HIMALA At The Indio Bravo Filipino Film Festival

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After being named CNN Asia Pacific Screen Awards Viewers Choice Winner for Best Asia-Pacific Film of All Time, the Ishmael Bernal classic Himala (Experimental Cinema Of The Philippines, 1982) will be shown on June 13th, Saturday as part of the Indio Bravo Filipino Film Festival at the Visual Arts Theater, Theater 2 located at 333 West 23rd St. in New York at 7pm. Himala stars Philippine Superstar Nora Aunor, best known for her performance as fake visionary Elsa, her portrayal is considered by most Filipino critics to be the best of her acting career. Himala was the only Filipino film that made it to the Best Asian Films of All Time chosen by CNN International Europe/Middle East/Africa (CNN UK). The film was cited for having austere camera work, haunting score and accomplished performances that sensitively portray the harsh social and cultural conditions that people in the third world endure. Himala, as one of CNN's Top 18 Asian Films, had been shortlisted as one of the 10 films vying for the APSA Viewers Choice Award. Earlier this month, PASADO (Pampelikulang Samahan Ng Mga Dalubguro) hailed the film as Pasadong Pelikula Sa Lahat Ng Panahon with due recognition to the contribution of lead actress Nora Aunor and screenwriter Ricardo Lee. The PMPC (Philippine Movie Press Club) honored Himala with the Global Achievement Award at the recently concluded 25th STAR Awards For Movies. 

For tickets and inquiries visit www.indiobravo.org

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To Scream In Terror... PATAYIN MO SA SINDAK SI BARBARA

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Horror in the film Patayin Mo Sa Sindak Si Barbara (Rosas Productions) conceived and entirely executed by Celso Ad. Castillo is the trauma that it presents at the outset as a dreadful effect. It is the trauma that disrupts the uneventful lives of the characters and initiates the moviegoer into the causes of distress , if not the abjection. This is the sort of haunting that bedevils the innocent who trespass the threshold of the living and the dead and mingle with those who yearn to speak their graven hearts. And it is the specter of the past haunting the present that serves as our access to the real which is repressed by the symbolic domain that purports to be the reality we must accept as customary and inevitable, if only because we cannot help it. Well, Ruth's (Rosanna Ortiz) spirit resist this disarticulation, and strive to perform the theater of her history across time, affording the viewer a retroactive narrative of the trauma and pleading not only for a re-enactment but a rehearsal of a different outcome, which in its course renders the entire tale poignant and melancholic as it traces the cause of the effect. 

Such trauma is well-coordinated by highly accomplished and creative filmmaking, from Mike Relon Makiling's intriguing screenplay to Ernani Cuenco's robust musical score. But it is largely through Ricardo Remias' cinematography that this is fleshed out with conviction. The scheme of horror is ingeniously embedded in the architecture , which is depicted without ethnographic detail in as much as it conveyed as a nightmare, the house of the real that intrudes on a reality domesticated by such norms as family and indifference. The camera controls the chromatic climate which shimmers through the spectrum of darkness and takes the moviegoers to Ruth and Fritz' (Dante Rivero) room cramped with vexing memory. Patayin Mo Sa Sindak Si Barbara therefore, plays around the vital element of horror, the uncanny return of the aggreived, and how it complicates the lives of those who have not committed. In the end, as Ruth confronts Barbara (Susan Roces) the viewers become witnesses to her hatred and disgust, to the spectacle of the irrational. And the film compels the audience to become complicit. This is why Barbara had to face her own demons to terminate the horror does not only stem from the havoc wrought by Ruth but also for the need to acquit herself. Patayin Mo Sa Sindak Si Barbara however, does not relent. It lures itself into a more inclement realm, the challenge to propose a symbolic resolution as the door of engagement is flung, not to repeat reality, but to change it so that it is Barbara who slays Ruth and it is Karen (Beth Manlongat) who eludes perdition. This is what the film does, to compel a decision of confronting the trauma through the decisive device of screaming cinema. It is hoped that it has the moviegoers' ear.

Story & Direction: Celso Ad. Castillo
Screenplay: Mike Relon Makiling
Director Of Photography: Ricardo Remias
Music: Ernani Cuenco
Film Editor: Augusto Salvador
Production Design: Bobby Bautista And Geny Enriquez
Produced By: Rosas Productions
Release Date: August 16, 1974

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PAG-IBIG KO'Y AWITIN MO... With A Song In My Heart

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Quiet, unassuming films come once in a while in this landscape teeming with shrill attempts at shabby humor and needlessly complicated drama. And so given that, Pag-Ibig Ko'y Awitin Mo (LEA Productions), can only promise the most prosaic of of romanticist longings, the premise does fulfill a formidable romantic requisite by using music as the medium in which love is expressed, heard and hopefully answered. The encounter between middle aged Angelo Aragon (Eddie Rodriguez) and Rebecca Santiago (Nora Aunor), a provincial lass blessed with a captivating voice who eventually helped inspire the musician to finish writing the song he's been yearning to compose all his life. Pag-Ibig Ko'y Awitin Mo is a film which tells its story with the cinematic aesthetic in mind and heart, it tackles a complex range of human relations premised on romance but problematizes it quite rigorously so that love though central in the lives of the characters is continually re-read and therefore re-written.

Nora Aunor nonetheless fulfills more than what is asked from her in this competent melodrama, a voice that utters her pleas not just through singing, but through the song itself. Between and beyond her deliveries, Ms. Aunor achieves nuance, the sense to lend texture to an otherwise flimsy sentence by means of careful phrasing and the sensing of infinite possibilities for the precise film soundtrack. Nora Aunor is the only Filipino actress who knows how to use sparse silence. How? By turning to the solid gaze, singing of a love that, perched in sweet surrender, waits. Eddie Rodriguez's tempered and resolute performance resonates with the perspicacity and method of the film's dramatic goals. The writing merits of Pag-Ibig Ko'y Awitin Mo rests on its skillful appropriation of the conventions of a commercial feature in its earnest effort to come up with a truly artistic and purposive motion picture. Luis Enriquez's solid direction retraces the steps of this form of journey which gives rise to fluid feelings and emotions of displacement and rebuilding, of leaving and finding, of loss and fulfillment. Pag-Ibig Ko'y Awitin Mo is filled with emotional rigor through which affairs of the heart are dealt with and dealt with intelligently.

Directed By: Luis Enriquez
Screenplay: Augusto Buenaventura
Director Of Cinematography: Mike Accion, FSC
Music: Rudy Arevalo
Film Editor: Abelardo Hulleza
Production Design: Julie C. Guzman
Produced By: LEA Productions
Release Date: April 1, 1977

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MINSAN, MAY ISANG INA... This Is For You Mama

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The family serves as a microcosm or analogue of the household in the more instructive instances of Philippine melodrama. The realism of the plot does not make sense if severed from the moral agenda of an alternate or alternative reality, so that the characters for instance in Minsan, May Isang Ina (Regal Films, Inc.) become social types that enact the narratives of a family in pieces. The film's tendency to broaden the dimensions of this material needs to be encouraged, if only because it harnesses the potential of the practice of moviegoing as a collective act of reviewing society. In Minsan, May Isang Ina, the crest of a middle-class family is wracked by crisis and is ultimately materialized in Sarah (Charito Solis), a domineering martriarch fighting to keep her slowly decaying family business. The gesture of Ruth's (Nora Aunor) awakening from Edmund's (Ricky Davao) abuse is a moment that effectively synthesizes realism and allegory in a prefiguration of salvation in a milieu on the verge of a total breakdown. Noemi (Maricel Soriano) on the other hand is made to come to grips with the contentious contradictions raging within a driven and aggressive young woman while capitulating to the charms of Rene (William Martinez). 

What is of substantial interest in Minsan, May Isang Ina is its task, and this need not to be thoroughly fruitful or even a a satisfying one to work out an allegory in cinematic terms and within the domain of melodrama. In this modality, the film is able to address the desires of melodrama, here the family suffer and share the intimate relations that dispose them to oblige each other to reciprocate the acts of kinship, succor, sustenance and sympathy. The casting is near perfect. Charito Solis and Nora Aunor are excellent as the sanguine Sarah and the phlegmatic Ruth. Both actresses fill their roles to the hilt and it is to the director's credit that he was able to orchestrate their two styles of acting. Aunor shows her strength early in the movie when she is confronted by Sarah about her husband Alan's (Bembol Roco) unruly behavior. At this dramatic exchange, we feel the pain that she feels. In the same scene, we see Solis, defining her authority with one fiery gaze. Aunor's most dramatic moment comes when she finally realizes the failure of her own married life and tearfully breaks down by her bedside. Maricel Soriano plays her most challenging role so far. This time she was able to wrest the attention from the two dramatic heavyweights and managed to reveal a strength that comes from an understanding of a character's background. Bembol Roco is ambiguos playing a golden boy who is a total zero as a family man. It is within this perspective that the characters in Minsan, May Isang Ina are not only dramatis personaem but also discursive subjects who inscribe in human action of a particular condition.

Directed By: Maryo J. delos Reyes
Screenplay: Jake Tordesillas
Cinematography By: Joe Batac, Jr., Sergio Lobo And Gener Buenaseda
Music By: George Canseco
Edited By : Edgrado Vinarao
Prodcution Design By: Butch Garcia
Produced By: Regal Films, Inc.
Release Date: December 2, 1983

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HUBO SA DILIM... Naked And Empty

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The bad bold movie, makes extensive use of recycled dressing or more appropriately, undressing in Hubo Sa Dilim (FLT Film Productions International And Rare Breed Ltd.). This much touted, so called adult movie might have initially tickled our hopes for some semblance of maturity in the way our filmmakers explore the realm of sexuality but unfortunately, it could only manage to just as quickly dash off all remaining hopes for Philippine cinema's much awaited rebirth. Hubo is bold, naked and empty, a triple disappointment for diehard optimists. An ostensibly low budget, one and a half hour incursion into the domain of psychological trauma, Hubo offers meager psychology and no thrills, a terrible fate for its makers. The director, Tata Esteban might have had the best intentions in coming up with an honest to goodness adult film, as he once did with his feature film debut the 1984 Metro Manila Film Festival entry Alapaap which not withstanding its shortcomings, succeeded in many counts, particularly in exploring the horrors of a ghost consumed by revenge. Hubo is beset with many pitfalls. The material itself is old hat, though not necessarily itself a shortcoming if it had been retold with a good measure of insight, novelty or ingenuity, qualities that are sadly lacking in the finished product. Michael de Mesa plays Dinkee, a young man obsessed with Carmina (Maria Isabel Lopez), a call girl introduced by his cousin Andrew (Lito Gruet). Dinkee's absurdist temper presents the almost psychotic lengths he went through as a child growing up with his adulterous mother Christina (Chanda Romero), arguing that domestic violence breeds dementia.

Hubo, while making a bid for the viewer's attention via the bold genre, rehashes a tried and tired plot that has been used countless times before. I have no idea why a material as threadbare as this qualified to serve the filmmakers' purposes. The film miserably fails to probe into the lives of its characters, much less the motivations for their actions. Thus, in the case of Dinkee, we only get an idea of his slow descent into insanity through a scene which shows him having flashbacks of his traumatic childhood. The most overexposed yet most underdeveloped character in the film is Carmina, who after being beaten to a pulp still turns to Dinkee for sexual release. Hubo in the final analysis, merely capitalized on sex as a come on. Here it is shown in bits and pieces of nudity, simulated intercourse and coitus interuptus and the blame goes to the director and screenwriter for having exploited such a cheap device for a psychodrama. This is nothing by way of insight, observation or exploration that this film offers nothing but the hollowness of its intentions. Hubo's semiotics borders on the inane and the vulgar. Characters are utterly uninteresting, throughly boring and therefore, not deseving of a single penny's worth of compassion. There's also no worthwhile conflict that unfolds. Come to think of it, Hubo is completely bereft of dramatic potential. The performances are not even impressive although Michael de Mesa admittedly has some good moments as in that scene which shows him brooding in bed. Maria Isabel Lopez's character is mostly a caricature, calculated to lure the male moviegoers. Her performance rests on a shaky notion, and like the rest of the movie, naked and empty.

Directed By: Tata Esteban
Screenplay: Rei Nicandro
Director Of Photography: Ver Dauz
Music: Blitz Padua
Editing: Pat Ramos
Production Design: Steve Paolo
Produced By: FLT Film Productions International And Rare Breed Ltd.
Release Date: August 23, 1985

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Karapatang Magpalathala 2006-2013. SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY Lahat Ng Karapatan Ay Nakalaan. Disenyo Jojo Devera