The 1st ToFarm Film Festival arrives after over a year of wondering what exactly it is. It is currently running at SM North EDSA and SM Megamall, playing six new movies that, according to the ToFarm website, “showcases the lives, journeys, aspirations, trials and tribulations – failures and successes of the farmers and other stewards of agriculture and nature.”
It’s certainly a unique and intriguing theme to build a festival around. Here’s a look at what they have to offer.
Zig Dulay’s Paglipay takes place among the Aetas in Zambales. Nineteen year-old Atan (Gerry Cabalic) is out hunting when he runs into his childhood friend Ani (Joan dela Cruz). The two are seen together at the river, and Atan's father later insists that the two marry lest Ani and her family be disgraced. To marry, however, Atan needs to put together a dowry of twenty thousand pesos. He goes down the mountain into town to find work, and there, he meets college student Rain (Anna Luna), who is working on her thesis on cross-cultural relationships between Aeta and non-Aeta.
The plot somewhat resembles James Gray's Two Lovers. Like that movie, it is a study of a young man at a crossroads between tradition and modern thinking. But instead of a Jewish man in New York, it is an Aeta in the mountains of Zambales. The film presents the coming of change as a consequence of the eruption of Pinatubo fundamentally changing the lives of people in the area. The film shows the traces of this change, the casual erosion of traditional life in these mountains. Trucks roll into the mountains for a mysterious project. The weather is changing, making farming more difficult. It then anchors all of these details into this weirdly affecting story of young man letting his heart run wild for the very first time.
The film is beautifully pragmatic about its romance. This is a movie where one can clearly see that the characters are making mistakes, but it feels completely natural that they're erring in that way. It gets a little loud in the middle, with a supporting best friend character given too many lines to explain Rain's romantic situation. But once it finds its footing, and really gets to the heart of the matter, it manages to build this portrait of two very different ideas of romance, of a massive schism between cultures that remains in spite years of integration. Gerry Cabalic, a real Aeta, certainly isn’t the most seasoned actor, but he really makes this character work. And he gets a lot of help from another terrific performance from Anna Luna. It’s probably my favorite romantic film of the year so far.
I don’t quite know how to explain Jojo Nadela’s Pilapil, other than to say that it is pretty bad. But here goes: it is the story of Victor, who is a member of a gang of criminals. The film begins in the aftermath of some sort of heist we don’t get to see. They’re at their hideout, expecting their boss, when a SWAT team show up and guns the gang down. Victor manages to get away, taking with him a blind boy named Buknoy that was rather inexplicably brought to their hideout.
Victor is keeping the boy hostage, as a bit of an insurance policy should the police catch up with him. This doesn’t really make sense, and at no point does it ever feel like the police are hot on his tracks. Instead, the gang’s boss sends another goon after Victor. All the while, we’re learning about Victor’s past (which doesn’t make sense), and seeing him grow closer with the precocious Buknoy. And oh, Victor is illiterate. That comes into play later.
The film is trying to be funny, and to its credit, it is kind of funny. It’s just that it isn’t funny for the reasons that the film wants. At almost every turn, this film is making a really bad choice. It is like it is allergic to sense. Something as simple as scenes depicting the goon on the trail of Victor and Buknoy feel like they’re out of sequence. There are shots that seem intent on missing the action. There are lines of dialogue that are bizarrely repeated from cut to cut. And the sound doesn’t seem to have been finished. This is the kind of terrible film that might become a cult midnight classic at some point, if we were actually had the kind of film culture that prized that kind of thing.
Dennis Marasigan’s Free Range seems to have really taken the festival’s farming theme to heart. It sort of feels like infotainment, an educational film that might be played at a seminar about the benefits of free range farming. It combines a lot of information with the story of Chito (Paolo O’Hara), the son of a pair of resort owners in Coron, Palawan. At the start of the movie, Chito is technically unemployed, and is struggling to leave any sort of mark in the world. And then one of his guests sells him on the idea of free range chicken farming on some land his family owns.
It’s kind of a middle-age coming-of-age film. Chito’s journey is from being an emasculated, sort of nebbish bird nerd to a successful businessman, thanks to his belief in free-range chicken farming. There are stabs at drama, but they all feel pretty unfocused. It’s a little difficult to invest in the story of Chito’s difficult relationship with his father when we hardly even see it. He is, after all, in a completely different city, sleeping inside a chicken coop. And the stuff with Chito’s wife is dancing on the borderline of the pretty terrible trope of the unsupportive partner.
What’s most clear by the end of the movie is what it takes to put up a free-range chicken farm. The film gets specific with yields and costs and processes. There’s also a pretty low-stakes political subplot that involves Chito becoming embroiled in a local conflict malls in Coron. And while that’s all kind of interesting, it hardly feels like the kind of thing people go into a cinema for. In the right context, this film will certainly be a boon to someone. But it’s hard to recommend this as a cinematic experience.
