The Film Development Council of the Philippines has put together a second edition of their fledgling festival, the World Premieres Film Festival. And this year, aside from its slate of international premieres, the festival has a side program called “Filipino New Cinema,” which features eight all-new films made either in the Philippines or by local filmmakers.
Awards were given out on Sunday, and the big winner of this program is Alvin Yapan’s An Kubo sa Kawayanan. And it really is a clear winner. It stars Mercedes Cabral as an embroiderer who, as the title suggests, lives in an old hut in the middle of a bamboo grove. Throughout the film, she is presented with opportunities to move away, to find bigger and better things in Manila or abroad or wherever else. But she does not want to leave the hut. And it seems as though the hut doesn’t want her to leave, either.
It’s likely best to keep that description vague. Suffice it to say that the film makes little distinction between dream and reality, and that it is much stranger than that description might suggest. It puts us directly into the mind of this one woman, laying bare all the things that she doesn’t say, the thoughts that she holds in while talking to someone. Mercedes Cabral is spectacular in this lead role. The actress is consistently great, but here she is made to carry the movie pretty much on her own, and she more than rises to the occasion. This film is likely an early contender for one of the best of the year.
Charliebebs Gohetia’s I Love You. Thank You. tracks the lives of several gay men living in Thailand. Paul (Joross Gamboa) doesn’t seem to have much direction in his life. He’s in love with Red (Prince Stefan), who is four years into a relationship with Ivan (CJ Reyes). Then, while taking a trip in Cambodia, Paul meets Tang (Ae Pattawan), who falls hard for him almost immediately. The film follows these characters over a couple of years as they wrestle with the complications that falling in love tends to bring.
The writing of the film is often inelegant. The dialogue often makes explicit what could have been suggested in more interesting ways. And there are scenes where the characters are awkwardly stating their histories out loud. But there are long stretches in this film where that inelegance doesn’t really matter. What comes across is the heartfelt nature of the material, which traverses the prickly landscape of young romance. It embraces the illogic of falling in love, the film unafraid to let its characters be completely irrational in their pursuit of their objects of affection. The rawness that comes with that makes it feel more relatable than your average romantic film, even when the writing gets clumsy.
Nestor Abrogena’s Ang Kwento Nating Dalawa plays coy about the nature of its central relationship for a painfully long time. For most of the film, it makes it out like the only keeping its main characters Sam and Isa (Nicco Manalo and Emmanuelle Vera) from fully committing to a relationship is the fact that Isa has an unseen boyfriend. It turns out there’s something else that stands in the way of their happiness, but the film plays it as a twist and never really ends up dealing with it as a narrative concern.
Because the film never has the characters talking honestly about what’s wrong about their being together, it ends up feeling distant in spite of its intimate treatment. The film is often cute, but there isn’t a whole lot to that. There are moments that might have benefitted from a real injection of passion. This is a forbidden romance, after all. It might have helped to feel that at some point.
I almost never walk out of movies, but I did walk out on Ruben Maria Soriquez’s Of Sinners and Saints, which stars the director as an Italian priest assigned to a small parish in Payatas. Its inclusion in the Filipino New Cinema lineup is pretty weird to begin with. One would think that this section would be reserved for Filipino filmmakers. Putting that aside, the film just comes off as lazy and patronizing. At one point, with no irony whatsoever, the main character shows a group of battered women pictures of battered women. One would think that battered woman would know exactly what battered women look like. It was at that point that I decided that the film had nothing important to say to me about the state of this country, that it was an example of a foreign director thinking that he somehow knows better about the problems that the Philippines faces. There is a chance that a film got better as it went along, but all my experience as a moviegoer told me that it was going nowhere.
Movie posters from World Premieres Film Festival official website (wpff.ph)
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World Premieres Film Festival (WPFF) runs until July 7, 2015 at the theaters of SM Mall North Edsa, SM Cinema Manila, SM Cinema Megamall, SM Mall of Asia, and SM Cinema Southmall. For screening schedules and more information, visit the WPFF website (http://wpff.ph/schedules.php) and like their Facebook page (/worldpremieresfilmfestival).
