Big Screen
New Filipino Cinema: Yerba Buena series shines spotlight on often overlooked independent film region — the Philippines
The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,100 islands, so it’s no surprise there’s a lot going on there — such as: a child Christ, gay zombies, a rock ’n’ roll band going for the big time, a taxi driver on the ride of his life and a Vietnam War vet with a vast harem.
Those are some of the stories in a major retrospective at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts series New Filipino Cinema, which serves as a frontlines report of what’s going on in what Center programmer Joel Shepard calls the most underrated independent film region in the world.
“It’s still shocking to me how much quality and talent there is, and how little of it is recognized,” said Shepard, who has made about a half-dozen trips to the Philippines in recent years and has returned with 29 films, 25 of which are U.S. premieres. “It’s wide open.”
It says something about the commitment to the underserved of Shepard and series co-curator Philbert Ortiz By, a critic from Manila, that there are no films by the most internationally recognized Filipino director, Brillante-mendoza (the first director from the Philippines to win best director at the Cannes Film Festival, for “Kinatay” in 2009). Another goal of the series was to expand beyond the cliche of films set in garbage dumps and crushing poverty.
“That is not the Philippines,” Shepard said. “That stuff exists, but there’s this whole other aspect of society.”
Thursday night’s opener, “Niño,” is a touching portrait of an aristocratic family who, with debts piling up, pray for a miracle and dress up a young boy as the child Christ, or Santo Niño. (The film will be preceded by a performance by Alleluia Panis of San Francisco Kularts, which presents contemporary and tribal Filipino arts.)
Popular cinema is not ignored, either: Saturday’s program includes a documentary portrait of horror film character actress Lilia Cuntapay and two films that played in shopping mall multiplexes: “Rakenrol,” a love story set amid the Manila rock scene, and “Remington and the Curse of the Zombardings,” a gay zombie movie that uses comedy horror to tackle homophobia.
“The stories are all over the place,” said director Benito Bautista, who will present his feature narrative debut, “Boundary,” on Friday night with an actor in the film, Edwin Nombre. “You can go to the northern part of Manila and be in an entirely different region. …(The Philippines) are 7,100 islands, and every single place has a story, in its own genre.”
Bautista has been living in the Bay Area since 1984 but has worked on projects both in the United States and the Philippines. While he was working on a documentary in Manila, he found himself taking a lot of taxi rides.
“There’s a different landscape, a different grit (to Manila), and I wanted to express that,” Bautista said. “The taxicab experience is a very unique experience. I could feel the heartbeat of metro Manila. I could feel personal economics of the taxi drivers. And we’re listening to the radio and getting the whole city experience. … I started riding the taxi, even if I wasn’t going anywhere. I rode it on different times of the day — rush hour to see the stress, the dark hours of the night. … I would write in the back of taxis.”
In a way, the whole New Filipino Cinema series is like a taxi ride through the cinematic landscape of a fascinating corner of the world. Look out the window — you’ll see what’s happening.