Addressing Historical Trauma, Erasure and Exploitation

It is particularly interesting to note that documentaries, fiction or an exploration of both are the main short films at this year’s Cinemalaya Film Festival. Animation and experimental work are sidelined.

But what’s even more shocking is how the two sets clash. Set B, by the way, has better plot and aesthetic flair – aspects that its counterpart sorely needs. In other words, something is amiss in the programming decision.

Thematically, Set B makes much more sense, with stories that grapple with historical trauma, erasure, exploitation, and violent acts, in its many iterations, hoping to create gentler paths forward. Most of the shorts in this program feel at least more confident in their visions and articulations, with some showing more experience than the rest.

I walked through the streets of Chinatown (directed by Ryan Capili)

The line-up will be opened by Ryan Capili’s I walked through the streets of Chinatownin which an artist returns to his hometown to finish an autobiographical film. Chinatown, also known as Binondo, a commercial and trading center in Manila, is probably the oldest of its kind and in the film, as in real life, is ravaged by so much history and change, which the protagonist and, by extension, Capili, tries to cope with.

The film takes us through the cityscape, showing us a once-famous arcade, an abandoned shopping mall, a tailor’s shop, an art deco building, a tobacco factory and other places marked by time, colonial remnants and the cruelty of urban capitalism.

Capili’s images, mostly in wide shots, glow and radiate an enduring beauty in their grainy, postcard-like state, which he combines with archival, monochromatic photographs of Binondo’s cultural markers. It’s his sharpest work to date, as far as the visual lexicon is concerned. His sound work also suits the film’s poetic terrain.

As impressive as this montage is, it’s hard to see past the film’s tendency to lean on nostalgia to support its arguments. The analysis is vignetted, to the extent that the film doesn’t really introduce us to the inner lives hollowed out by the sites it maps.

It is as if Capili’s more forceful claims are reserved for another conversation altogether. The fiction could have expanded its nonfictional unity, and yet there seems to be a reluctance to actively interrogate the larger structures at play, the layers that bind any fact together.

Towards the end, the protagonist worries about the completion of his film because of the construction of a bridge he observes. He notes that, apart from people, no cars ever drive across it – a moment that reveals a rather capricious, deceptive politics, a kind of Freudian slip.

Here it is clear that Capili’s concerns still return to him, still so introverted, self-absorbed even. If cinema is to act as a keeper of memory, as the film likes to say, then we had better start asking more militant questions. How exactly do we want to protect such memories, and from whom?

Cross my heart and hope to die (directed by Sam Manacsa)

Upstairs in her workplace, cluttered with clothes and office supplies, protagonist Mila plays with a knife and seems fixated on the knife. Soon she tries to suffocate herself with a plastic bag, as if taking it all in, until someone interrupts her.

This opening frame, with its biting precision, introduces us to the thesis of Cross my heart and hope to die – a world where overworked but underpaid bodies are routine, a story repeated among the disenfranchised, a pattern passed down from generation to generation.

Director Sam Manacsa’s visual lexicon is nothing short of amazing. Starring Martika Ramirez Escobar, of the meta and trippy Leonor will never die (2022), in which she films the film, she manages to breathe life into a soulless, unforgiving environment and tap into the broader aspects of the country’s labor, of the Filipino people’s livelihood, and of the human condition.

The sound work by Ilya Selikhov and Sum-Sum Shen is equally stunning in the way it exploits the tragedy that awaits its subject and offers the viewer a moment of reflection, especially in the film’s final note.

But towering above this craftsmanship, radiant as it is, is Jorrybell Agoto as Mila, the film’s protagonist – a tireless woman who works day in and day out; a woman who seems to give herself up, but also looks elsewhere for hope and respite, if not a possible way out. Agoto astonishes when she focuses on her gift, when she tries to contain her character’s inner turmoil; so nuclear even in her silence.

It is worth mentioning that the actor has already been given similar roles of exploited workers a few times, after Rafael Manuel’s Filipino (2020) and Kevin Mayuga’s When this is all over (2023), but her work always refuses to give in to safe, unexciting tendencies. How amazing to see that she already has such a good handle on her talent, which should not go under the radar anyway.

Mom (directed by Alexandra Brizuela)

Alexandra Brizuela’s Mom draws parallels with Sheryl Rose Andes’s Maria from last year’s Cinemalaya, precisely because both documentaries focus on former President Rodrigo Duterte’s ruthless drug war.

But what separates Mom The big difference with its predecessor is that there is no major character narrating the story, which brings the series closer to the lives that were destroyed by the bloody campaign.

Rather than delving into suffering and illuminating only the trail of carnage, as most documentaries on this series of killings show us, the film explores the forces that drive its subjects, whether motherhood, religion, or even grief itself.

In one of the film’s most poignant moments, the camera closes in on a stuffed animal held by the brother of Myca Ulpina, the three-year-old girl shot dead by police in a 2019 buy-bust operation in Rodriguez, Rizal, as her mother recalls tender memories they once shared. They light a candle at her grave. It’s her birthday.

Brizuela, with a focused edit, suggests these parts that often become confusing when statistics are considered, when big names enter the conversation, parts that pulverize the absurd narratives perpetuated by state spin doctors. Shit, the film argues, doesn’t just happen, contrary to what one senator likes to claim. Rather, it’s orchestrated, especially when the one orchestrating it is in a position of power.

At once serious and poignant, Mom shows that it is difficult to dismiss a vision sustained by its community, by unbridled hope, by its commitment to justice. It offers us an alternative to seeing the underplayed details of historical tragedies before they are reduced to something merely part of a memory factory.

Mariposa (directed by Melanie Faye)

Melanie Faye’s Mariposaabout a teenage girl named Des who suffers a series of sexual abuses, boasts a brutal, often disturbing scale of simplicity. Shot primarily in monochrome, with yellow highlighter strokes meant to obscure the identity of its subject, the film then delves into the depths of this violence, with the traumatic incidents often depicted through animation.

The camera moves with the subject: inside the organization that shelters sexually abused minors, where Des has spent a year trying to process what she has experienced, largely at the hands of her uncle; inside her own home, where she celebrates her birthday, the day the crime took place; and inside the community where she hopes to start over.

At one point we see the children, in tears, expressing all the weight and pain they carry with them – an image that announces Mariposa‘s intention to give people like her more space and care.

However sincere this intention may be, there is something wrong with the way the material is put together. It seems that the editing is focused on the drama and the film raises questions without thinking about them much, swallowing the answers purely for the sake of atmosphere or effect.

I think there is a fine line between striving for openness and intrusiveness. There is also an error of judgment in the fact that the identity of the subject is hidden, while her parents are not only named but their faces are also revealed to the camera, which of course points to issues of consent. But isn’t this decision contrary to the purpose of the film?

Of course, the current events of Mariposa: on the importance of creating the necessary channels to address abuse in general; that sexual violence remains a ‘sensitive’ conversation only shows that it is still taboo, that the issues have never stopped.

But the way the film delivers its message calls for more caution, if not a complete rethink.

Primetime Mother ((dir. Sonny Calvento)

There is a certain moment in Sonny Calvento’s Primetime mother where the characters, all auditioning for a TV game show appropriately titled “My Amazing Mama,” try to wedge themselves into the camera’s frame and slowly, one by one, begin to shed tears as the spotlight sucks every fiber of emotion out of them.

It is an image so absurd and poignant that it points to the film’s central theme: the tricks of exploitation, accidents as commodities, motherhood as spectacle and the pitfalls of spectatorship.

Essential to this point is the way that Calvento, with Ian Alexander Guevara’s cinematography and Sam Manacsa’s production design, simultaneously bathes the footage in bright, popping colors, particularly on the game show, and reins them in when the lens focuses on what’s going on behind the scenes. This treatment serves to illustrate the inequality and power dynamics between the characters—how easy it is for those in positions of respect (in this case, the show’s director) to condone abuse as artistic control.

The fact that Meryll Soriano plays the lead role, a mother who waits in line for hours for a chance to win the daily cash prize for her sick child, is in a way telling and ironic, since her father, TV presenter Willie Revillame, has long been responsible for the kind of programs parodied and commented on in the film.

Revillame came under fire in 2006 after a stampede at his famous but now defunct show, Wowin which more than 70 people were killed and nearly 400 injured. A similar incident occurred in 2019 during the filming of Wow!Revillame’s show on GMA Network at the time, which left one dead and one injured.

Alternately glittering and dark, farcical and cutting, Primetime motherillustrates at its core many facets of exploitation as a symptom of a larger, capitalist world – a similar angle that Calvento charted in his short film Sundance Excuse me, ma’am, ma’am, ma’amabout an overworked shop assistant hoping for a permanent job, and a daughter desperately trying to care for her sick mother.

It is worth examining whether Calvento’s characters remain trapped in their situation in both cases. This can be seen as a solid description of the material reality in the Philippines or as the director’s refusal to show them mercy or offer better alternatives. – Rappler.com