The way the world ends

AS the year was coming to an end, I found myself in two places the Manila-oriented Philippine film industry will never identify with the progress of cinema: Zamboanga and Iloilo. And yet, the two places are in my book among the many sites of regional films, the only exciting locations for the creation of movies that are not tired, trite and trifling. For fear of romanticizing the simplistic, let me say that not all regional films are excellent and gripping. But what I realized going around the film festivals and concourses—big and small—and conducting film education and film criticism workshops, there is only one factor that diminishes the, otherwise, organic trenchant characteristics of regional films, and that is when filmmakers try to imitate the bad habits of the works coming from the putative cultural center.

Iloilo proved to be an engaging exercise of confronting the problems of boundaries. As an outsider, I often asked: “What makes an Ilonggo film? What is Negrense cinema? Is there a Hiligaynon narrative?” these are outsider’s paradigm.

Early on, in Bacolod, under its Sine Negrense, a mind-bending film about a woman who levitates grabbed practically all the awards in the competition. It came from the otherwise unheralded city of Sagay? City of what?

That is one grim problem: we do not know our archipelago.

The same film was brought over to the Cine Kasimanwa, a festival that celebrates citizenship and geographic camaraderie. It then competed with other films from the “region” that is not anymore the region that local government units recognize.

Cinema under Cine Kasimanwa has challenged geographies and limitations of places and languages. It is an interrogation that is only discussed academically in major educational institutions in Manila; it is a complex of questions settled, negotiated, contested— all acted upon—in the places of the periphery.

In Zamboanga, with a film festival that brandishes the notion and act of peace, films from Manila were admitted and exhibited together with those from Mindanao and other places. This decision has not made Zamboanga the center of cinema. This decision has prompted—and should prompt—us to rethink the evil of centers.

Centers totalize and remove the splendor inherent in varied cultures. It is from these cultures—that need not be about folk dances and folk songs—that the many singular, arresting cinemas are formed.

Back in Manila, at the end of the year, the disenfranchising Metro Manila Film Festival reared its ugly and decomposing head again.

Months before the holding of the festival, a committee always dangles the prospect to filmmakers of who would be chosen for the feast. For some reason, the trick still works. A significant number of cineasts have not yet lost hope that maybe, just maybe, this year the films to be chosen would be “good” films. We are not even searching for excellence, anymore. In a country that rewards—and enjoys—mediocrity and an industry that has been correlating Christmas jubilation with films that can make people laugh, the Metro Manila Film Festival is a natural offspring.

Then the list is released. Then the pictures are screened. Then the people respond.

Not all reviews are bad. In fact, reviews are misleading.

Some reviews are built upon the sands of press releases (oh please, if you love bad films, allow me some bad figures of speech). Many proceed from a collection of log lines supplied by publicists producing a torrent of information about films that are poetry of loss and isolation, of performances that are remarkable in their silences.

Are we celebrating silences and pauses because as we commemorate the centenary of our cinema, we have come to a conclusion that we are writers of bad lines?

An actor, who has vanished from the scene for personal reasons, is used by a film that has earlier declared itself to be “serious cinema.” He is the Minute Boy and his appearance is declared magisterial. Some in hysteria professed that the brief appearance stole the scenes from the other “thespians.” Bad news for the leads, eh?

Oggs Cruz, my favorite critic outside my Manunuri colleagues, describes Mindanao a “betrayal.” The review, which appears on Rappler, takes issue with the title, one that “screams politics” and “promises culture.” Cruz laments how the film is “nothing more than a stilted soap opera, one whose prolonged expositions of the banal aspects of life are but bids at elevating what essentially is a pity party.”

But why am I not surprised about this betrayal?

It is because Manila/Tagalog cinema, long mistaken for national cinema, has made it cultural business and political propaganda to betray the regions—the non-Manila societies and communities. We have been deluded to believe the Philippines—with all its diversities and conflicts—can be made in the image and likeness of the metropolitan gaze.

The omnipotence of Manila as the cultural center insofar as cinema is concerned should come to an end. But the powers-that-be are not giving up.

The film grants and festivals are still in Manila. And there is a new monster in town: film pitching. Be careful about the funds you wish for.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the issue was ODA, or Official Development Assistance. Development scholars discovered the fund came with long strings.

Film pitching is the new ODA. Experts from Manila descend upon regional festivals and in various moods of biting criticisms proceed to reduce the filmmaker that his or her idea sucks. A clique is formed, and a clan of filmmakers with similar templates is born.

As the year ends, two words gained currency: “genre” and “world class.”

A comedian with uncanny profundity exclaimed how comedy is not recognized as a genre. Of course, comedy is a difficult art and genre is often mispronounced (ask Señora Evelyn Caldera Soriano). And the comedian does not even know comedy does not necessarily mean to have a f---ing laugh.

As for world class, who declares we are world class? Not the world, as far as I know.

As far as I know, for all the “world class-ness” of our cinema, we have never made it to the Oscars short list of choices for films in a non-English language.

As for me, there is a world out there in the regions where films are unique and lovely, and disturbing. ■

Manila/Tagalog cinema, long mistaken for national cinema, has made it cultural business and political propaganda to betray the regions, the non-Manila societies and communities. We have been deluded to believe the Philippines—with all its diversities and conflicts—can be made in the image and likeness of the metropolitan gaze.