CINEMALAYA

While I really wanted to see all the films during the Cinemalaya festival, I was able to buy the only remaining available tickets for "Dagsin", "Kusina," "Hiblang Abo", "Shorts A", "Shorts B", two Asian Films, plus Lav Diaz's "Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis." Quite expensive if you ask me, but this was the only time I could really watch a lot of Cinemalaya films so I endured the pocket drain. However, I wasn't so satisfied, that is, as a simple movie goer.

Dagsin is supposed to be heavy and yet, I felt something was lacking in the gravitas. If not for the ever brilliant Tommy Abuel Dagsin would have suffered more. Judy Ann was exemplary in Kusina, but Kusina itself failed to give me that moviegoer high. I didn't like the Kusina template of stage and film fusion. There is too much going on that deserved great cinematography. I guess, I simply was looking for the Film-ic quality. Kusina's textuality bored me. The kitchen/cooking/food motif occupied too much space in the narrative that its symbolic quality just got lost in the monotony and the repetitions. (I was told that Mercury is Mine handled the same motif more cleverly, so I regret that I didn't see it). And of course, because of the fusion thing, the mis-en-scene is obviously so staged and although I can understand the studio effect, I have long favored exterior and interior spaces interspersing and giving a much needed exposition of characterizations of interior and exterior selves. But maybe that's the point of the film, that there is agonizing interiority that the character in Kusina is unable to exteriorize, and thus, her space doesn't expand and she dies without ever going beyond the boundaries of her safely defined space.

The other characters in Kusina could have been better cast. All of them are stereotypes, with strained albeit contrived dialogue, formula types of formula friends, with their wardrobe amplifying them as formulaic constructs.

In the past, I didn't see Rene Villanueva's Hiblang Abo as play, so I treated the film as play, and did not go look for anything other than the nuance of the text as would be delivered in a play. This is a mistake of course, because film is a visual medium and the nuances that are supposed to be read in the subtexts of a play, the supposed mystery of each personal struggle, ceased as nuanced puzzles and became apparent in the visual montage. I also wondered about the film's casting of one and the same actor for the younger versions of the three old men in the story. I offer myself the answer that there is no symbolic meaning in that casting after all, it was just Indie budgeting constraints which led to that decision. But I hope I'm wrong and just plain stupid in not seeing the reason/meaning behind this choice.

I found the shorts entertaining, but predictable too in the Filipino-indie-shorts tradition (The good ones had a twist of course, like in an O' Henry story). However, I saw great promise in Direk Quesada's film Pektus. For me, Pektus was excellent for a low budget Indie. The pace, the editing, the mis-en-scene and the acting are all well deliberated. But mostly, I like the idea of found chances as opposed to missed opportunities. For me, that was a very ethical point that isn't submerged but also isn't preached. I had an aha! moment in this film, like an epiphany of sorts.

The Asian film from Kazakstan, The Stranger is superb. The cinematography is awesome and the visual footage succeeded immensely in projecting the isolation, the strangeness, the utter difference of one man from the rest of the population. Then as usual, the film from Afghanistan is terribly depressing, but the acting is superb. This film will ever remind me that there is much more that needs to be done for women. A film can only expose. How long will this situation of female subjugation last in other parts of the world such as Afghanistan? What can people do? How can a film make people responsible? The face of that woman in Afghanistan, who is with skill, but whose skill doesn't count; who's only value is in the dowry she gets from marriage; who's recourse against such arranged marriage is begging on the streets for survival -- that face needs a response.

Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis (Lullaby in Sorrowful Mystery) turned out to be easier to watch (eight hours)  than Norte Sa Dulo ng Kasaysayan (four hours). The film has a linear narrative that focused on the days of Gregoria De Jesus's search for the body of Andres Bonifacio. The almost mythical telling involving three creatures of the forest, all Tikbalangs, problematizes the still unsolved mystery of Bonifacio's un-recovered body. Considering Gregoria De Jesus's youth at the time of that event in Philippine history, and the circumstances around her capture and her husband's arrest by the Filipino soldiers, the film succeeds in projecting an ancient, almost forgotten, quite anachronistic, and not even a footnote of a question in our national memory. The issue resonates however given that we still have "the disappeared" in our midst, and most of them are rumored heroes as well.

Lav Diaz shoots the entire film in black and white, but the story is not black and white at all. References to the Japanese film classics in the visual narration style is Diaz homage to filmmaking at its core, an exposition of soul and conscience using scarcely edited and prolonged real time photography. (The only downside in watching this film is when somebody, lulled by the scarcely edited footage and getting impatient, started to munch that crispy chips or popcorn and this moviegoer was distracted from certain deep ruminations.)

El Filibusterismo's Isagani and Basilio interpellate Diaz's interior monologue about history. In the end, Basilio, the hero of the novel, lives with all his unanswered questions and lost idealism, while Bonifacio, the hero of the revolution dies in the hands of the men he supposedly led. And the Gregoria De Jesus's of our nation's story? They will simply have to live through the mysteries, endure the superstitions, cast off the demons and tikbalangs of their desperate expectations and lull themselves to dreamless sleep.