THE LEAVING (Ian Loreños, 2010)

Everything is changing, leaving, and returning. There is always a constant transience in this world.   -- The Leaving, program synopsis

            

Strange, but one comes away from The Leaving with a very little sense of its vaunted transience. The film promises movement and what we get is stasis. If nothing else, everyone here is trapped in purgatorial states, a state of imprisonment, which makes transience synonymous with escape. Escape, that’s all – and perhaps a dastardly one. Let’s recite a precis of their life stories one by one. Martin, unable to fend for himself, literally hightails it to the loving arms of his parents in the States. Grace sees transience by giving up on her marriage. The line of least resistance. And those who supposedly make the existential  transition – the transient ones? The lovers, William and Joan – they do so through violence. Violence also takes another neighbor; they find her all broken like the rag doll that is supposed to stand for her missing younger sister. Sick. And how about the ghosts trapped in this haunted apartment building? This film defines transience in the most perverse terms: A function of flight and defeatism. The frightening part is, it seems done in solemn earnest. As such, one tries to see another film altogether. Another review instead, written before knowledge of those lines about transience – unearned, never made concrete.

Popular notions, whether ill-informed or not, are such that the Chinese in this country are so clannish and tight-knit in their ethnicity that it's hard to single out anyone of them who is struggling in life. Mention the word Chinese and this immediately conjures up lofty and grandiose images of a business tycoon, or a rich, well-connected fat cat, or a kid studying in the most exclusive schools. In Ian Loreños’ The Leaving, one gets to see the other side of the tracks: Tsinoys who are economically vulnerable and subject to moral and human susceptibilities.

But Loreños -- who wears a number of hats as writer, producer and director for this film -- locates his characters almost exclusively within a middle-class spectrum, which short-circuits some of the exercise. Still, in a film set in a haunted apartment building in the enclave of Binondo, it’s a good college try. Perhaps, there aren’t really impoverished Tsinoys around after all.

Three intertwining stories make up The Leaving: subtitled Martin, The Lovers, and The Wife. In Martin, the eponymous character is the scion of a once-wealthy family who have since emigrated to the United States, leaving him alone to fend for himself. In the ensuing fall from grace, his girlfriend has left him, while he goes applying in futility from one job to another. In The Lovers, Wiliam, a married man, is embroiled in a volatile affair with travel-agent Joan and they tussle with deadly results. In The Wife, one sees a long-suffering character who discovers her husband’s indiscretions and starts a close, almost intimate relationship with the next-door neighbor, Martin. These overlapping lives must also coexist with the ghosts and ghostly ones trapped in the apartment building.

A nagging feeling of familiarity, however, sours an appreciation of this film. What condemns it is an unbridled wearing of influences on its sleeves. The Leaving is a pastiche of all-too-identifiable sources -- from Asian movies, mostly Hong Kong derivations, particularly Wong Kar-Wai, and still more specifically In the Mood for Love. Read above for the plot toThe Wife. From the very Asiatic color motif – red, all shades of red, curtains, calendars, fruits, dresses, and blood, copious blood – to suspiciously familiar shot compositions to the presence of ghosts recruited from Asian horror flicks, Nakata’s The Ring among others, this film is like a shameless collage that would put Picasso and Braque to shame.

It would have been all compensated for had this film recounted fresher, more novel stories, but that, too, is not forthcoming. Aside from slavishly quoting In the Mood for Love in one part, the other two stories are not compelling enough to sit through either. They are trite tropes that one might generate in a scriptwriting workshop – e.g. someone looking for a job to no avail; a pair of lovers fighting and leading to the most logical extreme. If Loreños feels so compelled to tell stories about Tsinoys, he is better off adapting stories by authors like Charlson Ong, Mario Miclat and other Tsinoy fictionists. Admittedly, Loreños had a good premise – the notion of the struggling Filipino-Chinese – but somewhere along the way, he just lost the plot, and ended up paying homage, not to Tsinoys, but old and rehashed representations of Asian filmmaking. 

reviewed: July 10 ,2010

CINEMA ONE ORIGINALS 2009: The Year of the Misbegotten

The movers and shakers of this year's Cinemalaya must be congratulating themselves as the year comes to a close. A fruitful year, 2009, they must be musing as they pop champagne and toast themselves in jubilation. True enough, many of this year’s films have exceeded modest expectations and have done not just the filmmakers, but the country proud. Even as this is being written, many of these films are now making the rounds of the festival circuit abroad and initial news indicates they are coming home far from empty-handed. Pepe Diokno's Engkwentro won the Venice Horizons Award and the Luigi de Laurentiis Award at the recent Venice Film Festival and Alvin Yapan's Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe bagged the Gold Prize at the 33^rd Cairo International Film Festival. At this year’s Cinemanila Film Festival, local audiences had the privilege to see the promising feature debuts of directors Christopher Gozum (Anacbanua) and Armando Lao (Biyaheng Lupa) and it wouldn’t be far-fetched to see them invited overseas as well. Nor would it be surprising to see them grabbing some prizes along the way. 

When all is said and done, the same might not be said of the entries to this year’s Cinema One Originals. Featuring veteran directors at the helm, this year saw a forgettable procession of mediocre and uninspired filmmaking. One came away from watching the Originals with a sensation of malaise: the films were not bad, but not good, either. The films were either too safe (read: too commercial, too formulaic) or just too headlong (read: too enterprising but not too well thought-out). But the coup de grace that doomed these films remains the failure of the scriptwriting. Film critics have often harped on the short shrift afforded to Filipino film scripts, and this year's films validate this cutting observation and testify to the need for improved screenwriting. 

If nothing else, the Cinema One Originals this year seemed to dwell on the shallow end of navel-gazing. Self-flagellation has never been so symptomatic as now. And yet, like most of Lenten flagellants, these films open little more than skin-deep wounds, seemingly content and complacent at their exhibitionism. As humans, as a society, as a nation, we get little insight through these films into our essential maladies. The interrogation of our common plight dissolves ultimately into flippancy. These films don’t problematize our condition as much as take cheap potshots at it; hence many in this lineup of films are either comedic or fantastic. 

Lahat tayo may abnormality, declares a supposedly insightful character in Maximus & Minimus, the opening film at the festival, a comic film that proceeds to do nothing with its rehashed insight into the human condition, but concludes with a cynical ending. The eponymous characters must contend with distorted self-perceptions amidst a modern world obsessed with rigorous conceptions of beauty. Their shallow plight is telegraphed by their names: Maximus is an overweight beauty who has few problems – not even with her healthy sex life – except that a new lover has given her a reason to doubt her comfort in her own skin. Papu, on the other hand, derives his nickname, Minimus, from his lack of penile endowment, so lacking that he cannot possibly pleasure the fleshy and fleshly Maximus. He is consigned in this movie to find ways to remedy his physical shortcoming, illustrated by trope after trope depicting his failures. Lest we think that abnormalities depicted in this film are shallow, Maximus’ new lover will give Freudians a reason not to outrightly dismiss it. On second thought, forget it. 

Paano Ko Sasabihin is a romantic comedy that turns Maximus & Minimus' motif of dysmorphia into the motif of disability. This is strictly for the birds: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and well, you get the drill. Not many films delve into the sensitive issue of disability; but those that do often squander the chance at giving this subject a fresh, insightful spin. Practically trivializing its delicate subject and turning it into a substanceless subplot, Paano Ko Sasabihin, sadly, belongs to this majority. A cutesy tale about two people who know sign language (the boy works at a school for deaf-mute; the girl has a mute brother) and mistake each other for deaf-mute, it is little more than a vehicle for its stars, who are reprising their romance in an ongoing television serial. 

Wanted: Border is the film that comes closest to a serious distillation of some of our national maladies. But it’s not so much a social analysis as it is a stylish and richly embellished imagining of a story in the tabloids. Like much tabloid fodder, we get a gallery of grotesque characters -- yet identifying who corrupts whom is no easy task in a culture of violence that implicates everyone. At the center of its black, macabre comedy is Saleng, a woman who must run an eatery while military men turn her house into a halfway house for suspected communist rebels. Before long, the tortures Saleng and her mentally-challenged son witness turn them into butchers. With increasingly ghoulish faces, leprous sores, black circles under their eyes (remember Elem Klimov’s Come and See?), they butcher and cook their victims and feed them to the unsuspecting – not the least of which are their teachers in torture. As the first woman to be crucified during Lent, Saleng embodies the conflicts and traumas of a nation's tortured history. Whether her acts of butchery are the symptom of profound sociopathy or just the outcome of Pavlovian conditioning, whether her crucifixion is sincere penitence is left to the audience to decide. It is best left that way: Wanted Border neither trivializes nor judges. 

Bala Bala: Maniwala Ka is a fantasy that foregrounds our common irrationality, as if to acknowledge it would mean our redemption. At the heart of its story is a boy named Amiel, a mute child whose secrets are manifold. He has elemental origins and elemental powers, but he is also a child suffering from the abuse of his adoptive parents. He begins to use his supernatural gifts for good when he meets an agriculturist who has come to the boy’s beleaguered town on orders to investigate the source of a plague. The plague – not unlike a biblical one – has started to claim children and domesticated animals. The agriculturist, an arrogant cynic from the city, becomes the child’s instrument to heal sick children. The agriculturist also crosses paths with a curious witch doctor whose prophecies seem to be coming true. In the end, we are given to speculate (read: the film withholds too much) that the town is little but a playground for elementals who apparently harbor resentment for the mistreatment of their kind. Bala Bala: Maniwala Ka ultimately depicts the chastening of science, and revels in privileging what cannot be verified by it. With the logic of magic realism, with its espousal of the anachronistic, this fantasy further reinforces why we have remained in the dark ages for so long, why we have remained stubbornly polarized against an empirical,  modern world.

reviewed: November 26, 2009

MY WAY HOME (Miklós Jancsó , 1964)

Something about the images of war haunts and fascinates Joseph, a wide-eyed 17-year-old partisan who wanders across the Hungarian plains on his way home in the final days of  Second World War. He lingers in a war-torn landscape, and seems uninterested to continue his journey home. What he is bound to experience in transit, however,  is not the scenic route but bewildering and harsh lessons,  as he gets variously caught in a series of internments and arrests by renegade Cossacks, various bandits, and the advancing Red Army. 

As a prisoner of war, Joseph experiences firsthand the horrors and absurdities of war. He comes close to death as he is lumped together with common bandits who are promptly executed by the Soviets. Released on one of his captors' pure whims, he wanders around trying to find armaments left behind and marvels at reconnoitering planes. Caught wearing a Nazi uniform, he is captured by Soviet troops but is spared by virtue of his Hungarian documents. Instead he is sent to a cow farm manned by a wounded soldier who is his coeval. He becomes the soldier’s assistant in milking the cows, and although they hardly speak each other’s language at first, they form a fast and strong friendship. 

This brotherly bond between the two is captured in a series of scenes of blissful idyll: shooting at frogs with pistols, toppling Greek statues, chasing after bathing girls, goofing around among ruins. All manner of play enjoyed by teenage boys. Young Joseph also starts to learn the foreigner’s language and absorbs his thinking, no more apparent than in a scene where he puts on the soldier’s uniform and pretends to be one of the Red Army in order to get help for his bedridden friend. Reminiscent of the freeze-frame of Antoine Doinel that ends Truffaut’s 400 Blows, a close-up of young Joseph’s bewildered face ends this movie, coinciding with the end of war, his own freedom marred by a rude awakening that he must flee away from. 

Filmed in stark black and white, My Way Home reflects many of the themes to be found in Jancso’s other films set in strife, namely Round-Up and Red and White: the brutalization, barbarity and nightmare logic of war. But it isn't so much a bleak and pessimistic view of war depicted here as it is one of frank naturalism; few virtues can be attributed to war, after all. It's been told many times before but the retelling here is done with little comment: the depiction of war's aberrations happens without warning, not lingered on and sometimes observed in long shots that remove a sentimental meditation on them. Some of the characters are almost ciphers -- without faces and names -- caught in the sad dynamics of violence and aggression. What remains in the final reckoning are the human casualties, those abused and dehumanized by the changing vicissitudes of war. To the victor, as the old adage goes, the spoils. Jancso, however, does not dwell on the dark nature of conflict, as the camera's focus levels on an uncommon friendship between captor and prisoner. The scenes involving the two boys evoke the most fascination, the mine-littered Hungarian plains receding farther and farther back into an almost forgotten backdrop.

Title in French: Mon Chemin
reviewed: September 10, 2006

KARDIOGRAMMA (Darezhan Omirbaev, 1995)

 

Think where Truffaut's 400 Blows leaves off, replace Antoine Doinel with a young farm boy and transplant the setting to a cold Kazakh institution -- this is how director Darezhan Omirbaev must have conceived of Kardiogramma. He makes one more modification: instead of a boys' reformatory, Jasulan, the young hero, is condemned to a sanatorium for children with heart ailments. Before it is all over, the heart's mettle will be tested, driven to the brink, the sense of claustrophobia and asphyxia enclosing it, the cold, institutional walls conjuring the dimensions of a prison.   

By all accounts, Jasulan is a loner, by nature and by circumstance, hailing as he does from the desolate outskirts of this former Soviet state. For miles around, on native soil, there are no houses or signs of life, the plains of the countryside are wide open spaces. A painful contrast soon becomes apparent with his place of exile: a cold, dimly lit edifice populated with children who speak a different tongue. While this is a place for convalescents, it is not unlike a regular school, complete with the cruel hierarchical structure and strata.

Jasulan, not the least for not speaking a word of the sanatorium's lingua franca, is soon singled out for humiliation. His tormentors are unforgiving; they even have a foolproof way of inducing urination during sleep and Jasulan falls prey to it. Otherwise, the hectoring takes on more straightforward varieties.

Jasulan's one remaining solace is an unrealistic one, too, developing a crush as he does on the sanatorium's nurse. We find Jasulan frequenting the clinic for various cuts and bruises, only to discover that the nurse is being courted by one of the doctors. A number of sequences ensues, desperately chronicling his attempts to look in on them. Subsequently, we perversely rejoice with the naturally voyeuristic Jasulan when a secret is made known to him: a peephole into the women's showers. (In an earlier scene, his father rebukes him for addictively "watching tv programs of nude women.") But just when he gets the chance to see the woman of his dreams in the nude, the bullies threaten to play spoilsport yet again.

Voyeurism seems to be this film's humorous metaphor for freedom. For Jasulan who is exiled in more ways than one, held incommunicado among peers culturally different and only speaking Russian, the curtailment of this "right" is the last straw. His prison-like situation has been untenable all along. We have witnessed a stark contrast between his unfettered life at home and the regulated, often hostile existence in a cold city institution. 

Kardiogramma's simple tale of a young boy in exile also seems to explore a bigger, darker parable: the continuing legacy of the former Soviet capital, its neo-imperialism, in the affairs of this newly independent state. There is a kind of estrangement sustained in an environment that privileges the Russian language. All in all, Omirbaev's latest film is an affecting tale of alienation, a portrait of the seeming dichotomy between urban and rural spaces, and a child's truncated sense of wonderment, all his myths coldy withheld from him, in an increasingly quasi-totalitarian environment.

Title in English: Cardiogram
Reviewed: March 14, 2007

MOE NO SUZAKU (Naomi Kawase, 1997)

Naomi Kawase seems consigned at the moment to be the darling of film festivals, one of the best-kept secrets even among those who follow arthouse films. Fellow art-house compatriots like Hirokazu Kore-eda and Shinji Aoyama have found better luck and have crossed over to greater prominence. Even after winning the Golden Camera at Cannes in 1997, fame and wider audiences continue to elude this young Japanese director. One of the problems is that her work is largely unavailable outside of Japan, and hence any version with English subtitles. (Edit: Kawase has since created a website that makes her documentaries available in an 8-film dvd boxed set entitled "Tsumugu".)

Moe No Suzaku is an outstanding introduction to her oeuvre. It's an instant charmer that recalls the work of old Japanese masters, a throwback to times when family drama held sway among Japanese moviegoers. If you relish the quiet rhythms of Yasujiro Ozu and the lyrical imagery of Hou Hsiao-hsien, chances are you will enjoy this film. But Kawase also complements her visual style with very contemporary, eclectic touches that are well-integrated and fairly seamless. If anything, the results are haunting and engaging, a visual experience that complements a humanist story.   

The story takes place in an agricultural village nestled among mountains in an unnamed locale in Japan. A prologue introduces the central characters of the movie, an extended family of farmers composed of  the farmer Kozo, his wife Sachiko, his daughter Michiru, his mother and his nephew Eisuke. The emotional center of this story, however, are the two young characters, Eisuke and Michiru, close-knit cousins who grow up together and have a very intimate relationship. 

Fifteen years on, very little has changed for the village they inhabit. Outsiders from the city may idealize this village steeped in an idyllic and charming setting, but the villagers are eagerly waiting to usher in the machinery of modern times to pump life into its economy. Economic recession is hitting hard, and the new railway would open the markets outside their purview for their cash crops. Villagers gather and lament how construction of a railway station in their town has been put on hold. 

These unfulfilled opportunities cast a pall on the villagers. One of the hardest hit is Kozo, who is so distraught that he takes his life. His wife is forced to work at a restaurant until she falls ill one day out of grief and exhaustion. Something has to give, sacrifices have to be considered, although relationships are at stake. 

Moe Nu Suzaku captures not only a family’s quiet hardships. The beautifully photographed milieu  -- panoramas of rustic life and and unspoilt nature -- provide a needed contrast, recalling Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust in the Wind, where the similarities not only encompass a pristine setting but characters who must consider leaving their pastoral lives to improve their lot in life. Hou’s influence can also be felt in the overall mise-en-scene, while the posture of characters and their faraway gaze are echoes of Ozu. Kawase also borrows thematically from Ozu. In a book entitled Ozu,  Donald Richie puts forward a thesis on the old master's work: the dissolution of the family is a theme that runs through most of Ozu's mature films. This seems to be the central concern of Suzaku, but Kawase makes it more complex by introducing the destructive determinism of socio-economic forces. Intercut with lavish shots of the picturesque backdrop are documentary-like compositions of the unadorned faces of the villagers, adding poignancy to their sad fates. 

On par with many of her more ballyhooed compatriots, Naomi Kawase deserves to be seen and heard by a wider audience, having proven herself with a formidable body of work that gamely straddles fiction and documentary. Now that her work is available on subtitled dvd, word of mouth should start to bode well for her and her future practice.

Title in English :The God Suzaku

reviewed: September, 2006

KORIDORIUS (Sharunas Bartas, 1994)

Forget any contrivance of plot, forget any semblance of story, forget altogether the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action. Koridorius is a patently experimental, art-house film that defies easy categorization, as hermetically sealed as its auteur, Sharunas Bartas, who has remained unforthcoming about the significance of his work, resolutely cultivating a poetics so personal that we seem to be looking over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of his heuristic pursuits. Given this caveat, Koridorius, as well as the rest of Bartas' equally arcane output, is not meant for everyone and bound to estrange the casual viewer accustomed alone to traditional modalities of moviemaking.

Koridorious pushes the envelope further. There is no dialogue at all spoken throughout the film. The characters, as a consequence, are fleshless and nameless. They do not trace any substantial character development; they come and go in a revolving door that doesn’t invest them with any dramatic arc. Whatever function they serve or tropes they may represent are nebulous and hard to pin down given the nature of the use of imagery and the subversion of story.

What connects them together is the presence of the corridor that they inhabit and pass through, on the same floor of a nameless tenement. If one insists, however, on a key -- a speculative metaphor -- the corridor may represent an overarching, claustrophobic tunnel that funnels them -- and us -- towards a long perspectival and diachronic view of time and space. According to one interpretation (even Bartas' associates are secretive and coy about the mysteries of the auteur's work), Koridorius is meant to allegorize Lithuania and its history. It is supposed to chart the progress of this Baltic state, Bartas' homeland, from Soviet Communism to a newfound democracy.

Authorial intention, however, can only go so far in elucidating one's grasp of this befuddling but mesmerizing film. Faced by its heady and hypnotic visuals, one abandons, by degrees, the hope for a story and settles into the languid rhythms of the film's slow, stately progression. One is taken by the contemplative and thoughtful faces that remind the viewer of Bresson’s models. One disregards that they don’t speak at all, subdued in a hush, a kind of post-verbal existence, weary of voices and speech, and that they never attempt to realize a significant presence in a full-fledged drama.

Let's try to make sense of it.

Three characters stand out and given what little Bartas hints about this film's intention, might represent three generations of the Lithuanian man, or its history: a teenage boy, a young man, and a middle-aged man. What do these characters do? Random acts, basically. But all seem to be caught under the influence of the dark, solemn corridor, where they live: deadpan, etherized. The youngest of them seems to behave in ways that young, mischievous boys are supposed to behave: he steals into wine cellars and gets drunk, sets fire to laundry, and victimizes a pet bird. The young man seems emptily content pacing the corridor, caught in a solemn, lazy posture in bed, dragging on a cigarette all through the film. The middle-aged man stands in front of the window gazing at an empty view; shortly after we see him blowing on the barrel of a shotgun like a woodwind instrument. Is he suicidal? Is this the culmination of life? History? Is this a metaphor for the malaise of a nation?  We can only speculate.

A seemingly crucial moment in the film comes when a contrast appears to be attempted, and as a consequence a statement. While the corridor plays host to a party among its inhabitants – the only part where we catch emotions on faces – outside the building there is an influx of throngs of people into the city. Later on, there are shots apparently of the same people in the city square, seemingly as homeless refugees, trying desperately to keep warm with bonfires using all the wood that they can find in the streets. What does this juxtaposition mean? Is the obvious interpretation about class conflict or class callousness applicable here? Or does it suggest the failure of a new democratic polity? These are bits and pieces that are ultimately not tied together. But it hardly seems to matter. Koridorius is too riveting to break its spell. The images possess both the antinomy of poetry and documentary: the camera takes its sweet time in long, seemingly empty takes and the actual ambient sounds of  this tenement are captured on the soundtrack. That it has historical, social, political overtones may be momentarily overlooked and seem secondary, only to reward the viewer on subsequent viewings. If nothing else, it is a welcome change from the oppression of fictional and narrative fare one finds at the theaters. Not that it will ever be shown in one.

Title in English: The Corridor
reviewed: September 18, 2006

MANORO (Brillante Mendoza, 2006)

By now, every film enthusiast worth his salt must be aware of the teachings and tenets of real-time filmmaking, a paradigm of Filipino cinematic practice pioneered by the avuncular Armando Lao. Often, however, it remains misunderstood to mean something literally unfolding in real time, that is a 90-minute-or-so glimpse of one continuum. It isn't strictly so, although it may create the appearance of a compressed span of temporality. What's most important, however, is not the illusion of synchronic inspection; rather its immediate and intimate dramatic impact on the audience and a logistic one on the fledgling filmmaker. In a nutshell, this film approach denotes a narrative paradigm encoded in a "found story" framework, nominally taking its cue from experimental, non-fictional film-making only in so far as it reworks and processes "found" material by the filmmaker -- perhaps in the form of documentary footage or research material -- until a narrative coheres and is put through further production. Often sociological in nature, often taken for Filipino neorealism, real-time filmmaking may share some of the Italian paradigm's features -- actual marginal people and actual locations -- but Lao's tenets may be more liberal and do not exclude, among other things, the use of professional actors and assistance, and a tendency towards documentary immediacy. Under the illusion of a spontaneous actuality it seems to faithfully depict lies the deliberate but unseen hand of the auteur-writer as creator.

In recent years, a string of real-time masterpieces, including Jeffrey Jeturian’s Kubrador and Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador, has given this film practice a high artistic profile. Manoro, another work by Mendoza, continues to demonstrate the virtues of this school of filmmaking. With its compressed narrative taking place in a handful of days, involving non-professional Aeta actors, and a documentary intimacy -- factors that bestow the filmmaking process with economical and streamlined aesthetics -- Manoro ("teacher" in the Aeta tongue) is a film of disarming and deceptive simplicity that chronicles the life of the Aetas, particularly that of Jonalyn Ablong, a teenage girl tasked to instruct her fellow Aetas -- illiterates all -- how to fill out the ballot.

The year is 2004 and it is the eve of presidential elections. Armed with basic equipment and a makeshift blackboard, young Jonalyn must traverse a dying landscape, past water-lily-strangled streams, across lahar-choked plains and mountains, to prepare her fellow Aetas to vote. Whether taking pains to write down FPJ, GMA, or Lacson, there seems to be a child-like struggle to do so for the Aeta. Meanwhile, Jonalyn’s grandmother’s mind seems to be elsewhere – before a simple attack of black ants disperses this gathering.

Another matter of concern for Jonalyn is her grandfather who has gone hunting for wild boar in the mountains. She and her father must make a long, arduous trek through treacherous trails to look for him if he is to cast his ballot the following day. Jonalyn’s father seems equally fickle about the coming elections, and seems more inclined to find employment at a South Korean project in the vicinity. But that, too, requires filling out forms.

Manoro is as much about a portrait of a young teenage girl (i.e. the disproportion between her ability and her mission), as it is about a portrait of an indigenous people, a subtle sociology of shortcomings through an outsider's prism. Ralston Jover’s script offers a balanced vantage but ultimately an understated reproach to the Aetas. They may be depicted as a close-knit community who share the fruits of hunting and gathering, but there are less than flattering jabs in their direction. Take their worship of pagan gods to whom much is attributed. Take their flighty and fickle stance towards the election, the allegory of the lowly ants that can scatter them. They seem to be caught unsure at a crucial crossroads, no longer simply hunter-gatherers but not fully absorbed into modern society just yet.

Harnessing a cast of Aeta characters who essentially play themselves, a highly suitable use of hand-held cameras and a documentary approach, Manoro evokes a multi-faceted fable – of troubled hope and of a people caught in retreat. There are faint echoes of Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards and Kiarostami’s Where is The Friend's House? and other Iranian films to be found in this film. There are also slight resonances of the mysticism of something like Souleymane Cisse’s Yeelen. But Manoro lays solid and unshakable claim to what it portrays. Filmmakers of the old schools, sit up and take notice!  

reviewed: September 11, 2009
revised: May 11, 2013