YBCA: NEW FILIPINO CINEMA—AMOK (2011)

I'm reminded of Malaysian filmmaker-turned-publisher Amir Muhammad whenever I hear the word "amok", as he was the one who first informed me of its Malay origins. Wikipedia indicates that "amok" stems "from the Malay word mengamuk, which roughly defined means 'to make a furious and desperate charge.' "

The term has since taken on contemporary and cross-cultural inflections, including "running amok", which refers "to the behavior of someone who, in the grip of strong emotion, obtains a weapon and begins attacking people indiscriminately, often with multiple fatalities. The slang term 'going postal' is similar in scope. Police describe such an event as a 'killing spree'. If the individual is seeking death, an alternate method is often 'suicide by cop'. Amok is often described as a culture-bound (or culture-specific) syndrome, which is a psychological condition whose manifestation is strongly shaped by cultural factors." In some instances, those cultural factors have associations with male honor (amok by women is virtually unknown). ...Running amok would thus be both a way of escaping the world (since perpetrators were normally killed) and re-establishing one's reputation as a man to be feared and respected. Some observers have related this explanation to Islam's ban on suicide, which, it is suggested, drove Malay men to create circumstances in which others would kill them." [Footnotes omitted. Emphasis added.]

In the Philippines, "amok" likewise means "unreasoning murderous rage by an individual. In 1876, the Spanish governor-general of the Philippines José Malcampo coined the term juramentado for the behavior (from juramentar—'to take an oath'), surviving into modern Filipino languages as huramentado." As if to confirm the above Islamic reference, it's intriguingly suggestive that amok "has historically been linked with the Muslim Moro people of Mindanao, particularly in the island of Jolo." Others, however, draw a distinction between juramentado and "amok" as the difference between "religious preparation and state of mind." [Footnotes omitted.]

Such etymological indulgences are merely to suggest that in his film Amok (2011), Lawrence Fajardo is playing with the word's ongoing connotations, while updating them to modern-day Manila. Without question, the "man with a gun" (as identified in Amok's closing credits) is suffering from social conditions in the Philippines that have left him jobless and unable to provide for his pregnant wife. That he is an ex-cop only adds an ironic twist to the theory of "suicide by cop."

Fajardo uses the urban congestion of the Edsa-Pasay Rotonda, one of the busiest and most rugged intersections in Manila, as both his narrative setting and his framework (or as Dodo Dayao puts it at Piling Piling Pelikua "both milieu and metaphor"). As Joel Shepard describes in his program note: "It is a place of absolute chaos: people, cars, buses, motorcycles, jeepneys and trains all compet[ing] for space as they try to navigate the crumbling, complex geography of the city in the sweltering tropical heat. It is here that the disparate lives of the characters in Amok converge, their fates united by the violence that sweeps through the streets." At Variety, Richard Kuipers claims Edsa-Pasay Rotonda is "instantly fascinating" and "a kind of tentacled creature playing host to shifting masses of humanity."

Fajardo's Amok is a truly urban narrative where the warp and woof of the anthill weave consists of overheated congestion and co-existent anonymity. Fajardo purposefully samples the variety of people that might be found on any given day at the Edsa-Pasay Rotonda to assemble his cast of characters and further suggests that they all negotiate various levels of internalized rage regarding how life has placed them down at heel. Whether it's delinquent kids (almost innocently) rapping about the dangers of push come to shove on Manila's crowded streets, a mother at a food cart who suspects her customers are cheating her, an aging stunt-man who discovers the woman he's been fucking isn't quite the woman he hired, an uncle at odds with his nephew, a brother at odds with his sister, or a homophobic taxi driver who threatens his gay clientele with a metal pipe, disillusionment and discontent crank up the heat on an already sweltering day.

That "the man with the gun" is the one who unhinges and goes on a shooting spree is as random as the justice and/or punishment dispensed by his stray bullets, and blind as the man who crawls to safety during the film's havoc. In this regard, Amok is nothing new by way of narrative; but, remains vigorous in its editorial attention and precision, excelling more as texture than text. Its visual elements emphasize tactility. You can almost feel the sweat trickling down your neck and dampening your armpits. Indeed, Amok won awards for Best Editing and Sound at the 2011 Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival and Variety concedes that "production values and technical work are impressive on a lean budget."

If Amok is more concerned with surface detail and editorial tempo than psychological depth, it also knowingly emphasizes apparent incongruencies between laws posted on traffic signs and the lawlessness that contests them. Its final winking joke is that of "the man with a knife" standing anxiously in front of the word "AMOK" scrawled in graffiti on the wall behind him. Is the film saying that he will be the next to go amok? When he moves out of the frame, however, it's revealed that the graffiti is actually stating a tenuous optimism in the face of the city's relentless barrage of violence: "I AM OK." It's about as subtle as the speechmaking at film's end that, according to Kuipers at Variety, lessens the impact of what until then has been "a vivid snapshot of Manila street life", especially by way of "some poorly staged TV news footage in which characters' reactions sound more like press releases about social injustice than the voices of those deeply hurt."

My three Philippine colleagues have also weighed in on Amok. At Lessons From the School of Inattention, Oggs Cruz considers Amok "without a doubt, chaos in astounding consummate order." He writes: "The film is directed with meticulousness and discipline, moving from one character to another with commendable restraint in not telling too much and not showing too much, effectively teasing the audience of the predictable but still surprising havoc that is quietly being orchestrated by the elements at play in that time-bomb of a place. Fajardo peppers the film with delectable details, a bit of visual wit here and there, a nuanced shot, and those gems of subtle humor in the dialogue. Louie Quirino's precise cinematography communicates the sweltering heat that seems to demonize humanity in the anarchic setting. The film uses the city's noise as soundtrack, creating an uneasy atmosphere of spontaneity that complements the film's story and theme."

At Piling Piling Pelikula, Dodo Dayao describes Amok as "a well-oiled tumult" and a technical feat "of logistics and guerilla tactics and cutting. It's rigorous, precise." He finesses the obvious comparison to the "multistrand criss-crosser" (Kuipers) associated with Alejandro González Iñárritu, specifically Babel (2006).

At Lilok Pelikula / Sculpting Cinema, Chard Bolisay praises Amok's pulsating direction: "The rhythm builds up and is carried through the climax, not an explosion of some sort, but a gala of predictable outcomes and unpredictable victims." He uses Amok to stage the tension between content and form: "If you ask me what aspect of local independent cinema I dislike, I'd say it's the unabashed preference for content and dismissal of form. A good film strikes a balance between the two, but usually, movies that tackle social issues, no matter how sloppily made they are, are more appreciated than those that boast of technical excellence, as if choosing a pressing subject exempts a work from scrutiny and showing off technique is a display of arrogance. Whereas content is mostly a writer and director's piece of cake, determined prior to execution, form is mathematics: everyone in the production contributes to it, consciously or not, including luck and the lack of it." To prove his point, Chard continues: "Amok succeeds because Lawrence Fajardo, who serves as the film's director, production designer, and editor, has managed to put together a fantastic group of people—from writer John Bedia and cinematographer Louie Quirino to the movie's trailblazing ensemble of actors—whose slight misstep can actually ruin the unmistakable rawness of the film."

Amok will have its U.S. premiere as part of YBCA's "New Filipino Cinema" on Sunday, June 10, 2012 at 7:00PM. Ticket info can be found here.

YBCA: NEW FILIPINO CINEMA—REMINGTON & THE CURSE OF THE ZOMBADINGS

Just in time for San Francisco's June Pride festivities, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) includes Jade Castro's Zombadings 1: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington (Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings, 2011) in their "New Filipino Cinema" program. As Joel Shepard synopsizes in his program note: "Bading is Filipino slang for 'gay,' referring specifically to flamboyant, effeminate homosexuals. A Zombading is the undead version, which the titular character has to deal with as he tries to lift a curse that is gradually turning him into a bading. This exuberant film satirizes the very idea of homophobia as it literally turns homosexuality into something to be feared. Blending the tropes of horror comedy, this film is a deliciously subversive piece of pop art."

At this juncture, it's fairly well-known that the iconic zombie can be a blank canvas on which any measure of social marginalization or political disenfranchisement can be painted in broad brushstrokes. Especially in the horror-comedy hybrid, the internationally popular zombie can likewise achieve satiric force through specific national and/or regional references, let alone subcultural ones. The laughs earned by a film like Juan of the Dead, for example, has as much to do with how it knowingly pokes fun at Cuban culture as it does with the fact that its generic tropes communicate to international audiences.

Zombadings is not the first gay zombie movie—Bruce LaBruce has already had controversial fun with Otto: Or Up With Dead People (2008) and L.A. Zombie (2010)—but it's quite possibly the first Filipino gay zombie movie. It's fascinating not only for its pop bravado, but also for its cultural affects, which remind me how comic timing and pacing differ from country to country, requiring a certain amount of spectatorial patience and accommodation. In other words, I have no doubt that a Filipino audience would be more privy to Zombading's in-jokes than an American one, yet the film still translates interestingly enough through its generic zombie tropes and its "gayspeak", which at the beginning of the 21st century has become almost as universal a language as English. Quite cleverly, if inconsistently, the "gayspeak" in Zombadings is telegraphed through yellow subtitling, perhaps to better indicate how its cute straight protagonist Remington (Mart Escudero) is resisting a curse placed upon him by an offended gay guy (Roderick Paulate) that has Remington gradually turning gay against his will.

This coming-out curse has proven especially dangerous because gays are being murdered one by one in Remington's small town by a nefarious homophobe and, as you have no doubt already guessed, it is all these dead gays that come back to life to wreak havoc and take vengeance; but, from the moment the first hand bursts up from the grave clutching a high heel shoe to a seance lit atmospherically with pink candles, you know that the mayhem is going to be more stereotypically mirthful than usual.

One of the main reasons I enjoy turning to my Philippine colleagues Oggs Cruz and Dodo Dayao to contextualize insight is that they have a working command of how Filipino films situate themselves within the history of their own national cinema. "If there's one thing a filmmaker needs to know about profitable filmmaking in the Philippines," Cruz writes at Lessons From the School of Inattention, "it is to acknowledge that the only kind of filmmaking that actually earns money is genre filmmaking. If the film is not horror, comedy, romance, or laden with homosexual themes and titillation, it would probably not arouse enough interest to earn enough box-office rewards to at least break even."

"Despite having a story where crazy-looking gaydars, rollerblading widows, vengeful drag queens, homophobic serial killers and the titular gay zombies miraculously cohere," Cruz continues, "Zombadings is actually very intelligently and carefully conceived and crafted. Castro directs the film like a maverick conductor, leading an orchestra composed of traditionally jarring instruments but eventually coming up with a symphony that is not so hard to enjoy and adore."

Cruz also praises the film's ingenious casting as an element of its popularity with Philippine audiences, emphasizing the credence granted Zombadings by veteran Filipino performers Roderick Paulate ("instrumental in creating the sub-genre of drag queen slapsticks"), and former macho stars John Regala, Daniel Fernando, and Leandro Baldemor to add muscle to the film's pointed equation of "homophobia as machismo." This sly critique of gender performativity is further extended into a predominantly female police force, where feisty deputy Mimi (Miles Canapi) made me laugh out loud more than any other character in the ensemble.

At Piling Piling Pelikula, Dodo Dayao concurs with Cruz: "Paulate is stunt-casting that's both preordained and genius. The queer act he's made his metier should've by rights gone stale after all this time but somehow it's even gained nuance and range. It's a shtick, sure, but it's a shtick that never ever gets old."

As for never getting old, Dayao points out Zombadings' reliance on "that old and old-fashioned Frank Capra trope—the comeuppance and enlightenment that comes from walking in the shoes of what you abhor, and more than anything, it's really subverting the very stereotypes it only seems to condone, much as it's hard to tell sometimes from the breathless velocity of the gags and the caricaturical swish and swagger of gay argot and affectation it relies on to make it fly."

Cruz concludes that Zombadings "becomes even more rewarding if enjoyed within the context of what it was made for, as a document of empowerment, a testament to the right of choice, and a blow against intolerance. It is packaged in a way that its freedoms and excesses should not be taken literally or too seriously, yet its jabs at still-existing constipated perceptions and opinions against homosexuality are too potent to be left unnoticed."

At Manila Bulletin, straight teenage hearthrobs Mart Escudero and Kerbie Zamora (who plays Escudero's sidekick Jigs) express their (to-be-expected?) jitters about the film's gay love scene, and at Inquirer Lifestyle several of the remaining cast members speak up about their roles while waiting to be made up as zombies.

Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings will screen Saturday, June 9, 9:30PM. Jade Castro has been invited but not yet confirmed. Ticket info is here.

YBCA: NEW FILIPINO CINEMA—KANO: AN AMERICAN AND HIS HAREM

As Monster Jimenez explains on the website for her documentary Kano: An American and His Harem, "kano" (pronounced kä•nô') is Tagalog slang for Amerikano; i.e., American. But, Jimenez qualifies that Filipinos usually refer to any caucasian, regardless of ethnicity, as kano. The kano in question is Victor Pearson, a decorated American Marine who arrived in the Philippines in 1969 after surviving a bomb blast while fighting in Vietnam, thereby earning himself a hefty disability pension of $3,500 a month for his post-traumatic stress disorder. Considering that at the time the average monthly income for a Filipino was a mere $250, Pearson arrived a wealthy man by comparison, and was able to wield considerable influence and power. He set his sights on "living the dream"; one that "every heterosexual male dreams about."

Pearson swiftly discovered how easy it was for him to secure a Filipino wife and a plot of land in a poor, remote village in the Philippine province of Negros Occidental. He built a compound and filled it with a harem of wives and mistresses, many of them underage women as young as 11, all dependent upon his financial handouts. "It was like Christmas and birthday and holiday all rolled into one", he recalls proudly. With his disability fund, Pearson lived like a king in his compound for more than two decades, where the main activity was sex. In exchange for "love", Pearson offered his women allowances, jewelry, and shopping money.

But in 2001, Pearson was charged with 87 counts of rape against eight women, most of them reported to be aged 13 to 16 at the time, convicted on two counts the following year, and sentenced to 80 years in jail. Irregardless, the Sideways Films one-sheet for the film wryly asserts, "We think you'll like him." And there's no denying that Pearson has plenty of charisma—and rationalizations—to spare.

At Lessons From the School of Inattention, Oggs Cruz characterizes: "Pearson looks like a thoroughly unkempt Harvey Keitel and talks like a reflective but drunken Edward G. Robinson. He is an inevitable screen personality. His back story, with the possible barrage of psychological torture from a hinted torturous childhood and Vietnam War experiences, could have been a Kubrick thriller. His present story, as embattled villain in a legal battle against all odds, could have been a clever Lumet court drama."

At Piling Piling Pelikula, Dodo Dayao offers his take: "If it doesn't exactly plumb the same depths of malevolence as, say, Charles Manson, what he does exude is a similarly dangerous ambivalence: charismatic and diabolical in equal measure. And it leaks into the movie, irradiating it almost. The part where he sings 'Love Potion #9' smacks of both the quaint and the sinister, and not merely out of how creepy the subtext of the song gets, no. One second he's your boisterous uncle with one too many drinks in him hogging the family videoke, the next he's Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet. He is, in many ways, the quintessential pervert. He is also the perfect documentary subject."

At Spot, Ria Limjap describes Pearson as a fascinating character who Jimenez allows "to unfold with a gentle detachment. She catches Pearson's twisted charisma and his central tragedy, evoking revulsion and compassion in equal measure. The nicotine-stained and puffy-eyed sexual predator should be nothing but repulsive, right? Right. But sometimes he's just a lonely old man with screaming lambs of his own."

Although Pearson is now serving two life sentences in Manila, many of his women stand by him, surprisingly even those who testified against him in court. Pearson and his harem form an extended family bound together by codependency and power issues. Although still behind bars, he has since married five of the women who testified against him in court, keeping them in apartments in the neighborhood. Several of the women sport tattoos bearing his name. With considerable prurience, Jimenez explores the blurred line between generosity and exploitation. Whereas on one hand women sold their own children to Pearson, on the other hand he financed their education and provided opportunity they could otherwise never hope to have.

Unrepentant when confronted with his abuse of girls as young as 14, Pearson claims that the lifestyle and education he provided these women outweighs the charges leveled at him. This becomes the provocative litmus test of Kano—the filmmakers don't judge, both sides are presented as fairly as possible, and it's up to each audience member to determine "right" from "wrong" in this tangled and conflicted scenario. As Basil Tsiokos states it for Indiewire: "Giving equal time to both Pearson and the women's stories, the film gradually reveals a system of sexual subservience predicated on economic exploitation—a system that most women (or their families) may have entered resignedly, but, sadly, fully aware." But Oggs Cruz warns against too simplistic a reduction: "To simply regard their intertwined relationships as primarily economic is to disregard the complexity of human nature. Jimenez explores not only the cycle of financial dependency but also the continuously evolving emotions, no matter how misplaced, mutated and immoral they seem to be."

Dodo Dayao furthers: "At no point does the film slavishly demonize Pearson. At no point does it need to either. That's the bone to pick for many. Only its gut-punch, both as film and as argument, really gets its brunt from resisting the urge to editorialize, leveling everything past the point of being about one man's guilt to being more about an entire nation's cultural psyche. How deep our resident subservience to the white man runs. How every moral choice tends to boil down to money changing hands. How money is our enabler, our prosthetic, our elixir, our atonement. And more than that, how the beloved infidel may well be our prevailing icon of machismo. Pearson doesn't faze us too much, perhaps, because he is, in many ways, nothing new. He is every domestic action star who ever played a real-life philandering family man slash cop hero and spread the gospel of the other woman as a badge of manliness. And that he's a war hero, too, makes the embodiment even more perverse."

Funded by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (Philippines), the Asian Network of Documentary (South Korea) and the Goteborg Film Fund (Sweden), Kano is the first documentary project of Arkeofilms, the independent film production company where Jimenez is managing director. It was selected for the First Appearance Competition of the 23rd edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), November 17–28, 2010, where it won. As reported by Isabel L. Templo to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, "The five-man international jury called it a film of 'disturbing power [that] explores a stunning mix of child abuse, post-traumatic stress syndrome, polygamy, co-dependence, sex addiction, criminality, and the lone voice of one woman whose testimony sends a troubled Amerikano living in the Philippines to jail.' " It likewise won Best Documentary at both the 2010 edition of Cinemalaya and the 2011 edition of the Gawad Urian Awards.

Though Victor Pearson is, as Dodo Dayao stated above, "the perfect documentary subject" and his story an undeniably compelling one, the documentary itself is more informative than artful and marred by indecisive camera work that struggles to position itself within the scenes, aggravated by quick zooms in and out that feel unsettling and amateurish.

Kano: An American and His Harem will have its U.S. premiere at YBCA on Friday, June 8, 2012, 1:00PM. Ticket info here.

YBCA: NEW FILIPINO CINEMA—NIÑO (2011)

The 2010 edition of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) introduced me to Filipino cinema. I took a festival studies approach to SFIAAFF's Filipino sidebar (Filipino Cinema and "Imagined Communities") and compiled a critical overview of Lino Brocka's Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting, 1974) as a sampling of SFIAAFF's mini-retrospective honoring Brocka. Then I solicited and retained the cooperation of the three Philippine film critics championed by Alexis Tioseco in his piece "Wishful Thinking for Philippine Cinema"—Francis "Oggs" Cruz, Eduardo "Dodo" Dayao, and Richard "Chard" Bolisay—all three who consented to interviews. Oggs and Chard further granted permission for me to republish their reviews of Yanggaw (Affliction, 2008). I enjoyed working with and learning from all three of these young gentlemen so much, that I continue to solicit their advice and counsel concerning all films Filipino to this day.

Thus, I was especially pleased when Joel Shepard advised of an upcoming program of "New Filipino Cinema" programmed for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), June 7-10 and June 17, 2012. Featuring 29 films, 24 of them U.S. premieres, "New Filipino Cinema" is the most comprehensive survey of contemporary Filipino cinema presented in the United States. Shepard explains: "New Filipino Cinema is a big fat snapshot of the diverse range of filmmaking going on right now—narrative features, documentaries, and experimental work. The clichéd images of the Philippines that most foreigners are familiar with are of poverty, prostitution, and crime. Those social ills are represented in this series, but they absolutely do not define this complex and extraordinary country. It's important to understand this. I was also careful to represent filmmaking taking place outside of Manila, and to include many women directors."

"New Filipino Cinema" kicks off on Thursday, June 7, 2012 with an opening reception to welcome director Loy Arcenas, who will be attending his opening night film Niño (2011). My Philippine colleagues Oggs Cruz and Dodo Dayao encouraged me to watch Niño when it screened earlier this year at the 2012 Palm Springs International Film Festival, and I found it to be an enjoyable and affecting melodrama about a family as worn about the edges as the delapidated house in which they live out their circumscribed lives. The patriarch has fallen into a coma and his sister Celia, a former opera star, tries to miraculously revive him by dressing her grandson up as Santo Niño de Cebú, the Philippine variant of Santo Niño de Atocha, seen here wandering whimsically far from his holy chair, running throughout the old house, and among the complicated—if not quite modern—lives of its inhabitants. The film's comic flourishes are its highlights.

Shepard deepens the perspective: "The image of the child Christ, the Santo Niño, holds special significance to the Filipino faithful. It is said to cause miracles, the idol a perfect representation of the country's strange conflation of religion and superstition. It is why a young boy has been dressed up as the Santo Niño in this clever dissection of a fading aristocratic family. With the patriarch fallen ill, the debts piling up, the house crumbling, and the family falling apart, all that's left is to pray for a miracle. With studied grace, Niño explores a social class rarely depicted in Filipino films, revealing a deeply human core to aristocracy."

At Lessons From the School of Inattention, Oggs Cruz details that exploration: "There is a reason why people are fascinated with ruins, despite the evident disrepair and decay. Ruins are permanent reminders of a distant glorious past. In Loy Arcenas' Niño, the Lopez-Aranda clan is portrayed with the same fascination, as if the family were ruins on display: the bits of opera that Celia sings to bedridden Gaspar with her aging soprano are the broken columns, the stories told by Gaspar of his blossoming political position are the damaged statues, and the rustic house, its remaining furniture and ornaments and the anecdotes of the loyal household help of the house's former prominence are the collapsed edifices, the wilted gardens, the burnt arcs, all of which are faint indications of the family’s expired extravagance." For a first-time filmmaker, Cruz finds Niño a "feat to behold", and stresses Arcenas' "disciplined craftsmanship."

At Piling Piling Pelikua, Dodo Dayao writes: "Fides Cuyugan-Asensio is indomitable as the lapsed diva and her temperament becomes the film's: skittish, fractious, wistful, elegant, and just the tiniest bit cuckoo."

Blurbs On Contemporary Filipino Films adds: "The effort to create an envelope-pushing film concocted over jaunty pieces of melodrama, gothic humor, opera music and camp with a Hallmark strain that’s too close for comfort, warrants some recognition. But it is through Rody Vera's excellent screenplay that we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel the angst the characters lived through, with their varied forms of displacement and agony rattling in the most smoldering of friction."

At Pelikula Tumblr, Jansen Musico has a brief conversation with Arcenas, wherein he explains: "Rody and I love irony and we much agreed how much irony fills up our daily lives. We wanted to explore this in the film, within the context of a comedy of manners. But Filipino life is a hijinks of comedy and sorrow and so we decided that Niño should be a study of the present Filipino psyche walking the fine line between tragedy and comedy."

Preceding the film, Alleluia Panis of Kularts will perform "Ritwal" with vocalist Kristine Sinajon.

SFIAAFF28 2010: FILIPINO CINEMA—A Few Evening Class Questions for Dodo Dayao

"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"

According to Dodo Dayao's MySpace page, he is 102 years old and chasing pavements. He further describes himself as "writer, filmmaker, infrequent painter, random komikero [i.e., comic book enthusiast], heartthrob in a past life, monkey gone to heaven." We should all be so prolific. Not only does he administer two film sites—Is It Safe? and Piling Piling Pelikula—but, he's a team contributor to Geeks United, Korean Bug and Unspoken Cinema.

In similar collaborative spirit, his oil paintings have been featured in group exhibitions at various galleries in the Philippines (examples can be seen at Quezon City's West Gallery website as part of three group shows: "12x9", "Them!" and "2010: The Year We Make Contact"). He's also collaborated with Khavn dela Cruz as "translator" on such films as Ang dagat na nalulunod (The Drowning Sea, 2008). His film writing—especially as reflected at Piling Piling Pelikula—is hot with incendiary irreverence. I find his poetic insights brave, searing and addictive. It's no wonder that Alexis Tioseco wished him a wider audience and I'm delighted that he was quick to respond to my set of email questions.

* * *

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

Dodo Dayao: That it's not all social realism and exoticized poverty. That it is multi-colored and many-flavored and more often than not—especially these days—goes on adventures. And that there's more where all this came from.

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

Dayao: That Brocka made around 65 movies and only around 10 of them have been elevated to the canon. And that the films that didn't make it to the canon—the melodramas, the comedies, the pop films—demand as much investigation, possibly even more, than those that did. Canons are moldy and rigid and play it safe and are no fun at parties anyway. I always thought cinema should be the opposite of all these (especially the part about being fun at parties).

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

Dayao: I'm a fan first, a writer second and a critic a distant third. I abandon myself to tone and voice and color, to energy of language and blood in the pulse and the beating to a pulp of all anonymity and objectivity. Cinema is all about wading knee-deep in the mud and getting your feet dirty and sometimes your heart broken. And I always thought film writing—or any kind of writing for that matter—should be as vivid and fervent and as misbehaved and as given over to the moment, not dry like a dissertation. Also, would-be film reviewers should at least know basic grammar. But there should be more film writers, if only to amp the volume of discourse. There are very few of us and the ones that are doing good work—and there are a good number of these already, mind—are either people I know or have met. I want to someday be swept off my feet with awe and envy by a complete stranger's piece. All this, of course, most likely situates me in the margins—which is really where I prefer to be.

Guillén: If there is one Filipino film that you don't think gets enough attention, what would it be?

Dayao: A trick question, as there can never be just one. But for now, let me just say that Joey Gosiengfiao's masterpiece is not Temptation Island (1980) as the world seems to think; it's Bomba Star (1980).

Cross-published on Twitch.