MANILA, Philippines - The 2008 Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival, held at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, concluded with the awards rites Sunday night. The festival movies films will next be shown at the UP Film Center starting tomorrow, with a special screening of Manuel Conde?s 1950 classic ?Genghis Khan? at 2:30 p.m.

Of the 10 competing full-length movies in Cinemalaya, I saw seven, and five of them ranged from good enough to extraordinary.

To break that down: Chris Martinez?s ?100? and Francis Pasion?s ?Jay? were extraordinary, Paul Morales? ?Concerto? and Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil?s ?Boses? were very good, and Onnah Valera and Ned Trespeces? ?My Fake American Accent? was good enough.

Five out of seven isn?t a bad ratio, and what made it more significant was that, in my view, these films could only have been made under Cinemalaya?s aegis. ?By their fruits ye shall know them.? No mainstream movie/TV studio today would dare make any of these films, or even allow their transgressive, aggressively non-conformist scripts to reach first base.

Ambitious ?Concerto?

?Concerto,? for starters, is an ambitious historical film about a family trying to survive the war in 1940s Davao. It manages to look expensive, yet intimate. The production design is excellent and well-sustained, despite the fact that every Cinemalaya director works with just P500,000 as seed money.

Except for a wayward summarizing speech in the middle and a couple of distended sequences that could stand pruning, nearly everything in the movie looks, sounds and feels so authentic, one can?t help but hold it up against the most recent (mainstream and big-budgeted) local movie set in World War II: Joel Lamangan?s ?Aishite Imasu.?

By any measure, ?Concerto? is a much better picture.

I heard some people compare it to the legendary ?Oro, Plata, Mata? by Peque Gallaga. I wouldn?t go that far (?Oro? is my favorite Pinoy movie?at least the first two-thirds of it, so I don?t want to be cavalier about its stature), but I understand such praise. It?s rare to see a historical film done right in these parts, and with such paltry resources yet. ?Concerto? proves it can be done.

Accessible entries

Martinez?s ?100,? Ongkeko-Marfil?s ?Boses? and Valera and Trespeces? ?My Fake American Accent? are highly accessible (and therefore commercially feasible) entries. But they, too, display a welcome freshness, fortitude and unconventionality, even with subjects as cliché as dying, child abuse or the peculiar culture of the call-center industry.

The moving ?Boses? offers an emotionally rich, cathartic experience with the well-worn tale of an abused boy finding solace in music, and proving to be a prodigy. This is an intense, heartfelt film brimming with lovely moments, notably those involving the violinist Coke Bolipata (in his adequate debut as an actor) mentoring the boy (Julian Duque) on the violin.

Duque is an acting and musical find. He speaks not a word but his performance shines, and his violin-playing is even more astounding. The movie he anchors and illuminates traces its story neatly, soberly, without fuss or histrionics.

Here we go again: Watch ?Boses? and see if Gil Portes? ?Mga Munting Tinig? doesn?t seem too stilted by comparison.

?100? has all the qualifying elements to make it a middling disease-of-the-week melodrama. Happily, it is injected with the one vaccine it needs to transcend its soggy genre: irony.

A young woman coming to terms with dying in her prime? Hello, Ishmael Bernal?s ?Pahiram ng Isang Umaga,? starring Vilma Santos! But ?100? is cheekily aware of its antecedent, so it set out to upend it?by boldly referencing Bernal?s classic weepie in a scene in the movie, and elsewhere rinsing itself of any hint of bathos.

Every crying jag is expertly counterweighted with a hilarious moment, often courtesy of those two great comics, Eugene Domingo and Tessie Tomas, even if their scenes aren?t supposed to be funny.

Mylene Dizon is persuasive in the lead role?hard-nosed but sympathetic, a thorny blend to pull off. It helps that she?s been photographed masterfully by Larry Manda, whose work is one of those elements that makes this film the most pulido of the seven entries that I saw.

Spoiler alert

From writing and directing to the performances and production values, ?100? is an admirably polished work. And (spoiler alert!) watching Domingo, Tomas et al skinny-dip has got to be a cinematic highlight not easily forgotten.

Ranged against ?Boses? and ?100,? ?My Fake American Accent? is lightweight fare?episodic sketches of the upside-down lives, work schedules and mind-set of call-center agents. It?s the kind of film Jose Javier Reyes would have made with its jaunty tone and quirky, individualized characters, although with more panache and better lighting.

Unexpected victor

But, but, but?it wins viewers over with its hip sense of fun and youthful exuberance, credible situations and strikingly natural dialogue. Unlike many mainstream films or TV dramas that fail miserably to capture the contemporary Makati/Ortigas milieus, this one does, and quite wittily. The filmmakers clearly did their research.

On the down side, the sound design is bad, the cinematography garish. The performers, however, led by Mailes Kanapi, are charming.

Which brings me to ?Jay,? for me the unexpected victor at the festival. Thank heavens for a movie like this, something long overdue given the insidious pervasiveness of our vapid TV culture.

Spare, deadpan, brutally hilarious, ?Jay? comments on?nay, eviscerates?the sheer artificiality and untruth of so-called reality television. And it does so without raising a voice?rather, without its darn good lead actor, Baron Geisler, doing so.

Playing a sweetly manipulative TV producer/reporter who?d do anything, including re-create scenes of genuine tragedy, to get his story, Geisler paces through his chores with nary a flutter of his gay character?s well-scrubbed hands. He keeps everything soft and low-key, yet in the end he conveys, with enormous power, the monstrous deceit of his actions.

This precise, economical performance becomes the unblinking insider?s eye that gives viewers a peek at the fraudulent myth-making created for our tawdry consumption.

It?s not just Geisler?s revelatory performance that?s commendable. Pasion?s script is sharp, subtle, complex and thought-provoking, playing with and rearranging our notions of illusion and reality right up to the last frame. His multi-layered storytelling owes a debt to Pedro Almodovar, particularly to ?Bad Education? which, with dollops of bite and humor, also teases out the fine points of reality-making and truth-telling and the hazy subtexts in between.

At its most inspired, specifically in the scenes of a wake in a barrio, ?Jay? is howlingly funny, yet also piercingly discerning.

Poised throughout

It?s certainly not the easiest film to make, thematically and stylistically; a few pushy moments induce the fear that it will lurch into camp or overwrought, self-conscious pomposity. Remarkably, its poise holds throughout, giving us a movie whose grim vision will, I believe, only acquire prescient, consequential weight from now on?let TV be damned.

All things considered, ?100? and ?Jay? were both shoo-ins for Best Picture, but I rooted for ?Jay? and I?m glad it won Best Picture honors.

While ?100? is the more accomplished work overall, ?Jay? fulfills Cinemalaya?s indie aesthetic more forcefully, from its subject matter to its tone, treatment and execution. It shows the way forward, if you will, for other works that strain at the limits and ask the hard questions. Bravo to our young filmmakers.

This piece first appeared, in slightly modified form, in the author?s blog, www.gibbscadiz.com. E-mail gcadiz@inquirer.com.ph