BWAKAW (Jun Robles Lana, 2012)

Advancing age does not sit well with Old Man Rene. The years have not been kind to him and have given him the patina of a grumpy, unhappy figure. Woe to anyone who dares cross him: the old man has a withering tongue and a mildly violent streak. Fierce in his solitude, he keeps many of his friends and neighbors at bay, and lives alone in a rickety ancestral dwelling. Here his sole companions are Bwakaw, a voracious, loyal stray, and if you can count it, a wooden sculpture of a supine Jesus that is said to be miraculously growing. 

The crux of his unhappiness seems to stem from his unflaunted and secretive sexuality. When one of his friends, Zaldy, an aging but flamboyant parlorista, gives him first dibs on a couple of call boys, he sends them back with a stinging reprimand. The old man seems to be going through the motions of life. All that consumes him are the details of impending death: an empty coffin sits in his living room; his prized belongings are wrapped up and inscribed with the names of intended recipients; he obsessively revises a last will and testament that he entrusts to the parish priest. An encounter with a brusque and muscular tricycle driver named Sol, however, breaks down his grumpy, irascible exterior. Now the perpetual scowl has turned into secret smiles; the old man relents to a haircut and has his gray hair dyed.

While this premise is far from novel anymore, there is charm in the the small, aforementioned and still unmentioned details. They are all marshaled with great timing and pacing. While Lana’s script seems to have been cobbled together from a cycle of old-man films -- such as De Sica’s Umberto D. (about a man and his trusty dog), Kurosawa’s Ikiru (an existential fare about an old man finding meaning in the terminus of life), and even Bergman’s The Wild Strawberries (a lyrical surreal meditation on old age) and Sorin’s Bombon El Perro (about a man who finds inspiration and redemption from his dog) -- Bwakaw finds an alchemy through the bricolage of dialogue and characterization, if the foregoing paints a part of the picture.

A meditation on old age and death, Bwakaw is splendidly leavened by acerbic wit and rough humor. This often finds expression in brutal exchanges between Old Man Rene and the ensemble of absurdly comic characters around him. The overall tone remains light and bright. While there are plenty of references to sickness and death – e.g. someone keeps importuning Old Man Rene for an audience with the miraculous santo entierro on behalf of the sick, and fatal sickness surrounds the old man and ultimately strikes close to home – they contrast with and are eclipsed by the lively and robust and humorous characters. A moment of hilarity that thumbs its nose at death happens when Old Man Rene lies down in his coffin, and pretends death while his friends and neighbors walk in on him and start mourning.

The triumph of Jun Lana’s film is to serve up death in a marinade of humor, vitality, and indomitability. There is no treacle dripping from it; no cloying, sickly sweet aftertaste. None of the histrionics of dying, no heavenly kowtowing. Neither is Bwakaw a celebration of ghoulish morbidity and dark humor. Nor are the characters steeped in bitterness and cynicism. Even at the film's lowest moments, darkness does not enter into it. Like the titular dog, one must learn to seize even the scraps. Like the dog, one should be voracious for life.  

  

KALAYAAN (Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr., 2012)

Enisled on Kota Island, one of the disputed islands of the Spratlys, Julian Macaraig, a solitary sentry, spends his long, uneventful days in routine and ennui. Other than reporting ship movements in the area, there is little productive to do, so he idles the time away with silent and deadpan regularity. Here he listens to the unfolding news of President Estrada’s imminent downfall on radio and television, on the shore he poaches turtle eggs buried in the sand, he keeps himself fit with his daily dozen, and masturbates to Asian pornography.

But there is something strange that draws him to the island’s mangroves. He bears witness to inexplicable sightings here. This is prefigured by a prologue showing a mermaid giving pleasure to a man of unknown identity. When two other soldiers are assigned to join Julian on the island, we learn the enchanted and maddened fate of those who previously held the same post. But they are tales of the fantastic: how mermaids abound and may make contact, how a lost and spectral sentry roams the islands, how the secret location of deposits of black gold is kept by the mermaids. We also learn how the death of his predecessor has rendered Julian mute for many moons.

On the surface, Kalayaan follows through lengthy, unedited takes the island sentry’s isolation, a fact which foreshadows the dangers of enforced exile and solitude.  Silence is its first symptom. Seeing mythical things is another. Madness may be next. But through radio and television broadcasts, the fate of the disputed islands is made to run parallel with the fate of a nation, a fact that allegorizes the importance of the latter. The film’s title, after all, denotes the grand word of freedom. One interpretation might point to the ironic lack of freedom of the film’s main protagonist – his seemingly being held incommunicado, a victim of large traumas. This is echoed and verbalized with empathic displeasure by the two arrivals. On the island, the lack of freedom destroys the mind, and evokes illusory figures and phantasms, dark and fatal as the promise of oil.

Along with Sandoval’s Aparisyon, Kalayaan is probably the most consciously and frontally European in tone and approach among this year’s Cinemalaya entries. The thrust of visuality and the sparsity of dialogue not only remove the burden of the vernacular from its Thai actor but bring the film closer to the aesthetics of Western filmmakers. In scenes showing the sentries performing exercises, there is a conscious effort to take a page from Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, a film about the French Foreign Legion in a remote outpost in Djibouti. This is not to mention the entire tradition of contemplative cinema valorized in the last decade or so in Europe that Kalayaan seems to draw from. Closer to home, Kalayaan has affinities to the work of Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose own enchanted forests figure in Blissfully Yours and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives.

Judged as a work in the prolific career of director Alix, Kalayaan represents a triumph. Kalayaan is a deceptively simple film about the dark side of solitude, and yet read at a higher level, yields a more profound significance.  Like last year’s Isda, and unlike his earlier output, it exemplifies how elements of magic realism and the supernatural can be harnessed to deepen and add meanings. That it may signify Alix’s easy (too,easy, some will maintain) adaptability, that it may suggest that he is something of a chameleon without a particular style (from the straightforward, unaffected debut of Donsol to the Iranian-inspired Kadin to the expressionist, poverty film Chassis), this filmmaker can answer by making more and more films of this caliber and quality. There can be no doubt, Kalayaan is one of the superlative films at this year’s Cinemalaya.

Title in English: Wildlife

REQUIEME! (Loy Arcenas, 2012)

The way we regard our own doesn't always equal the way we regard the foreign born: how often we discriminate against ourselves. Filmmaker Loy Arcenas continues to impress and delight -- this time with such themes as xenomania, and double social and moral standards. No sophomore slump here. A new and rich vein, in fact, has opened up for him. Gone for now is the lyric mode inherent in his debut, Niño. Gone for the moment is the serious and solemn tone. In its place is the ludic and ironic side of a versatile film practice. REquieme! demonstrates a more frolicsome bent, a more inclusive reach with its searing portrayal of the addled Filipino psyche.

There is much to appreciate here: the wealth of relevant themes and the way Arcenas weaves, intercuts and translates them into his own brand of black comedy. There is a temptation to go for broke and swing for the fences, but the director shows maturity in depicting his ludicrous observations with such assured judgment that the wry sense of humor does not come across as mean-spirited or off-putting. He skewers them all, though he is more composed than scattershot: our operatic grief, our sacralization of the dead, and our irreverence to all things that spout out of us like so much stream of consciousness, emphasizing a wildly verbal culture.

REquieme! is irreverent but not done in bad taste. Arcenas brand of black humor here supports the soap box for four deaths, and two funerals, those twin themes of death and lamentation. Our supposed reverence for the dead is given an uproarious roller-coaster ride with a televised saga of a corpse being mistakenly transported elsewhere around the world -- from Riyadh to Rome to Hawaii – to much dismay and mourning of his family. Then such lack of reverence  finds wry expression in how a dead man is given two funerals. Elsewhere another of the corpses gets held up interminably by red tape and rigid bureaucrats.

But just as paramount to REquieme!’s concerns is its commentary on the discrimination against unconventional sexuality. Surprisingly it is also the film's heart. At the center of the film, after all, is Joanna, a would-be transgender who, after running away from his homophobic home, has found a new identity and a semblance of family. When one of his surrogate kin dies, he goes to the extremes of giving him a decent burial. Meanwhile, Swanie, his estranged mother and a barangay captain, is trying to make a show of grief and translate the death of his distant Filipino-American nephew Adolfo Payapa – the notorious killer of a famous fashion designer – into electoral victory. 

What makes us infamously tick as a people, Arcenas seems to know by instinct. And he is learning well, openly taking a page from another accomplished satirist, Dennis Marasigan (director of Vox Populi), who gets a famous nod here. REquieme! keeps it refreshingly current owing to its strong sense of our fundamental social and cultural weaknesses, although it is clearly inspired by the life and death of Andrew Cunanan and his murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace in 1997. 

Whatever the case, the viewer is apt to be surprised with shock after shock of self-recognition. Just as much, the moments of the collective mentality are bound to be telling: the second-guessing and kibitzing as communities gather around television sets, radios, and funerals. Arcenas transmutes these moments of the Filipino psyche with a keen sense of humor and irony. They never feel crass or perverse, only that the sociology of a people is spot-on and so pitch-perfect that our only rejoinder is laughter, a nodding, knowing  laughter.                             

APARISYON (Vincent Sandoval, 2012)

Darkness has fallen upon the country. The streets of the capital are smoldering and exploding with mass protests to overthrow a despotic regime. Plaza Miranda has just been bombed, sending shock waves of brutal repression. The proclamation of Martial Law seems imminent. Somewhere in the countryside -- in a nunnery in the woods -- the state of things, however, couldn’t be more different. Monastic life is all but untouched and proceeds with idyllic steadiness:  the nuns undertake their tasks in perfect peace and serenity, there is joy and wide smiles during meals. A new nun has even come to the fold. The spreading lawlessness, however, is about to shatter this peace and interrogate their connection with the outside world. 

Vincent Sandoval’s Aparisyon is set with historical and political specificity, but it could happen anywhere where the fate of a people is at stake, where the push of a precious little could tilt the balance. Aparisyon is a film that allegorizes the inaction of the crucial many, the silent majority of society. More important, it thematizes the horrors and dangers of social passivity. 

Rather than receive the terrifying news from outside, the Mother Superior in Aparisyon silences the last remaining radio with confiscation. Rather than resolve the ills that claw and paw at them, there is an inward direction and even self-flagellation. Rather than blow the whistle on a crime, the nuns allow themselves to be gagged, lest they call attention to themselves, lest the malefactors turn upon them.

Sandoval establishes all this with lush cinematography. The theme of cowardly inaction is carefully and poetically constructed in brilliant compositions. Often, the faces of elderly nuns are framed in close-ups to reveal deep and heavy circles around their eyes, eyes that silently betray fear and meekness and apprehension, brows that are knitted in self-concern. Mostly they are silent. What begins as a gravitation towards natural idylls, turns into a lingering in the cold interiors of the nunnery. The camera pans here are slow and lingering in keeping with the sluggish response of the nuns, in keeping with the themes of inaction and indecision.

Great credit is due the filmmaker for fashioning something that is often thought beyond conflation: a poetic and lyrical allegory that is also profoundly political, profoundly dialectical. It is doubly to his credit that he accomplishes this without leaving the environs of a nunnery. It features nuns but it may have little to do with them. In effect, Aparisyon questions, for one, our own received images about nuns – nuns that link up in the frontlines of People Power, nuns who are fierce, brave and eloquent -- but it never mocks us and our complacent stand. In this regard, Sandoval is something of a humanistic instructor, a Socratic mentor who always wants us to question the world. Wants us to jump down from the fences and act bravely and decisively when the crucial moment comes.     

TISOY! (Ishmael Bernal, 1977)

Ishmael Bernal’s Tisoy! is quite a lark -- every bit as boisterous and hilarious as Nonoy Marcelo’s comic strip that it adapts for the big screen. Quite a challenge to transpose something as embedded in pop culture as Marcelo’s menagerie into film, but Bernal strikes all the right notes. Come to think of it, an adaptation was just about ripe for the Seventies, when American and foreign influences held sway in everyone’s sensorium and slashes of Martial Law remained in the air, a time that begged to have a snapshot of its flora and fauna to be taken, as it were. Enter Tisoy, a young, free spirited mestizo, and his equally lively and adoring clique of friends.   

Tisoy, as played with disarming panache by Christopher de Leon, does embody the charisma of the mestizo, the part-Caucasian so often held in high esteem and regard. He wears hip and body-hugging Western attire, speaks Tagalog in reverse, the slang of the times, and rides a Harley Davidson-like motorcycle. Arriving on the trot from America, he tows along his friends with whom he had initially fled local shores. He is looking for his American father, who has been sighted in Manila. But it’s also high time to touch base with old friends – and most of all to reunite with his long-suffering love interest, Maribubut.

Bernal’s brand of humor here relies, for the most part, on our awareness of its references. Tisoy is a grab bag of all kinds of nods, including, but not limited to, films and television advertisements of the seventies. There are homages to Julio Madiaga and Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag and Mike de Leon’s Itim, as well as Bert Marcelo reprising among other things his iconic line for San Miguel Beer. But there are also open hints of European inflection, as in close-ups of the pages of Le Figaro, and even perhaps a nod to Godard’s famous traffic jam in Weekend – minus the long tracking shot, but with an equally memorable set piece about restlessness and tedium.

Tisoy may be said to live and die with the Seventies and with those who remain attached to that decade. The film’s verve and intelligent energy, however, give it a life in popular culture: a self-propagating life as only films can sustain, as enduring as its originary comics. Along with creating a worthy vehicle for its lead, Christopher de Leon, Bernal’s challenge was not only to convey Nonoy Marcelo’s comic, but trenchant satire, but to make Tisoy endearing despite a cavalier regard for others.

There’s a palpable effort by Bernal to distance his work from being just a faithful adaptation, but to create a parallel cosmos – most particularly via the kind of references he chooses to include in the film. Tisoy, among other things, is a Nouvelle Vague-ish romp, a collage of fashion, advertisement, television, music, film and other representations of popular media. Somehow it all succeeds – and probably due partway to our familiarity with the material – in drawing a vivid ensemble of characters as well as a recognizable evocation of the times. We see it at the edges, around the characters, on their person, in their society, on their lips.   

And perhaps rightly so: Tisoy revels in its memorable characters -- from Moody Diaz's Aling Otik to Bert Marcelo's Tikyo -- while glossing over a slender plot. But who is taking note – aren’t we here for the high jinks and the gags, the mannerisms and the tics of an epoch? One can also read it so: Tisoy is a film whose kinetic and free-wheeling ethos belies the authoritarianism and despotism of its times. And as the boisterous story of a fair-haired boy – or shall we say a fair-skinned boy -- this film can resonate in a country that remains, to this day, obsessed with such conundrums as skin color and other surface issues of identity. Heck, it may be high time for this film’s rediscovery.        

HILO (thread) (Jan Philippe V. Carpio, 2007)

Within the framework of the huis-clos hangs, with obsessive recurrence, the cinematic corpus of Jan Philippe Carpio. As much as any other director might prefer to be identified with works of cosmic scope and significance, Carpio favors a more circumscribed premise: the closed doors, where characters are scathingly and powerlessly entrapped and pitted against each other. In Balay Daku (2002), his early masterpiece, Carpio foregrounded a hacienda full of inimical and inescapable bedfellows. In Tako, a short film about old flames threshing out their relationship at a despedida party, the premises could just as well be a phone booth.

Call it an affinity with the likes of John Cassavetes or Nobuhiro Suwa (M/Other comes to mind), call it a nod to Bunuel's hellish mise-en-scenes (The Exterminating Angel comes to mind), Carpio has often gravitated towards this strain of chamber drama, lean and spare, ever attuned to Sartre and his notion of the unbearable. The conflicts Carpio probes and examines are not so much materialist as they are metaphysical no-exits – as such, more irresolvable, and more harrowing, versions of hell.  

Hilo (2007), Carpio’s third full length film, further distills Carpio's fascination with the claustrophobia of the closed doors. Structured as a triptych, it charts the deadlocked relationship of two lovers, revolving around an unsettled and oft-interrupted dinner that runs the gamut of emotions, everything from nervous laughter to teary-eyed reticence.

Emerson and Jenny are, on the surface, regular lovers. Little indicates they are ill-matched. A salient point, however, is the fact that the man is a professor, while the woman is a student, which might explain certain dynamics between the two. Three almost identical episodes compose Hilo, slightly different from one another only in their gradual addition of detail and the growing tone of fatigue. The setting is a  dining table -- that hallowed place which imposes civility on the proceedings. Consequently, the couple hem and haw, approach and circle their issues with much trembling energy and much awkward aside. Speech bears a lot of informational withholdings, skirts a lot of verbal taboo. Voices trail off, murmur and sing to themselves, the objects of their predicates are missing, their pronouns refer to unknown antecedents. The problem is "it." But there is much misplaced laughter, that crutch of silent spaces and improvisatory dead air, almost to shatter the fourth wall for us.

Hell is other people, Sartre once declared. But Carpio is not as misanthropic nor hell-bent on passing judgment. With Brechtian mannerisms and a withholding of the true bugaboos bewitching the characters, Hilo keeps us at a respectful distance, our perspective bearing witness to the effects rather than the causes of the couple's impasse. Instead this dramatic aloofness, one suspects, serves to fetishize gentility – that of the ever-shifting mirage of civility, a bourgeois strain of which Carpio observes and sometimes subverts in Balay Daku. We suspect the truth about Emerson and Jenny, but there are enough gestural fakes and feints to throw us off; all we are certain of seeing are bits and pieces, like so many fragments and facets of a cubist painting.

Describing his oeuvre as a succession of “momentaries,” Carpio emphasizes the instantaneousness of his films, their shimmer that we briefly glimpse. Call them snapshots, quick cross sections, or slices of life, Carpio seems solely intent to present points in a continuum, a mere thread in a bigger tapestry, all meant to preclude easy, conventional conceptions about his body of narratives and character construction.

With the bareness and minimalism of a Dogme 95 setting – a table for two, a half-full dish of pasta, and spoons and forks that Emerson and Jenny toy self-consciously with – Hilo funnels our attentions to its two actors and their curious dynamic that manages to engage our empathy. Sympathy,  on the other hand, is made elusive by distanciation. Meanwhile the improvisational work of the two actors, Jenny Logico and Emerson Sanchez, is commendable. Carpio is not unlike a Prospero who sets a basic premise into motion for his protagonists to extemporize and enflesh its ontological bare bones.

True to the implications of Carpio’s conceptual idée fixe, Hilo  concludes in a kind of impasse, the problems as insoluble as ever. Things are back to square one, and somehow different. For, without exactly knowing why, we have undergone the brunt of emotional and psychical attrition, only guessing at the unknown wellsprings of the couple's problems. Without realizing it, we have come full circle: The couple is dead! Long live the couple!   

The Top Filipino Films of 2011

Riches, an embarrassment of riches. It is a year liable to go down in local cinematic history as one of the most accomplished, one of the richest. The year 2011 will also likely serve a benchmark against which other years, past and future, will be measured. It was the year the steadfast patience of the Filipino film enthusiast was rewarded with a veritable cornucopia at the local art-houses. The vaunted indie film festivals – Cinemalaya, Cinema One and Cinemanila -- delivered in spades. This troika of film venues constituted a vibrant independent circuit that kept everyone busy and buzzing for the duration of the festival season.

My shortlist of the previous year's top films – an unimaginative decimal list, I admit – may look spick-and-span on this blogspace, but it doesn’t reflect my frantic and confounded efforts to shoehorn all my favorites in. It is painful to leave anything out, and it underscores how arbitrary a top-ten list can be. Another ten may have been possible, and arguably just as solid: Bahay Bata, Amok, Busong, Isda, Ang Babae Sa Septic Tank, Mapang-Akit, Pahinga , and Bisperas would have been worthy candidates. That does not even include some putatively excellent films I neglected to see: Zombadings has been touted to be among the best comedies released last year, supposedly trumping even other more ballyhooed films. My almost complete ignorance of commercial-run fare also meant that some quality films may have fallen through the cracks.     

Refreshingly surprising and startling is how the past year’s harvest of films came in a broad spectrum of approaches and aesthetics, in a wide variety of themes and subjects. There is a healthy demonstration that our cinema and our filmmakers are not cut from the same cloth. Formal experiment, for instance, stands just as worthily alongside more conventional methodology and techniques. That Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay, a self-conscious mockumentary, and Buenas Noches Espana, an experimental, category-defying film, can make it alongside a serious neorealist tract like Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa, is a testament to the cinematic diversity on offer.  

Experimentalism did not simply find expression in various forms and aesthetics, but in a petulance with straight spatio-temporal diegetics: it was imperative as opposed to decorative. With Buenas Noches Espana, Raya Martin served up an anti-narrative that meditates and hallucinates about colonial history. In Sakay Sa Hangin, the camera ostensibly records the everyday life of a tribe in a kind of ethnography, but simultaneously tells a timeless mythic story. Big Boy cinematicizes memory, so that cinema becomes almost gospel that second-guesses our own supposed human faculties. The realities of time and space are almost like suggestions to these films. What it says is not escapism but a tendency toward a summa, a rootedness to the past.

Like the aforementioned films, Lav Diaz’s A Century of Birthing is also a hybrid work, an allegory that meditates on the nature and progress of cinema, its many practical and quotidian anxieties that go uneasily hand-in-hand with a filmmaker’s personal vision. Diaz's paean to cinema, it shows how he remains at the peak of his creative powers. Like Diaz's film, Shireen Seno’s Big Boy is both concerned with the personal and the historical. It is quite uncanny how someone’s personal vision of the past can codify everyone else’s memory.  

Discourse about more current and pressing issues is all but a given, a constant, when it comes to independent filmmaking. Films of this persuasion are probably the plinth that underpins the whole movement, and they sure enough made their mark in 2011. A film about sexual awakening like Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa can be seen in the context of wider gender and identity issues embedded in its subtle discourse. The demystification of the diaspora was the overarching theme of Lawas Kan Pinabli: it supplies an anti-heroic perspective so alien to the headlines and laudatory poetry. Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa lures us to one corner of Cagayan Valley to shed light on the tragic lives of waifs here and therefore elsewhere.  

The heterogeneity spills over into other forms. Mga Anino sa Tanghaling Tapat mystifies adolescence into a Grimm fairy tale with unexpected, almost Grand Guignol underpinnings. Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay is that tongue-in-cheek, and unusual biopic noteworthy for its thinly veiled sympathy for its subject while foregrounding a mocking and mock irreverence on the surface. In Nino, we find a well-told and affecting tale of a clan’s decline, a tale that circumvents the conventions of distraught family dramas. There is a genre-bending awareness that informs all of these films, a sure sign of growing and continuing maturity for local independent cinema.    

If some of these films have eluded you, fret not. It is almost certain that there will be opportunities to see these films in the new year. Their excellence almost guarantees it. But do catch up on this backlog sooner rather than later, as a new festival season opens at the middle of the year with the promise of still another bountiful harvest.                       

Here is my list of the top films of 2011 (Click on film title for full review):

1) Big Boy (Shireen Seno)

"Big Boy, the first feature film by Shireen Seno, is in many ways about the traumatization of childhood. Childhood is not always magic and idyll. True, to some extent, Seno’s film mirrors Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A Summer at Grandpa’s with its evocation of a happy childhood. Here with fondness are the wonder years: the parlor games, the outdoor adventures, the staunch playmates, the favorite songs, and the innocence."

2) Century of Birthing  (Lav Diaz)

3) Buenas Noches, Espana (Raya Martin)

"From Autohystoria (2007) to Maicling Pelicula Nang Ysang Indio Nacional (2005) to Independencia (2009), Martin has been engaged on a mission of dredging up and retrieving our colonial past. That has meant everything from reconstructing the lay of the land in 1896 to doing a diachronic depiction of Filipino culture circa American times. This time Buenas Noches reveals more about our present-day cultural relations with Spain than anything else, something that might seemingly involve more diplomatically palatable facets of geopolitics, but still puts into perspective how much – or how little – has changed between the two countries."

4) Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa (Alvin Yapan)

"The grand and not so grand narratives of sexual awakening are a dime a dozen. Each one of us has a story to tell – and how often a story to embellish – at an early juncture of adolescence. More relevantly, within the annals of cinema, the terrain is a well-trodden one, assuming a subgenre all its own. Many a tawdry youth-oriented film has singlemindedly sexualized love, and thus vulgarized and grossly irrigated this honorable ideal. An entry of a preeminent kind, Alvin Yapan’s Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa is a lyrical and poetic tale that brings back respectability to eros so often shortchanged."

5) Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay (Antoinette Jadaone)

6) Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa (Mes De Guzman)

"Episodic in structure, neorealist in approach, De Guzman's film shows these kids caught in the last gasp of innocence. Their naivety is best illustrated in a scene where they bring home a discarded vhs player found on a garbage heap. Believing it to be a gift, they have it tested on a neighbor’s television, only to realize that it is broken and  beyond repair. Worse, it is technology as obsolete as their innocent worldview."

7) Mga Anino Sa Tanghaling Tapat (Ivy Baldoza)

"These girls are the newly adolescent. Their flowering is headlong, and complacent. They embrace the latitude of their young age, but ignore the fine print that comes with it. They handle sex as an unfamiliar apparatus, in different stages of clumsiness and callowness. They are tempting fate, a fate that memorializes them in various stages of maturation. You can all but draw a schema. Thus there is a reason to read a symbolic subtext into their destinies."

8) Lawas Kan Pinabli (Christopher Gozum)

"Forever Loved, in the end, may well be the most thorough, most textured, and most insightful study on the Filipino OCW. Perhaps such a saga of a people's exodus is bound to unfold in many more unforeseen ways and might never see an immediate end. Gozum deserves to be commended for going against the grain, forwarding a perspective the rest of us aren't prepared to entertain. He never loses sight of the human picture, the stories he has heard or knows first-hand. These stories, whether grounded on the real or the invented, must resonate with him, cut him to the quick, a heart that harbors the traumas of being so far from home." 

9) Sakay sa Hangin(Regiben Romana)

"Sakay Sa Hangin is a worthy ethnographic document of singular distinction. Few films -- Murnau's Tabu and the works of Flaherty perhaps -- can be compared with it through cinematic history. Sakay Sa Hangin, without didacticism, also retrieves our lost connection and communion with nature. Framed in an open-ended structure, the film demonstrates the flow of life and how it ought to be held sacred: war should not enter into it. And once we latch on to its lyrical imagery, its fabulous structure and spare storytelling, it is a breeze to watch. A breath-taking ride on the wind."

10) Nino (Loy Arcenas)

"Faded glory crumbles from the walls of the Villa Los Reyes Magos, the ancestral dwelling of the Lopez-Aranda family. This house used to be grand, laments one of the remaining members of this once-proud family in a resigned and regretful tone. And there is every reason for regret. From having born witness and played host to some moments and figures of historic importance, the house teeters on its last legs. The fate of its occupants seems inextricably linked with the fate of the very house."

Postscript: The Best Non-Local Films 

I was able to watch around 250 films last year. Ironically very little proportion came from 2011. What's important, I guess, is discovering these films at all.

Here then, without regard for year of release, are the best non-local films I saw in the year just concluded:

  

Once Upon A Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011)

Tie Xi Qu: West of The Tracks 1,2,3 (Wang Bing, 2003)

The Circus Tent (Govindan Aravindan, 1978)

Hunting Scenes from Bavaria (Peter Fleischmann, 1969)

Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman, 2010)

A Simple Story (Marcel Hanoun, 1959)

The House of the Angel (Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 1957)

Sao Paulo, Sociedade Anonima (Luis Sergio Person, 1965)

Oxhide (Liu Jiayin, 2005)

Kosmos (Reha Erdem, 2009)

Blockade (Sergei Loznitsa, 2006)

Anything Can Happen (Marcel Lozinski, 1995)




(tag: The Best Filipino Films of 2011)