Paolo Villaluna’s Pauwi Na has a tenuous connection to the festival’s theme at best. It tells the story of this one family living in poverty in Metro Manila. Pepe (Bembol Roco), the patriarch, drives a pedicab around the markets, and makes money from making deliveries from the various vendors. His wife Remy (Cherry Pie Picache) does laundry. His son JP (Jerald Napoles) is a street hustler, and his daughter Pina (Chai Fonacier) sells cigarettes on the street. JP is married to Isabel (Meryll Soriano), who is blind, but can see an invisible figure hanging around the family. This figure is Jesus (Jess Mendoza), who seems to have taken a special interest in this family, but rarely does anything to help them.
After establishing the various struggles of this one family, the action really kicks off when Pepe manages to get his hands on some money. He decides that it’s finally time for his family to go back to the provinces. The entire family makes a journey on a pair of pedicabs. They sleep on the roads, have trouble finding food, and meet some hostility along the way. This might sound like a recipe for just non-stop suffering, but there are other things at play here. First of all, the presence of Jesus in this narrative adds a shade of magical realism to the proceedings. Secondly, the film has kind of a grim sense of humor, and at least some semblance of a heart. It makes it clear that while this family is not exactly in a good place, they do actually love each other. The film mostly balances out their suffering with scenes of them simply enjoying each other’s company as they take on this absurd journey across an inhospitable land.
But the film goes on for a little too long. And the suffering starts to take over. The film ends in a nice place, though it could probably have lost its one last visual reveal. This is a film filled with lovely moments, but the effect is somewhat lost as it drags on.
Kakampi, directed by Victor Acedillo Jr., makes quite a few goofy choices. It starts with the framing device. It doesn’t just straight up tell the story. It frames it as a story being told to a guy (Felix Roco) by his taxi driver over the course of a long drive. The taxi driver is Ben (Neil Ryan Sese), who explains that driving a taxi is just his sideline. He used to be in sales, but he moved to Camiguin to inherit his grandfather’s Lanzones farm. He gets there, and it turns out that everyone there expects him to somehow save the farm, which just hasn’t been yielding the kind of harvests that they used to get.
It turns out that his grandfather had some sort of secret for making the trees bear fruit. Everyone believes that Ben was told that secret when he was young. But Ben doesn’t remember anything. And so the film is mostly about him trying to figure out how to make these trees bloom. In order to do this, he starts to immerse himself in life in Camiguin, a place full of superstitions, and apparently still has many ties to our country’s animist past.
This is a strange film that still manages to be pretty delightful at times. The framing device doesn’t really help in any way, and its payoff is underwhelming to say the least. But it’s also part of this film’s very distinct personality. It’s just an easygoing film that at the same time seems to reject convention. It captures the spirit of the place it’s depicting, delivering its narrative in a good-natured, infectiously earnest way that doesn’t quite feel like anything else in our cinema. It’s kind of infuriating in some ways, but it’s hard to deny that there is a certain kind of magic to what this film ends up doing.
And finally, Maricel Cariaga’s Pitong Kabang Palay seems to the film that best embodies the ideals of this festival. It is, in fact, about the hardships that farmers go through, the story following the travails of a farmer’s family as they try to live on just seven cavans or grain until the next harvest. The film places it focus on middle child Balong, a seven-year-old about to enter school for the first time. He and his siblings try to help their parents out in any way they can. And they’re all very good kids that are really intent on making their parents proud in school.
The movie undoubtedly means well. It sketches out this idea that the children of farmers aren’t afforded the luxury of having a childhood. The scarcity means that from a very young age, they have to develop a sense of responsibility, and have to think about what it means to have limited resources. And that’s a smart enough idea, but this movie lacks almost everything that makes a movie work. It doesn’t have a lot of incident, first of all. And while the premise is inherently dramatic, the movie fails to make it feel that way.
This is a very amateurish production. While one can’t fault the film for having nothing to say about the plight of farmers, it still isn’t a good movie. It just doesn’t reach the basic standards that should be expected from anything that’s projected in a real cinema.
So that’s the very first ToFarm Film Festival. The raison d’etre for the festival still feels a tad strange, but as long as the films are good, it would be silly to complain. And in this first year, the festival did produce at least one great film (Paglipay), and a couple of other interesting ones. That’s pretty impressive when all is said and done. It's certainly enough to make one look forward to future editions.
