Starting QCinema with a blast

The regular screenings of the increasingly-exciting QCinema International Film Festival, Quezon City's still-young annual film event, have just started yesterday (Oct. 23 at Trinoma, Gateway and Robinsons cinemas). This year's line-up is indeed a veritable candy shop for avid cineastes, which includes a number of films that premiered in prestigious festivals abroad (Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Sundance), like Matteo Garrone's "Tale of Tales", Chaitanya Tamhane's "Court", Sebastian Schipper's "Victoria", Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Cemetery of Splendour" and Sean Baker's "Tangerine". Further whetting our appetites is the subject this year of the festival's Director in Focus: Gaspar Noé, French cinema's enfant terrible, whose trio of provocations ("Irreversible", "Enter the Void", "Love") will finally make their way to our big screens. At this early, I'm already having nightmares! 

And of course, the films in the Special Screenings section, which finally brings to the big screen for us to fully savor Francis Ford Coppola's all-time war masterpiece "Apocalypse Now", as well as its equally-masterful making-of documentary, "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse". These two films were the first that I saw on the festival's first day of regular run. 

"Hearts of Darkness" (1991, USA), which was originally intended by Francis' wife, Eleanor Coppola, to be a video diary of the day-to-day production stages of "Apocalypse Now" (1979, USA) and which eventually was developed into a full-length documentary by directors Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, is insightful, riveting and eye-opening. As much as the feature film itself is grand, ambitious and stunning, so are the behind-the-scenes activities - the conceptualization, the budget, the casting, the shoot, practically all the blood, sweat and tears that went into the making of what is now considered to be an all-time classic. The documentary is a testament to a filmmaker's genius and madness and to the magic and power of filmmaking itself. It's just apt that Orson Welles, another uncompromising filmmaker, and his radio narration of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (on which "Apocalypse Now" was based) are referenced in the documentary. Likewise, Werner Herzog, another mad genius, comes to mind (his "Fitzcarraldo" also has an acclaimed making-of docu, called "Burden of Dreams"). "Hearts of Darkness" is an essential viewing for anyone who has a bursting passion for the art and craft of filmmaking (the film director) and for anyone who is simply in awe at the magic of cinema itself (the film viewer). 

Meanwhile, it's nothing else but the big wide screen of a theater that can do justice to Coppola's war epic "Apocalypse Now", winner of the Palme d'Or in the 1979 Cannes film fest (along with Volker Schlöndorff's "The Tin Drum", another astounding political epic). How else can we be fully engulfed by the film's surreal and hellish world of a war-stricken Vietnam, made all the more vivid and feral by Vittorio Storaro's cinematography that utilizes to astonishing effect the interplay of hues, lights and shadows and by Dean Tavoularis' evocative production design that lends everything the look and feel of a nightmare more than being a war-ravaged land itself, than by experiencing it inside the theater. As mentioned above, the film was loosely adapted by John Milius and Coppola from Joseph Conrad's short novel and the duo has succeeded in bringing to life onscreen the atmosphere and imagery of the book. As a desensitized Capt. Willard (played by Martin Sheen) makes his journey through a sinister river and a perilous jungle in search of the renegade Col. Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando), so do the viewers. It's a truly immersive experience, both magnificent and horrifying in ways that not even a thousand words can fully describe. Likewise, it's a succession of one memorable setpiece after another, something that only the unique art of cinema can bring life to. Much has been said already about the film's social and political implications in regards that magnificent folly of a human invention called war. Thus, having "Apocalypse Now" viewed by today's millennial generation has become more relevant than ever. Col. Kurtz's last dying words certainly echo for long: "The horror...the horror". 

Marlon Brando as Col. Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now": Epitome of a world gone mad