It’s particularly interesting to note that documentaries, fiction, or an exploration of both make up the main short film slate at this year’s Cinemalaya Film Festival, sidelining animation and experimental work. But what’s more jarring is how the two sets clash with each other. Set B, for that matter, is infused with better plotting and aesthetic panache – aspects that its counterpart is in dire need of.
Which is to say, there’s something amiss in the programming decision. Thematically, Set B makes far more sense, with narratives that wrestle with historical trauma, erasure, exploitation, and acts of violence, in its many iterations, in hopes of crafting gentler ways forward. Most shorts in this program at the minimum feel more confident in their visions and modes of articulation, with some exhibiting more experience than the rest.
i was walking on the streets of chinatown (dir. Ryan Capili) Opening the lineup is Ryan Capili’s i was walking on the streets of chinatown , which sees an artist returning to his hometown to complete an autobiographical film. Arguably the oldest of its kind, Chinatown – also known as Binondo, a commerce and trade center in Manila – in the film as in real life has been tenanted by so much history and change, which the protagonist and, by extension, Capili tries to contend with.
The film tours us around the cityscape, retracing a once-famed arcade, an abandoned shopping center, a tailoring store, an Art Deco building, a tobacco factory, among other spaces marked by time, colonial residue, and the cruelty of urban capitalism. Chiefly rendered in wide shots, Capili’s images, in its grainy, postcard-esque state, glow and exude such lasting beauty, which he blends with archival, monochromatic photographs of Binondo’s cultural markers. It’s his sharpest work to date, as far as visual lexicon is concerned.
His soundwork also accommodates the film’s poetic terrain. Impressive as this mounting may be, it’s difficult to look past the film’s tendency to lean on nostalgia to buoy its arguments. The analysis exists in vignettes, to the extent that the film doesn’t really let us into the inner lives eroded by the sites it maps.
It’s as if Capili’s harsher assertions are altogether reserved for another conversation. The fiction could have magnified its nonfictional unit, and yet there seems to be restraint in actively interrogating larger structures at play, the layers attached to each fact. Towards the end, the protagonist frets over the completion of his film because of the construction of a bridge he observes, noting that, save for people, no cars ever course through it – a moment that exposes a rather fickle, misguided politics, a Freudian slip of sorts.
Here, it is clear that Capili’s concerns still circle back to him, still so inward, self-indulgent, even. If cinema is to act as a memory keeper, as the film is wont to say, then we better start putting forward more militant inquiries. How exactly do we intend to safeguard such memories, and for whom? Cross My Heart and Hope to Die (dir.
Sam Manacsa) In the upper floor of her workplace, crowded with clothes and office paraphernalia, central character Mila toys with a cutter and seemingly fixates on the blade. Soon, she attempts to suffocate herself with a plastic bag, as if taking it all in, until someone interrupts her. This opening frame, in its biting exactitude, initiates us into the thesis of Cross My Heart and Hope to Die – a world that renders overworked yet underpaid bodies routine, a story that recurs among the disenfranchised, a pattern handed from one generation to the next.
Director Sam Manacsa’s visual lexicon is nothing short of terrific. With Martika Ramirez Escobar, of the meta and trippy Leonor Will Never Die (2022), lensing the film, she’s able to pump life into a soulless, unforgiving environment and tap into the larger aspects of labor in the country, of Filipino life-making, of human condition. Ilya Selikhov and Sum-Sum Shen’s soundwork is just as stunning in how it harnesses the tragedy lying ahead of its subject and extends the viewer an interval for reflection, especially in the film’s endnote.
But what towers over such craftsmanship, glowing as it is, is Jorrybell Agoto as Mila, who serves as the film’s cardinal point – a tireless woman who works day in, day out; a woman who seems to be in sheer surrender but also turns elsewhere in search of hope and respite, if not a possible exit. Agoto marvels when she leans into her gift, when she tries to contain her character’s inner unrest; so nuclear even in her silence. It bears mentioning that the actor has landed similar exploited-worker roles a number of times already, following Rafael Manuel’s Filipiñana (2020) and Kevin Mayuga’s When This Is All Over (2023), but her work always refuses to cave into safe, unexciting tendencies.
How astonishing to see her already in great command of her talent, which by any means should not be under the radar. Mama (dir. Alexandra Brizuela) Alexandra Brizuela’s Mama draws parallels with Sheryl Rose Andes’s Maria of last year’s Cinemalaya, precisely because both documentaries probe into former president Rodrigo Duterte’s ruthless drug war .
But what separates Mama from its predecessor is that it doesn’t involve a marquee figure to present its story, hence allowing itself to come in closer contact with the very lives eroded by the bloody campaign. Rather than steeping itself in suffering and covering solely the trail of the carnage, which most documentaries about this spate of killings have provided us with, the film excavates the forces that propel its subjects forward, whether it be motherhood, religion, or even grief itself. In one of the film’s most arresting moments, the camera closes up on a stuffed toy held by the sibling of Myca Ulpina , the three-year-old girl shot dead by the police in a buy-bust operation in Rodriguez, Rizal in 2019, while her mother recalls tender memories they used to share.
They light a candle at her grave. It’s her birthday. Brizuela, with a focused editing, intimates these parts that often get muddled when statistics are considered, when big names factor into the conversation, parts that pulverize the absurd narratives perpetuated by state spin doctors.
Shit, the film argues, doesn’t just happen, contrary to what one senator is wont to claim. If anything, it is orchestrated, especially if the one who orchestrates is in a position of power. At once earnest and affecting, Mama exhibits that it’s hard to put down a vision sustained by community, by unbridled hope, by its commitment to justice.
It affords us an alternative to seeing the underseen particulars of historic tragedies before they’re reduced into something that is part solely of a memory factory. Mariposa (dir. Melanie Faye) Melanie Faye’s Mariposa , about a teenage girl named Des who has gone through a series of sexual abuse, boasts a cruel, often unsettling scale of simplicity.
Rendered chiefly in monochrome with strokes of the yellow highlighter meant to obscure its subject’s identity, the film goes on to untangle how deep exactly this violence is, with the traumatic incidents often imagined through animation. The camera moves just as its subject does, within the organization that houses sexually abused minors, where Des spent a year trying to process what she has suffered, especially at the hands of her own uncle; within her own home as she celebrates her birthday, the day when the wrongdoing was committed; and within the community where she hopes to begin anew. At one point, we see the kids, in tears, venting out all the weight and hurt they carry — an image that announces Mariposa ’s intention to extend the likes of them space and care.
Sincere as this intention may be, there’s something amiss in the way the material is put together, as if the editing is bent on harnessing the drama, and how the film raises questions without much thought put into it and sponges the responses solely for mood or effect. I think there’s a fine line between striving for openness and being intrusive. There’s also a lapse in judgment in the fact that the subject’s identity is concealed yet her parents are not only named but whose faces are revealed before the camera, which of course points to matters of consent.
But doesn’t this decision run counter to the film’s very objective? Of course, there’s no denying the topicality of Mariposa : about the importance of creating necessary channels to tackle abuse at large; that sexual violence remains a “sensitive” conversation only speaks of the fact that it’s still taboo, that the cases have never let up. But the way the film peddles its point demands more caution, if not a complete rethinking. Primetime Mother ( dir.
Sonny Calvento) There’s a particular juncture in Sonny Calvento’s Primetime Mother where its characters, all auditionees for a TV game show aptly titled “My Amazing Mama,” try to squeeze themselves into the frame of the camera and begin to shed tears, slowly, one after the other, with the spotlight heightening every fiber of emotion being milked out of them. It’s an image so absurd and searing that hints at the film’s central argument about the artifices of exploitation, misfortunes as commodity, motherhood as spectacle, and the pitfalls of spectatorship. Integral to asserting this point is how Calvento, with Ian Alexander Guevara’s camerawork and Sam Manacsa’s production design, at once steeps the visuals in bright, popping color, particularly within the game show, and subdues it when the lens points to what unravels behind the scenes, a treatment that sketches the disparity and power dynamics between the characters – how easy it is for those in venerated positions (the show’s director, in this case) to excuse mistreatment as artistic control.
Meryll Soriano taking on the lead role, a mother who waits and lines up for hours to get a shot at taking the show’s daily cash prize for her ailing child, is doubly telling and ironic to some extent, considering that her father, TV host Willie Revillame, has long been steering the kind of shows the film satirizes and comments on. In fact, Revillame was under fire in 2006 due to a stampede at his widely known but now-defunct show, Wowowee , that killed over 70 people and injured nearly 400. A similar incident occurred in 2019 during the taping of Wowowin , Revillame’s show on GMA Network at the time, leaving one dead and another injured.
By turns glittery and dark, farcical and cutting, Primetime Mother , at its core, illustrates many facets of exploitation as a symptom of a larger, capitalist world – a similar corner that Calvento has mapped in his Sundance short Excuse Me, Miss, Miss, Miss , about an overworked retail employee hoping to be hired permanently, and a daughter desperate to provide for her ailing mother. And it’s worth interrogating that, in both cases, Calvento’s characters remain trapped in their predicaments, which can either be read as a sound depiction of material realities in the Philippines or the director’s refusal to extend them grace or better alternatives. – Rappler.
com.
