Flashes of genius, but lack of insight

Let’s call a spade a spade. The entries for the first round of short films in competition at this year’s Cinemalaya Film Festival, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary, are a tough sell. Comprised of docu-fiction shorts, the selection makes us think about how the selection committee reached its decision, how each film was chosen, because the results clearly show that there are so many walls to overcome, from treatment to execution to financing.

The five short films in this box set primarily shift between languages, question space as a place of memory and material respite, and grapple with difficult political conditions, with characters often floundering in liminality.

This is the promise of the program, but there are only promises. Some films are brilliant, but most fail to give us significant ideas. Moreover, even if we read the films while discussing them, we find only very rudimentary information, devoid of biting analyses, of exciting itineraries.

Ambot Wa Ko Kabalo Denounces I-Title Ani (dir. King Anthony Villaverde)

Besides the fact that it is a docu-fiction film, which could well be the driving force behind this year’s programming, Ambot Wa Ko Kabalo Denounces I-Title Ani distracts from the broader thematic concerns of the rest of the entries in Set A.

It’s a film about filmmaking, an ode to art, if you will. At the heart of the story are two young college students attempting to make their first short film with no budget. Director Rey Anthony Villaverde traces the history of cinema, from Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of a galloping horse that are considered the first films, to the invention of sound and Technicolor, to the advent of digital cinema, complete with notions of the multiverse. Beyond that, Villaverde shows the walls that many artists must climb to succeed on stage, the obstacles and abuses on set, and the conditions that shape artistic practice in general.

Given its nature, the film cannot be faulted for its sentimentality. However, this does not prevent it from offering a better work and addressing critical points that need to be debated. Its protagonist constantly repeats that narration is imperative to making a film of value, and yet this is an aspect in which it clearly falls short. The mode does not work because it feels like the film unfolds according to a particular rubric that is both ambitious and sprawling. This also expresses Villaverde’s tendency to explain everything, which results in overly informative and mawkish dialogue that perhaps needs to be refined. Ambo It is a work that is at best gentle, sometimes funny, but often uneven and says nothing particularly new or lasting.

All that wasted space (dir. Cris Bringas)

In a post-screening discussion at UP Town Center, director Cris Bringas revealed that in 2021, their home succumbed to demolition and he felt like it was time to take stock, as if to emancipate this space that had held so much history and trauma. Bringas juxtaposed this experience with the real-life struggles of his lead actor, Angelu, to shape the film’s genesis and beating heart. All that wasted spaceSuch a context, as touching as it may be, has unfortunately not been transcribed on screen.

In the film, we follow Angelu’s character as she returns to her family’s home after more than a decade in search of a funeral token for her deceased mother, forcing her to confront a past she has long since let go of. We see her come across an old photograph or try on a dress her mother wore and dance as if she were caught in a cruel rainstorm.

Bringas articulates this story primarily through interior shots and by exploiting sound work, perhaps the film’s only quality, but this attempt is like most works about grief I’ve seen time and again, the kind that leans too heavily on its pathos and loses sight of the real plot and active questioning. Like grief itself, the film retreats into abstraction, refusing to offer any real point of reflection. Even the character’s supposed homosexuality is nowhere to be seen; if we’re being frank here, it seems hypocritical to read the work through this framework. The film’s title says it best; sometimes, the critique really does write itself.

Pamalandong to Danaw (directed by Breech Asher Harani)

In his closing text, Pamalandong to Danaw The documentary indicates that its subjects—Remy, Marites, and Ricky, residents of the Agusan Marsh Wildlife Sanctuary, an inland wetland ecosystem in the southern Philippines—are reaching out to state authorities and advocacy groups to protect their ancestral lands that are beginning to dry up due to climate change. Such details, if they had not been reduced to mere text, would not only have broadened the scope of the documentary but also added depth to the debate it opens. It’s a glaring omission that director Breech Asher Harani himself acknowledges in a post-screening discussion at UP Town Center.

Shot in 12 hours on a shoestring budget, Harani says it’s impressive how the documentary manages to pull together such painterly, perfectly composed images, rendered largely through wide, aerial shots, particularly in the opening shot where Remy, encumbered by vegetation, is seen toiling in the swampy area. The rest of the work, however, speaks clearly to its constraints, lacking better interrogations and better ways of seeing.

The film focuses primarily on the daily struggles of the fishermen of the Agusan Marsh and their sense of community, a commendable effort, but it refuses to convey the exact depth of those struggles. It is so intent on addressing everyday life that it chooses not to point fingers and instead extends its commentary to the actual institutions, the systems that continue to disadvantage its subjects: how the country’s environmentalists have long been at risk, and how state neglect plays into discussions of climate change. Moreover, it could have shed new light on its subject from a number of angles, but despite its best intentions, this is another work that feels like a snippet of a sharper, more assertive vision.

A baga in Dalan (directed by Mariel Ritchie Jolejole and Roniño Dolim)

Inspired by the Sag-od massacre that took place in Las Navas, in northern Samar, under the Marcosian regime, A baga in Dalan The film begins with a low-resolution clip of a child’s testimony about witnessing and experiencing the violence, before cutting to a woman trying to hold back her tears. Such an opening seems so appealing, until the film strays into total disorientation and incomprehension.

Here’s the plot: A boy, after surviving the carnage, is desperate to bring his parents’ cold bodies back to life. So he travels through the site of the atrocity to reach Biringan, a mythical place where the supposed cure to make resurrection possible is found.

The film is a failed film, completely lifeless. Directors Mariel Ritchie Jolejole and Roniño Dolim punctuate the film with numerous flashbacks, executed so randomly, with a camera that does not hold the focus and placed in angles so uninspired that they tire the eyes. It does not help that the structure of the film is distorted, as if the film forgets its own logic and does not know where it wants to go; the editing is equally erratic.

Of course, it is convenient to assume that A baga in Dalan The film evokes debates about increased state aggression, forced population displacement, and relentless environmental plunder, but I don’t think the film makes these arguments any clearer or more precise. In fact, it ends with a text about the Sag-od massacre, hoping to reinforce the message that its visual lexicon can’t do justice to. What a difficult watch.

Abogbay Bay (dir. PR Monencillo Patindol)

Abogbay Bay The film’s synopsis states that it “evolved organically, without a script,” and the film reflects that. The story follows three siblings grieving after their mother disappears, now reduced to mere carbon. One retrieves her remains, another buys an urn, and another awaits her return. And that’s about it, really.

The way the film presents its vision gives a palpable sense that the film wants to make the most of its resources and its immediate surroundings. Its use of locations is wisely economical but sometimes excessive, highlighting the trails, forests, and waters of the isolated island. And it’s captivating to see how it renders its visuals through a chiaroscuro composition, with bursts of orange appearing across each frame.

Regardless, the film’s plot is a glaring drawback, as the whole thing doesn’t really go anywhere. raw In the sense that it needs more incubation because it’s not there yet. Its overall sentiment is clearly tied to the inaccessibility of public health services in the country as well as the inconsistent response to the pandemic, justifying varying degrees of grief. But the writing avoids the deeper fissures of that same grief, unable to offer strong characterization and exploit the urgency of the problems it presents. The substance, one might venture to say, requires a more perceptive artistic eye. – Rappler.com