time on the Internet chatting with a man who has not revealed his face to the young boy. Shot in Pagadian City and Cagayan de Oro, the tale about the duplicitous reach of social media is cautionary.
For Adjani Arumpac in Count, counting is a way of coping with the lockdown. The schools are closed but, at home, her child counts and learns about equations. Loss is known by counting; health care is not subject to counting. As danger escalates outside, inside our homes, plants are being nurtured, cats are born.
It is the 1970s. Martial Law rules. News circulates that Skylab, the remains of a space capsule, is falling back to Earth, its service to space studies finished. The anxiety over an object hurtling down from outer space is almost poetic as told from the eyes of two schoolboys in a time when people are expecting the end of the world. In Chuck Escasa’s Skylab, they discover though that the catastrophe is happening much closer to where they live.
In Keith Deligero’s Kalayo (Fire), a man running chances upon a P100 bill. He checks its temperature: health (and wealth) is always seen as either inflamed with fever or not, safe to touch or not. From above, like an omniscient eye, drone shots provide us a world in flames at many points, with men in white entering homes. It is as if the Earth is on emergency.
Pam Miras’s Lonely Girls follows a woman, alone, going through the motion of yoga, or some forms of meditation. She is alone in the house but an energy in wispy shadows comes around, tactile. She is at a loss. She seems to control her body but her soul is somewhere.
The man in Kyle Fermindoza’s story is in solitude with the universe and the primordial shapes of nature around him. He walks the space and the ground; he makes paper boats and lets them float on the water. Is this hope or despair? No one knows. The short film is called K[u]adrado.
Let us start by saying Dandansoy is the story of an honest-to-goodness “aswang” who enters an Internet cafe to seek help from a young boy. She wants to send an e-mail to her daughter who is abroad. The young boy goes with the aswang in her journey to reach the place where all aswangs die.
The three documentaries nominated this year are traditional in approach in many ways but the forms adopted by the documentarians do not diminish the contribution of these films to truth-seeking. Here are the documentaries and their summary:
Venice Atienza is with a young boy who is spending his last summer at home, near the sea. The village is called Karihatag, a place where boys are destined to be fishermen. Reyboy, however, will leave the place, be in the city, and study. They—the narrator and the boy—spend the days gazing at clouds and wondering about the stars at night. This is Reyboy’s home and the simple, little things around it—the days, the water, the crabs. There is also the talk of storms and climate change. Then, there is the boy bidding goodbye to this home.
The Right to Life brings us into the society of the indigenes. For a long time in isolation, the Manobo tribe escapes and finds themselves in an evacuation center. The virus comes and forces them into lockdown. Their dreams remain: for their children to be educated and for the community to survive with food. Almost a contradiction, these people are caught on camera wearing masks, an invasion into their ethnicity and notion of well-being.
Roel Hoang Manipon continues his documentation of vanishing arts and practices in Lepa and other watercrafts and boat building practices of the Sama people of Tawi-Tawi. Used both for fishing and traveling, the lepa is also the home for a family. Crafting these boats is passed on from father to son, from one generation to another.
The Gawad Urian will go live on November 11, 2022. Details will be announced soon.