THIS is the second part of my capsule review, as promised, of the other films in Sine Halaga, a project of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) working with and through the Negros Cultural Foundation.
SUMMER, the season of transitions for boys, grounds these two films: Carlo Natividad Ortiz’s Masalimuot ya Tiyagew (translated as Summer Blues) and Manie Magbanua’s Ugbos Ka Bayabas (Tender Leaves of Guava). Where Magbanua gives us a humorous, tender and loving tribute to a past unique in its depiction of a vanishing rite of circumcision that ties all men (and women, for that matter) to a vanishing community, Ortiz conflates memory with loss, rejection and with death. Did the other boy really drown, or was it a denial of a remembrance too tough to remember even up to now?
Grit and sorrow unite the films of Noel Escondo and Jordan de la Cruz. Escondo’s Lorna is about a mother seemingly resigned to her situation but in tiny details, we see her as more outspoken compared to the husband. A tragedy takes place and here is where Escondo’s gender politics becomes the film’s moving grace. Lorna sets out to sea in defiance of the old tradition that only men are charged with the labor of fishing. A different relationship happens in de la Cruz’s Salog nin Diklom (Black River) where no gender wins in the tragic fate of a woman. The river of life turns into a river of darkness in the life of a young couple, where the woman suffers from the malady that very few people do not talk about and many people do not understand. Escondo dares to make his film in black and white, underscoring the raw realities of poverty; de la Cruz edits his way to a narrative that leans toward the implicit.
Literalness is magic in Carlo Obispo’s 13 Feet. With a color palette that is limited mostly to grays and the somber, Obispo’s tale tells us about a man who saves a child from drowning. As days pass, he begins to see a transformation in his body. This is about man as the steward of nature; in the film, it bravely claims how we should become of the sea if we are to save anyone from it.
The monomyth gets critical readings in Christopher Gozum’s Mina’s Family History and James Allen Fajardo’s Looking for Rafflesias and Other Fleeting Things. Both filmmakers defy the notion of a single myth and venture into articulating the real gift of the past as myth (in Gozum’s film) and transgressing the myth as extant tales (in Fajardo’s). Mina descends from a long line of healers. Negating this lineage or forgetting about it is the filmmaker’s discourse on the power and value of heritage. More problematic is the created mythical universe of Fajardo where a tikbalang, long acknowledged as a trickster, is deconstructed as a murderous monster. The young man said to be the offspring of the tikbalang hides the flower from any explorer but in the end, he swims with the “enemy,” the American. Let’s do a post-colonial reading: when the boy named Gubat, he of the forest and, ipso facto, the protector of the forest, befriends the botanist, does this make him a conspirator to forest exploitation? Is the tale confused? Or are our histories really that confused?
The past is alive in the film Sa Balay ni Papang (In My Father’s House), where immediately the title itself locates the father of a cinematic tradition—the beginning of some cinemas (or theater and other arts)—in one person, Peque Gallaga. Directed by Kurt Soberano, the film freely moves between the past and the present, the artifice and the reality, nurturing the many traits of Gallaga’s cinema where boundaries are wildly breached and reconstructed as well as re-imagined.
A fairy tale, albeit of the trenchant type, lives on in one film. This is Richard Soriano Legaspi’s Bakit Ako Sinusundan ng Buwan (Moon Under My Feet). The film is sheer poetry, frame after frame, scene after scene. All the elements of romance are here—the moon, the pastoral view, a love story.
Then comes the social phenomenon of being an OFW. And yet the film never for a moment leaves the gaze of a man returning to a present that is not his anymore and a mother the constant, ever-present, guiding “moon.” As with all the other films (and this is credit goes to the writers and directors), the audience would really never know where Bakit is leading to. But good films should have signposts. The sign is there in that enchantingly quiet space where Lino, the returning son, after inspecting their old ruin of a home, walks to his mother and, in a gesture uncommon in people of that social class, grants the old woman the softest of kiss. To this, the mother moves her lips as if in a prayer and the camera grazes over the icons on a poor altar.
All main actors in all the films of Sine Halaga are compelling, a realization that in this pandemic or in the future, we do not need the faces that used to command the screen not for their gift of performance but for their celebrity. There is a point in a screen performance where sincerity takes over technique, and this has been supremely realized by practically all the leads in Sine Halaga films.
Sine Halaga demonstrates one fact about the many filmmakers involved. They are artists but they are, first, good technicians. They know how to employ the technologies of camera, color-grading, sound design, production design, and editing to tell their story. These are our new voices and visions: filmmakers unafraid to breach rules of cultures, histories and cinema.