What is Cinema?

" White " (1994), the second installment in Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy, is a strange brew. It's a rags-to-riches drama, an absurdist sketch, a revenge tale and an unconsummated romantic comedy. Its lead character, a Polish immigrant named Karol Karol (portrayed by Zbigniew Zamachowski, hilarious and heartbreaking), is one such down-on-his-luck guy: divorced by his young and pretty wife Dominique (Julie Delpy) because of his impotence and left penniless and homeless in a foreign country. He then begs for alms in an underground subway where he is chanced upon and eventually befriended by a fellow Pole named Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos) who, we later learn, has a "friend" who's willing to pay a large amount of money to someone who's able to help him commit suicide (predates Abbas Kiarostami's " Taste of Cherry ") and through whom Karol is able to return to Poland (in an absurd kind of way). Once there, the Chapli...

It's gradually becoming a tradition of QCinema International Film Festival to showcase a trio of films by a particular world cinema auteur . In 2014, it was South Korean director Park Chan-wook and his trilogy of violent and exacting revenge-driven tales (" Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance ", " Oldboy ", " Lady Vengeance "). Last year, it was French helmer Gaspar Noe and his trio of nihilistic-cum-misantrophic provocations (" Irreversible ", " Enter the Void ", " Love "). For this year's edition (which ran from Oct. 13 to 22), the director in focus was Polish master Krzysztof Kieslowski (whose 20th death anniversary is being remembered this year) and his Three Colors trilogy, which deals with the emotional lives of certain individuals in contemporary France. The trilogy is called as such because each of the films represents a color and its corresponding meaning on the French national flag. Unlike some trilogy where one film...

Let's continue with a couple more films that I saw in the just-concluded QCinema International Film Festival (Oct. 13-22). • " Godless ". Ralitza Petrova. 2016, Bulgaria. Ralitza Petrova's debut feature film is not to everyone's taste. Some may find its extreme miserabilism to be totally off-putting, while some may find it viscerally rewarding. But one thing is for certain: we rarely get to encounter a film as gloomy and as downtrodden like this, even if we come up with something from Bergman or Antonioni or from the Romanian New Wave. At best, "Godless" is a prime example of the Cinema of Abjection, letting us right into the skin and bone of destitution and misery. The film couldn't be more intimate with this than with its use of the 4:3 Academy ratio (similar to that used in Lisandro Alonso's " Jauja " and Xavier Dolan's " Mommy ", both shown in a previous edition of QCinema), as it tells the tale of a morbidly sull...

It's that time of the year again and QCinema International Film Festival (Oct. 13-22), now on its fourth edition, once more showcases new Filipino films (both full-length and short) and some award-winning foreign-language films. Because of the event's strong line-up, it has already become one of the much-awaited film events in the country, garnering its own avid followers who are always looking for the very best that cinema has to offer. Here are some of the films that I saw: • " Old Stone ". Johnny Ma. 2016, China. In China, it has been reported that pedestrian accidents will be much less of a burden to the culprit if the victim just dies, because the former will not be burdened anymore of the expenses that he needs to shoulder (for a significant amount of time, perhaps even for life) if the latter survives and the claiming of insurance policies is more often than not steeped in bureaucratic machinery. Harrowing as this may sound, it has been claimed to happen...

In a biblical sense, a serpent is regarded as the creature that led Eve to temptation and thereby brought about the first act of sin. Thus, it connotes something negative or evil. In Ciro Guerra's Oscar-nominated " Embrace of the Serpent " (2015, Colombia), we gradually realize as we go through watching the film that the creature in the title actually stands for the origin of life in the universe and thus connotes something positive or good. That's how the Amazonian indigenous tribes look at life and creation - it's being at one with nature. We can say that the film is about life and nature, but that would be too broad a description. To get into the essence of the film itself, we ought to emphasize instead that it depicts how Western colonization can encroach upon the pure quality of this nature as inhabited by the tribes.  As Karamakate (a tribal shaman and inhabitant in the Colombian Amazon) laments, the intrusion of the Western colonizers into their lives only ...

If we put a crime in the context of a country's socio-political state or, more specifically, a government in transition, does it justify the act? Does a crime committed as an act of "defiance" against an "unjust" status quo make it any less evil than that committed with purely personal motive? What if there's really a thin line between them? To be able to make sense of the heinous goings-on in Pablo Trapero's " El clan " (2015, Argentina), recipient of the Best Director award in last year's Venice and part of this year's Spanish Film Festival organized by Instituto Cervantes-Manila, I believe it is important that we view them from the perspective of those questions.  Not so much to condone the horrors depicted onscreen (definitely not) as to deduce the underlying motivations of the Puccios, headed by the strictly-patriarchal yet deeply-psychopathic Arquimedes (Guillermo Francella, chilling) in committing the spate of murderous kidnap-fo...

Somewhere in the mid-section of " Ang Babaeng Humayo " (2016, Philippines), the new film by Lav Diaz and recipient of this year's Golden Lion at Venice, a wealthy and powerful man named Rodrigo (Michael de Mesa) confesses to a town priest how different he really is from the kind of person whom the latter outwardly knows, that he can't really bring it upon himself to be a good person and that he's glad of the fact that he's able to destroy the life of someone whom he hates most. At the end of the "confession", he asks the priest if he believes in God and how can he find Him, to which the latter answers by saying he sees God in every person and Rodrigo has to look for Him. To search, to look or to seek is in fact a key theme of the film. Whether or not the characters are able to find what they are looking for doesn't so much matter as what it is that they've gone through as they make their search. As the saying goes, it's not the destinati...