NETFLIX ‘YOU’ SEASON 2 TEASER TRAILER DEBUTS
WHEN audiences last saw Joe (Penn Badgley) his heart was tragically broken and his past just caught up with him in the form of long-lost ex-girlfriend Candace (Ambyr Childers)—a woman now hell-bent on teaching him a lesson. Season 2 finds him on the run from Candace, leaving New York City for his own personal hell: Los Angeles.
He’s fresh out of an intense relationship that ended in murder. The last thing he expects is to meet an incredible new woman but he’s falling in love again— with a woman named Love (Victoria Pedretti). Is history repeating? Or will this time be the real thing? Joe’s just crazy enough to risk finding out.
The Season 2 cast includes Badgley (Joe Goldberg), Pedretti (Love Quinn), Childers (Candace Stone), James Scully (Forty Quinn), Carmela Zumbado (Delilah Alves), Jenna Ortega (Ellie Alves), and Chris D’Elia (Henderson). Developed by Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti based on the book by Caroline Kepnes, You returns to Netflix soon.
THE young man is alone in his hut. He wakes up each day and goes to work. The camera follows him but it is not our perspective that is working here. Someone seems to walk behind him. Someone is looking at him. He senses presences and confronts them. We are not audiences in this work; we are initiands in this rite of passage from living to dying. This is the short film of Rayan Amacna from Ozamis and he has titled it Trespas.
In Amacna’s imagination, the land can be owned and not owned. Or one could be a steward but there are beings that insist they can own it. They are called landlords and they can also be unseen beings. On both counts, the ordinary farmer or the peasant is helpless. He looks out into the horizon and hears a shot and he does not know where it is coming from. Evil is unseen; menace is invisible in this narrative.
A young girl attends a fiesta in a place she is not familiar with. Beside her, a stranger taps on the table. When the girl reaches home, she is unwell. She throws up. Her mother takes her to a healer who declares her as having been victimized by a Pikpik. This is a form of casting an evil eye by the simple act of tapping on an object that also touches the object of obsession. In other towns, Pikpik can be in the form of someone tapping you on the shoulder and with that touch bring upon you a spell or a curse.
The healer is assured what he has done to the girl is sufficient. But the girl comes back to him, still feeling nauseous and afflicted. Without the healer knowing it, the girl is pregnant by her very young boyfriend.
In the classroom, the girl feels sleepy and we believe the spell has not left her. In school, she sees her boyfriend with another girl. She is distraught. She soon finds out too that there is something more in her body than the old belief in magic and sorcery. She goes home and her mother is angry but later relents and embraces her. This short film is by Xytel Freya Lopez and Kent Xerus Labrador of Nabunturan in Compostela Valley. The film bears the title Pikpik.
The two are just some of the entries at the Festival de Cine Paz in Zamboanga. The two are just two of the films that manage to fuse the two layers and meld the two levels of the socioec0nomic with the notion of enchantment.
The trope of the fantastic tale is employed by these filmmakers to tell stories that affect people in the most realistic way. This mode of the storytelling succeeds to work around our assumptions about realities even as the events happening before us appear to be told with the patina and persuasion of the mysterious.
Where have we been when these stories were being told?
The two films were entered under the section “La
Bella Mindanao” or “The Beautiful Mindanao.” But the astute festival director, Ryanne Murcia, knows that the beauty of the region does not refer to the exotic allure we from Luzon and even Visayas ascribe to the southernmost regions of the country. The beauty of Mindanao can be found in how the films can capture the small stories about these regions, not the huge monolithic homogeneity that lowland Christian filmmakers tend to paint about a land they love to frame in their own image or counter-image.
Even the melodrama genre is thoughtfully subverted in the films from this region. In Ang Pagbalik sa Ugat-Hinungdan (The Return to the Reason), the story of death and loss caused by the bombing in the Davao night market is told through flashbacks and moments of insanity and lucidity. The mother who recalls her daughter talk about whether chickens feel it when they are butchered and skewered. Instead of being camp, the conversations assume a levity that is all poignant and gross. Violent and senseless death, after all, is never not gross.
Ang Pagbalik is directed by Keisha Halili of Davao. In Alindahaw, an entry from Butuan, a little boy watches over his grandmother. At an early age, the boy realizes there are many good things he will not have because they do not have money. One evening, the boy and his grandmother stay up to wait for the alindahaw to come. This was the money distributed to each household to buy votes. That morning, the grandmother falls ill. That night, the boy notices the men who carry the boon have skipped their home thinking that the grandmother is too ill to vote anyway. The money will be wasted on them. The metaphor of corruption as seen by the young has never been told in this manner.
Alindahaw is directed by Marie Claire Amora.
In the recently concluded film festival in Zamboanga, there was an award to be given called “Pluma de Paz.” Murcia explained the award as not really about film depicting peace but about films that depict events happening because there is no peace.
The festival and the filmmakers found a kindred soul in the person of Adjani Arumpac. The awardwinning documentarian, fresh from her Chevening fellowship in England, screened her work, War is a Tender Thing. It is a documentary that, while introspective, is deceptively personal. It looks at the filmmaker’s own parents and from there goes on to inscribe a peace process that begins from the self that questions the concept of peace.
For Arumpac, there is really no definition of peace. What we have is a laundry list of the conditions when there is war and there is no peace.
It is in this open field of discourse, where things are contested, that I find the value of local filmmakers. Where peace is not burdened to find a definition but is rather subjected to questions. In the greater capital of Manila, the practice is to find an answer. In the region, the mode is to ask and ask, to question and to confront.
The lesson from regional film festivals is the foundation of stories, not particular stories but the fact that things begin always with stories. Where it has been a fashion in the lowland Christian civilization of Metro Manila to learn how to write screenplays, the valor of regional filmmaking is in the stories they will be able to tell. The screenplay can assume any form; the stories need not follow the formulae of classrooms and workshops. The regions— the outlying marginal lands—are the workshops. ■