A Pilgrimage to Cinema

It has been a decade since I went to Cine Europa, the European Union’s annual festival of films from its member-countries. That is why there was a mixture of excitement and anticipation when I finally decided to once again attend this year’s edition of the film festival. What even made this year’s festival more exciting was that whereas before only about ten member-countries were included in the festival, this time it showed films from eighteen member-countries! European countries which had been never represented by a film in the festival before now had films shown in this year’s fest – Romania, Slovakia,  Czech Republic, Bulgaria. I only wish I was able to see ALL the twenty-one films shown (which would be actually impossible, work- and health-wise). Nevertheless, I was really glad that, even if only a handful, I was able to see films from this year’s fest. This piece is meant to share my two-cents’ worth of thoughts on each of the films that I watched. However, allow ...

From the impoverished slums of " Oros ", I was then brought to the posh subdivisions of Gino M. Santos' " The Animals ", the second film I saw at the 2012 Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival. Now we have an  indie  film that takes a look at the lives of the so-called  conyo  kids, those pampered brats of affluent middle-class families. From the looks of it, the film appears to be a distant cousin of Larry Clark's "Kids". But compared to what the teeners in the American film are doing, the activities of the teeners in Santos' film are still child's play. Nevertheless, "The Animals" is still a provocative film to the extent that it is not for the "tween" of heart. The filmmaker, who himself is still young at 22, certainly has an eye and ear for the lifestyle of today's youth, a generation defined in no small way by Facebook and Twitter, by Ipad and BB. And he definitely is adept at progressing the mood of his n...

A casual look at Paul Sta. Ana's " Oros ", one of the ten entries in the New Breed section of the 2012 Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival, might tempt one to tag it as one of those  indie  films that wallow in the so-called "poverty porn", which by now has already become a derogatory term. In attending this year's Cinemalaya, I made it upon myself to put aside any expectations and preconceptions. If there was any, it was only to hope that our films would find new avenues to explore cinematically, other than the impoverishment and squalor of slum life (not that we could not care less). But more than anything else, I just wanted to discover for myself the wonders of each of the films as I watch them through. That is why I find it ironic that the first film I saw in this year's festival was the above-mentioned work by Sta. Ana which, by all means and purposes, deals with another slice of Filipino slum life. No matter how I tried to muffle it, my in...

In a moving, if a little didactic, monologue towards the end of the film, an elderly man laments that the fate of his grandson is no different from the fate of our country – a life gone to waste. This mournful thought is at the core of '' Batang West Side '' (2001), Lav Diaz’s five-hour masterful probing of the Filipino soul and psyche, whether still rooted in one’s own soil or adrift in a foreign land. This is only the third Lav Diaz film that I have seen (the other two being the erotic mind-puzzle '' Hubad sa Ilalim ng Buwan '' and the darkly comic '' Hesus Rebolusyonaryo ''; and about a decade after the film was shown at the Cinemanila International Film Festival in 2002) and I understand that this one served as a springboard for his succeeding epic-scaled works (like '' Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino '' and '' Heremias ''), but it can be rightly said that this film is an illuminating highlig...