YBCA: NEW FILIPINO CINEMA—Essay by Philbert Ortiz Dy

With "New Filipino Cinema" poised to launch tomorrow evening at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), I'm grateful to Joel Shepard for granting permission to replicate Philbert Ortiz Dy's essay accompanying the film series. Philbert Ortiz Dy [Facebook] graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2005 with a degree in Management Information Systems, but has since then channeled his energy into writing. His short story "The Great Philippine Space Mission", won second place in the 1st Philippine Graphic/Fiction Awards sponsored by Neil Gaiman. He has written for some of the country's top broadsheets and magazines on subjects as diverse as fashion, music, art and politics. He is currently the resident film critic for the Philippine website Clickthecity.com and a writer-at-large for Esquire Philippines.

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Depending on who you're listening to, you might have been told that Filipino cinema is in the middle of a revolution, or on the cusp of one, or has already gotten stale. Or maybe nobody's ever told you anything about Filipino cinema. This is understandable. We are a small archipelago on the other side of the world, and aside from our seemingly endless supply of talented singers, we rarely make the news.

But if you've been told anything about Filipino cinema, it's probably true. We are in the middle of a revolution, and on the cusp of one, and we've already gotten stale. The truth in this country is always complex, and our cinema seems to reflect it.

The last decade or so has seen Filipino cinema die and be reborn. At one point, the country was home to one of the most prolific film industries in the world. The country has a surprisingly long history in filmmaking, and by the 1950s, we had entered a golden age of cinema. In the 1970s, we had our own New Wave, defined by socially relevant films driven by accomplished dramatists. By the 2000s whatever filmmaking tradition the country had was largely considered comatose if not dead. A lack of quality, combined with greater competition from Hollywood and the Asian economic crisis, pretty much sank much of what people thought of as the local filmmaking industry.

And then a lot of things suddenly started happening. In 2000, Raymond Red won the Palme d'Or for his short film Anino. In 2001, Lav Diaz released the five-hour Batang West Side, which seemed to indicate that Filipino film still had the capacity to be bold and challenging. Digital filmmaking entered the picture, which made production a lot more affordable. New festivals opened up, each with their own corresponding grant system, giving would-be filmmakers venues to fund their ideas. Filipino films traveled the world and won all sorts of awards. Brillante Mendoza won the best director prize at Cannes for Kinatay. Pepe Diokno and Lav Diaz received honors in Venice. And so on.

This might sound like an amazing decade for Filipino film, but the truth is a little more complicated. The grant systems are arcane and often involve some sort of creative interference, which makes the idea of independent film a little suspect. The mainstream studios still mostly churn out formulaic dreck, and audiences continue to reward them for it. Meanwhile, it's difficult to find a venue willing to screen the films that win acclaim abroad. The only independent films to consistently make a profit are a new wave of badly made gay exploitation films, which seem to have no artistic ambitions beyond sending a parade of naked bodies on screen to serve as background to a culture of cinematic cruising. When one says "indie" in the Philippines, most people will think you're referring to these exploitation films, of which there is a new one almost every week.

So it goes. There is a revolution, but it hasn't really changed things yet. It is an ongoing struggle that doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. But there are reasons to be optimistic. The last couple of years of Filipino cinema have been truly exciting, and there's a vague sense that we're on the verge of something profound.

The last couple of years have seen the return of the documentary film to our shores. Driven by affordable cameras that can roll nearly endlessly, a small group of documentarians has arisen to capture the strangeness of the nation. Corinne (aka Monster) Jimenez's Kano: An American and his Harem was a work five years in the making, and the result is an astounding exploration of the darkness of a man's soul, and the society that gave him a home.

The truth is becoming a theme in the country, with new movies purposefully blurring the lines between reality and fiction in fascinating ways. The return of the documentary seemed to coincide with a series of movies that blend the form in varying degrees with narrative fiction. Antoinette Jadaone's Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay crosses the line between truth and fiction so readily and easily that it makes the distinction irrelevant. Christopher Gozum's Lawas Kan Pinabli makes the separation clearer with distinct segments, but uses that distinction to make audiences question the very idea of truth. It is a form that we seem to be remarkably comfortable with, the postmodernity casting vibrant shadows that resemble the country's complicated relationship with reality.

The other regions of the country are beginning to tell their stories as well. The Philippines is much more than imperial Manila, and filmmakers from Cebu, Bacolod, Pangasinan and dozens of other places are starting to have their voices heard, creating a more vivid picture of the diversity of the archipelago.

And most heartening of all is the development of a true independent industry. Filmmakers are separating themselves from the grant systems and just going at it on their own. This has led to a wide berth of films that can't be defined by a single characteristic. Jade Castro's Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings co-opts popular forms of mainstream cinema to tell a deeply subversive tale that serves as commentary on the country's macho culture. And thankfully, it found success with local audiences, beating out both local mainstream releases and Hollywood blockbusters.

What is it that is going on in Filipino cinema? It's a difficult to question to answer. It has died and it has been reborn. Then it might have died again. It won favor abroad then went out of fashion. It is being ignored at home, even as some films find an audience. The mainstream is becoming irrelevant, while still remaining the most powerful force in the industry. Filmmakers are coming out of nowhere and disappearing just as quickly. There are angry filmmakers, and talented filmmakers willing to work within the system. People are making bigger films and smaller films and projects that are a little harder to define. Everything is happening all at once, the story as convoluted and strange as everything else in this country. But through this struggle, a lot of great movies are emerging, and all of it is worth watching.

SFIAAFF28 2010: FILIPINO CINEMA—A Few Evening Class Questions for Richard Bolisay

"I wish Francis 'Oggs' Cruz, Richard Bolisay, and Dodo Dayao would get space in the broadsheets, because they're far more interesting than anyone writing there regularly."—Alexis Tioseco, "Wishful Thinking for Philippine Cinema"

When he was a boy, Richard Bolisay's father told him that he had "a peculiar pair of eyes", which no doubt accounts for his meditative gaze into the heart of dreams and—by extension—cinema. A self-described "dreamer from Manila", "Chard" Bolisay administers his own site Lilok Pelikula / Sculpting Cinema, his alternative to a dreamt-of Philippine magazine that would focus on film criticism. Indeed, Lilok Pelikula's intelligent writing seems shaped from the discipline of dreams. In his wistful Criticine "Love Letter" to the films of Mike De Leon, he described Lino Brocka as "a dream fighter of the common people." That word—dream—thrums throughout Bolisay's writing like a bass beat. One senses that this young writer has harnessed the language of dreams to "raid the inarticulate". I am grateful for his willingness to respond to my questions.

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Michael Guillén: What do you want San Francisco audiences to understand about Filipino cinema?

"Chard" Bolisay: Sometimes it's distressing that when I read foreign writers writing about Filipino cinema, the very first thing I notice is that they misspell our name. Filipino takes its shape as strangely as Philipino, Philiphino, Philipinno, or even Filiphino. So maybe I would like to make that clear first—it's Filipino. As much as we appreciate interest and admiration, annoyance can't be helped when such carelessness, whether unintentional or not, is committed. When in doubt, anyhow, one can always go for Philippine cinema.
As any national cinema, ours depicts a certain truth about our condition. Themes of poverty and violence are not surprising to see because our society is indeed poor and violent. It is something seen everyday, felt everyday, though not maybe by the filmmakers themselves but by the subjects they choose to tell. That's why local films that tackle such themes gamble on finding an audience. Why see a film of your own life? Why see a film while you can see such poorness on your own without paying for the price of a ticket? (The price which is more than enough to feed a family a day for those who live below poverty line.) There's a reason why Brillante Mendoza, like Kim Ki-duk to South Korea, is not popular in his own country.

Philippine cinema is as diverse as you can imagine: there are serious dramas, poor slapsticks, tried-and-tested romantic comedies, art house orgasms, and—once in a blue moon—interesting historical pieces. Sexually explicit films that were popular in the late '70s and '80s, and that remained steadily in the '90s through Seiko, are being revived now through the popularity of gay films, whose unsurprising number of audience is keeping Philippine cinema a little more of its (rather fittingly) gay life.

Guillén: What do you want San Francisco audiences to understand about Lino Brocka?

Bolisay: Lino Brocka is a Filipino filmmaker, as Filipino as the first Filipino may be. He knows the Filipino life, speaks the Filipino language, eats Filipino shit, breathes Filipino fart, fights for Filipino freedom, tells the Filipino experience ... and that doesn't come close to exaggerating his image, or to overrating his merits. Simply put, he is the Filipino that we never feel bad about representing us, no matter how bad he chooses us to be seen. His bad, sometimes, is even far from the others' good.
I am no expert on Brocka but I must say I like his family dramas more than his political pieces that made him an icon of the movement. A matter of taste and upbringing this preference may attribute to, but as I always argue, his family dramas are as political as much as his social realist works are. For instance, Tubog sa Ginto [Dipped in Gold, 1970], which may only pass off now as "the macho man's admission of his possession of a vagina", is practically the most entertaining movie to address homosexual relationships, with all the killer dialogues and naughty framing that Brocka unrelentingly provides. That's the quality of an important filmmaker—relevance not only during his time but even several years, or decades, after.

Guillén: How do you situate yourself within Filipino cinema and Filipino film criticism?

Bolisay: I have always been a lurker, a passive moviegoer. Blogs just happen to be public—and their being public just happens to be fun and interesting, that's why I find myself in it. Other than that I'd still be writing in my journal, cursively, selectively scribbling thoughts. Allow me to share a laugh but that phrase "Filipino film criticism" is just preposterous!

Guillén: If there is one Filipino film that you don't think gets enough attention, what would it be?
Bolisay: Gerry de León's Ang Daigdig ng mga Api gets a lot of attention but only a handful have truly seen it, apparently because no print of it exists. To be honest, it wouldn't be of much help to recommend Filipino titles to foreigners considering, confronted with our own embarrassment, we don't know where to find a decent—more so, English-subtitled—copies of them. That, my dear friends, is where our history always finds itself going: disposed to disappear.

Cross-published on Twitch.