MANILA, Philippines - Only in its fourth year, Cinemalaya has fully come into its own. Unlike the previous years, when certain entries didn?t meet the deadline, the most recent (and just concluded) competition had a complete slate of 10 full-length features. The sheer variety was impressive; the themes and challenges were diverse and highly original. According to the jurors, the entries showed that the Filipino indie film is breaking out of the mold.

Relative freshness

Since digital features have assumed the status of alternative cinema, they seem to have also taken on the stereotypical features of guerrilla filmmaking, such as unfocused and unsteady camera work, uneven sound quality, and clumsy acting that parodies neo-realism. But the relative freshness of digital features means that their technical lapses and artistic amateurishness can be swept under the rug of cinema verite. In short, they have become glorified B-movies, trendy cheap flicks.
But going by the technical quality of Cinemalaya 2008 entries, the filmmakers have become more confident and consistent. In fact there?s a polish to most of their work that would belie their status as ?indie.?

Most confident

Chris Martinez?s ?100,? which won the most awards, is perhaps the most confident of the lot. It is well-cast and well-acted, the main reason that it got two of the four acting awards (Mylene Dizon for Best Actress and Eugene Domingo for Best Supporting Actress). The subject may be too trite for an indie movie?a woman who is, as the jurors? citation for Dizon?s goes, ?raging against the dying of the light.?
Some viewers may doubt its originality or refer to it as the Brown ?Bucket List? or, worse, the Vagina ?Ikiru.? But ?100? does not disguise its emotional etymology; in fact, it pays tribute to Ishmael Bernal?s ?Pahiram ng Isang Umaga,? in itself a reworking of the Kurosawa film from a woman?s point of view: a funny sequence in ?100? has the heroine and her best friend doing a ?Vilma Santos marathon,? and the two burst into tears while watching the penultimate scene in ?Pahiram,? when Santos walks on the beach for the very last time, witnesses her final sunrise, and declares, ?Ang ganda ng umaga! Ang sarap mabuhay!?
Essentially a melodrama, ?100? is brave and determined and does not hold emotional punches in treating its very emotional subject.

Humanism

?Concerto? and ?Boses? are refreshing, too, for their no-holds-barred humanism. Like ?100,? Paul Alexander Morales?s ?Concerto? is also a very confident entry. Eschewing urban social issues or middle-class dilemmas that are usually the stuff of indie films, the movie tackles history, a challenging subject because of its tough and expensive requirements for verisimilitude and evocation. It focuses on a little-known incident toward the end of the World War II in which a music-loving Filipino family in Davao held a piano recital for Japanese officers.

The film attempts to detail the tensions of the Japanese Occupation with some success, and while certain details seem incredulous?a Japanese family friend gets to attend a party hosted by the family for American officers right after liberation?it hardly strikes a false note in conjuring the horrors of war and invoking the lessons of history and the need for reconciliation.

Healing

Ellen Ongkeko?s ?Boses? is also a ?musical? film. It tells the story of a mute boy?s healing from parental abuse through the power of music. The scenes in which the violin teacher attempts to break through the boy?s defenses and teach him music are engrossing, made more so by the totally unaffected acting of Julian Duque as Onyok. Duque?s crushing innocence embodies the movie?s purity.

Experimental

The other entries are true to the experimental and exploratory spirit of independent filmmaking.
Joel Ruiz?s ?Baby Angelo? is an intriguing film about how residents in a tenement building are affected by the discovery of a fetus in a nearby garbage dump. Initially taking on the genre conventions of a whodunit, the movie is concerned not so much with unraveling the mystery as with depicting the way social relations inexorably snap and poison each other. In this case, it?s people trying to evade the unsavory reality of an unborn found among?and perhaps dumped by?the living themselves.
Although it is debatable whether the movie is able to realize its bold artistic ambition, it is nonetheless successful in evoking the smothering confines of tenement or condominium living: it won the award for best production design. It is also distinguished by powerful performances by Jojit Lorenzo, Ces Quesada and Katherine Luna.

Stimulating

Paul Sta. Ana and Alvin Yapan?s ?Huling Pasada? is a stimulating tale about a writer forced to retreat to creative imagination after her husband leaves her. She invents a world of make-believe which the movie presents to the viewers parallel to her own existence. Through her imaginary character?a taxi driver who tries to get back the girl he left a long time ago while finding personal fulfillment in a street urchin he has saved from a road mishap and befriended?she tries to reconstitute her life.

Toward the end, author and character meet in a ballet class where their children are taking lessons, a kinetic convergence of fiction and non-fiction, a seamless melding of reality and congeries.

Real time

Not as experimental but nonetheless faithful to the documentary spirit of independent film is ?Ranchero,? about a convict?s last day in prison. Almost operating on real time, the film shows the convict going about his duties as kitchen master, his devotion as much a way of overcoming boredom as it is a way of avoiding trouble, lest he jeopardizes his release. But his last day will not be as boring as he expects: he will realize that the knives that fill his kitchen dominate the rest of his existence as well, whether in or out of prison. Archie Adamos delivers a very credible, almost touching performance.

Comedies

Because they are comedies, Onna Valera?s ?My Fake American Accent? and Jay Abello?s ?Namets? obscure their experimental nature. Entertaining at best, the movies show commendable attempts at humor and even satire.

Valera?s movie shows several intersecting lives in a technical assistance call center. The characters struggle amid merciless late-night shifts and office politics. Always sporting the fake American accent that is their ticket to higher-paying employment, they assess and reassess their identities, attempting with mixed results to rid their world of the fakery and virtual reality that have become their second nature.
?Namets? is a romantic comedy that tries to improve the genre by its loving take on Negros Occidental cuisine. Because of the love story, the movie threatens to be as saccharine as Bacolod piyaya. But it has a certain innovative quality about it, especially in its use of entertaining vignettes about food that are interspersed with the narrative (the film is written by award-winning novelist Vicente Groyon), including the Stanley Kubrick-like opening sequence about prehistoric Negros cave men accidentally discovering fire and inasal. The funniest vignette involves a father being stopped from slaughtering and cooking the household pet chicken, goat and dog by his animal-loving son, a tearjerker, if there was one.

Most notable

There may be debates on whether or not Tara Illenberger?s ?Brutus? and Francis Xavier Pasion?s ?Jay? are the best movies of Cinemalaya 2008. But without a doubt, they are the most notable for their scale, energy, and mordancy.
?Brutus,? which won the Special Jury Prize, is notable for its breadth?depicting nothing less than the dynamics between the injustices committed against the Mangyans and other cultural communities, and the rape of the environment through commercial logging. Without sentimentalism or browbeating, it explains the socio-political tinderbox created as a result of all this.
Telling the story of two kids? odyssey through the Mindoro wilderness as they try to deliver illegally cut logs to the market under the noses of forest wardens, soldiers, and communist guerrillas (?Brutus? is slang for illegal logger), the movie appears to have successfully surmounted the difficulties of shooting a movie under very difficult conditions. It is well-photographed and well-edited. The Mangyan kid actors, Timothy Mabalot and Rhea Medina, lend a particularly gripping and poignant realism to the tale.

Big and bold

?Jay? is big, bold and brash, fulfilling the documentary potentials of digital filmmaking while providing a cutting critique of the technology itself. It attains journalistic immediacy via its free adaptation of the real-life murder of a gay television executive, apparently by his masseuse. In the movie, the victim is Jay, a former small-town teacher in lahar-stricken Pampanga who?s now working in Manila to get a teaching placement in the United States. When his bloody corpse is found in his home, his namesake, Jay Mercado, a TV reporter, races to the victim?s family in the province to get their reaction. He thereby intrudes into their private grief and, eager for a scoop, involves them in a grand scheme to sensationalize the story. The movie shows that the immediacy of broadcast reportage is achieved at the cost of privacy-raiding, emotional blackmail, naked manipulation, a writer?s self-indulgence, and blatant sensationalism.

Striking conceit

The title refers to both victim and victimizer, providing a striking conceit on the Janus-faced quality of reality. Things aren?t what they seem to be. The victim is a respectable teacher who leads a double-life, hiding his homosexuality from his mother. The reporter, himself gay, genuinely condoles with the victim?s family but can?t resist using the extraordinary access he has gained, as a result of their friendship, to score a scoop and a byline. The victim?s relatives and friends readily show their grief, but can?t help pandering to the TV camera. Ironically, the only ?sincere? character here is the victim?s former lover, who refuses to be interviewed at first.
As the reporter, Baron Geisler shows both genuine humanity and utter repulsiveness. It is this potent combination that makes him so riveting. The other actors?Flor Salanga as the mother and Coco Martin as the ex-lover?deliver very competent performances.

Grand larceny

The twist in the ending defamiliarizes the story and calls attention to the film as... perhaps nothing more than a film. This may be unfortunate, as it shows that the rather playful film can?t stop playing games with the audience, that it plays games for the sake of it. But it is true that the alienation effect implicates the audience and makes them complicit to the grand larceny.

In the final analysis, ?Jay? is about the audience. In their greedy consumption of television images and narratives, the audience have battened themselves with entertainment and escapism. When Jay knocks on the door of the victim?s family, the victim?s sister mistakes him for somebody from ?Pinoy Big Brother? since she has applied to be a ?housemate.? When the victim?s former teacher-colleague is interviewed, she bursts into tears because she says the scene calls for it. When the original footage showing her breakdown in the morgue is damaged, the mother gamely agrees to repeat it, even making her face over so as to better register on camera.

To be sure, the audience is to be blamed, but the blame-pinning should not be one-sided. ?Jay? does not show the market forces that inevitably drive reporters to produce realistic shams out of real-life situations. Unlike Mike de Leon?s ?Aliwan Paradise? (1993), a satire also set in Pinatubo-ravaged Pampanga about how reality and the purity of love are adulterated by the entertainment complex, the movie misses out on the economic forces that gloss over press ethics and manipulate reality in the eager rush to capture the ?real? and the ?true.? ?Jay? seems mute about the role of TV networks and advertisers in the rape of the real; it is rather silent on their rampant profiteering, their empty programming, and their manipulative ?infotainment? that victimizes the audience without them realizing it.

But that these critical questions are raised owes to the compelling power of the movie. Like ?Aliwan Paradise,? ?Jay? is about the truth and how it can no longer remain pure and innocent. ?Jay? has definitely improved on ?Aliwan? because of its self-reflexivity, its scathing comment on the uses and abuses of the electronic media. Only some years back, digital filmmaking was so fresh, so innocent. Now, as ?Jay? shows, things aren?t so innocent anymore.

(The author served as juror in the 2008 Cinemalaya, together with actor-producer Cesar Montano, French film critic Max Tessier, Pusan Film Festival program director Kim Ji-Seok, and Berlinale programmer Ansgar Vogt.)