MANILA, Philippines?Are short films less important than full-length features?

This was one of the issues tackled in a discussion among a group of independent filmmakers during a festival of short films called ?Simply Shorts? held recently at the Inquirer offices in Makati City.

?People dismiss short films. They think makers of shorts are just waiting to graduate to making full-lengths,? said award-winning filmmaker Emman de la Cruz, whose seven-minute film called ?Imagining Edsa,? was among the works exhibited during the event. ?It?s like, is poetry less significant than the novel? I don?t think so.?

JP Carpio, director of the short film ?VTR,? pointed out that a short film is not just a shorter version of a full feature. ?It?s a different form completely. With making shorts, there?s a lot more leeway for experimentation, for playing around and trying to find another way of saying something.?

?A professor said, ?a film has to be as long as it should be,?? shared De la Cruz. ?If it?s a full-length, it better be good because it?s wasting a lot of time. A three-minute film can be as good as a feature-length if it?s really honest and it reminds the audience of personal thoughts and feelings.?

Grig Montegrande, director of ?Sakay? (25 minutes) and Inquirer sales office assistant for Classifieds, said form was really of no importance. ?As long as you are able to express your thoughts and share them with an audience, the manner in which you express it doesn?t really matter anymore.?

Inquirer employees also got the chance to watch Martha Atienza?s 25-minute short ?Man in Suit.? Although ?Prospectors,? by Waise Azimi, was not screened due to technical problems, the Afghan-American filmmaker-producer actively participated in the discussion.

Tell us something about each of your films.

De la Cruz: ?Imagining Edsa? was part of an omnibus called ?Imahenasyon.? It was produced by Jon Red for his Pelipula Production under Digital Viva. It?s about a child born on Edsa at the time of the Edsa revolt. My actor, Ping Medina, did an imaginative, stream of consciousness work. He imagined talking to his mother, telling her where he is, how lost he is at the time.

Montegrande: ?Sakay? is very personal in the sense that it tells my experience as a probinsyano in Manila. When I came here to study, I lived in numerous dormitories and apartments. Two of the most important figures in my life here in the city are the taxi and its taxi driver. Every time I would transfer from one house to another, the taxi brings me to my destination. It?s like my home away from home.

This film was shot while I was moving out of an apartment and transferring to another. A friend plays the cab driver here. I know that everyone, in one way or another, has had experiences with the cab driver and his taxi. I?m sharing mine in ?Sakay.?

Carpio: ?VTR? is a very intimate conversation between a man and a woman. Even though the central focus is a woman, I actually made it more for the men. Men don?t really get how vulnerable women are, or how much they sort of put themselves out there.

Atienza: The film (?Man in Suit?) is actually part of a video installation I created for a train station in Holland. I had 10 suits made and asked common people to wear them while still doing their daily routine. I?ve been obsessed with filming reality since I started filmmaking in 2003. This is the first time that I did something to ?manipulate? things. This is more about rhythm, and about the suit, too.

Was it difficult for you to create a film for just a few minutes?

Carpio: Each film has its own difficulties. In my case, it actually took me three years to be mature enough to edit it. In 2004, I still didn?t know how to put it in a certain form. It took me three years to understand what I?ve shot.

Azimi: The longest film I?ve edited was 120 minutes, the shortest was a minute. Ultimately, what?s important is if you?ve achieved what you want to accomplish in what you?re doing.

Atienza: My videos are made to go on indefinitely, forever. This is the shortest I could get myself to cut it. Usually, I have really long shots and loops.

A film, however short, is always a collaborative effort.

Carpio: That?s correct. The person I worked with here is Tessa de Guzman, who is also a filmmaker. I want to credit 50 percent of the film to her because without her it would be a bad film. I?m just the guy who arranged things. She was the one who carried the whole thing.

De la Cruz: [?Imagining Edsa?] was born out of improvisation. It?s a piece that came out of an accident. I?m glad that Ping was ?eloquently ineloquent.? He gave us a soulful, piercing, evocative narrative. The film is as much his than mine.

Montegrande: Bembol Rockers provided the music here. The band didn?t know me, but when I asked them if I could use their music (?Boogie Mo? and ?Cristine?), they immediately said yes. I appreciate the trust.

Is it good to work without a script in making shorts?

De la Cruz: When I was a student in UP, the writing course was offered on our third year. This meant we made shorts not knowing how to write scripts. I had a film that my teacher said was very good but it had nothing. It?s called ?Emperor?s New Video.? It ran for four minutes.

What I consider one of my most successful short films is ?Tatlong Lamok.? It?s based on a very short free verse about a woman who had three relationships. I collected images that evoked this poetry. I had two hours worth of footage. On an instant, I made a film on these images. It worked. It?s successful mainly because I became one with the piece.

E-mail: mcruz@inquirer.com.ph