The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
For admirers and supporters of Philippine independent films, the last 10 days of October were good. That’s how long the Quezon City government-backed Third QCinema International Film Festival ran. During the festival, dozens of films—including eight new full-length features and five documentaries in competition—were shown at Gateway, Robinsons Galleria and TriNoma malls.
The films in QCinema were diverse. This was especially true of the Circle Competition finalists: Mario Cornejo’s Apocalypse Child; Cesar Hernando’s Gayuma (Allure); Chuck Gutierrez’s Iisa (As One); Pepe Diokno’s Kapatiran (Brotherhood); Jet Leyco’s Matangtubig (Town in a Lake); Mihk Vergara’s Patintero: Ang Alamat ni Meng Patalo (Patintero: The Legend of Meng the Loser); Prime Cruz’s Sleepless; and Lemuel Lorca’s Water Lemon. From comedy to drama, from the conventional to the unorthodox—there was something for everyone, as some people would say.
I can attest to this. During the festival, I managed to watch nearly all eight finalists (Sleepless was the exception), plus five other movies included in QCinema’s other sections. They vary in quality, to say the least. Gayuma promised to enthrall the audience in the same way a handsome art student was bewitched by an alluring woman, but failed to keep it, to put it politely.
Kapatiran boldly tried to apply ideas associated with fraternities—brotherhood, exclusivity, privilege (or the lack of them)—to the society at large, but was not entirely successful.
Matangtubig is remembered more for Leyco’s masterful control of mood, cinematographer Tristan Sales’ shadowy lighting, and supernatural elements than its story of a lakeside town reeling from the rape-slay of a high-school student and the disappearance of her best friend.
Iisa boasts of unforgettable opening and closing shots, as well as Angeli Bayani’s terrifc performance as a communist rebel trying to help a typhoon- and landslide-hit village get itself back on its feet, but is ruined by a weak third act. (Raiding a National Food Authority storage facility? Really now.)
Three standouts
To me, the Circle Competition standouts are Apocalypse Child, Water Lemon and Patintero. The first—about a surfing instructor (Sid Lucero) in Baler town, Aurora province, who’s forced to face his past and the myths about his life, including one about him being the son of American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola—is the second independent film of director Cornejo and producer Monster Jimenez. Their first feature, Big Time, was a big hit at the first Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival in 2005.
Those who watched that crime comedy would note the sharp differences in content, style and tone between that and Apocalypse Child. Everything about the latter seemed so effortless and natural: how Cornejo helmed the movie, how the story unfolded, how character information was revealed. No wonder it emerged as the top winner at the QCinema awards night on October 28, garnering four Pylon trophies, including for best film.
Lucero and his equally attractive co-stars—RK Bagatsing, Gwen Zamora and best supporting actress winner Annicka Dolonius—gave authentic and beautiful performances, but I must single out well-known theater actress Ana Abad Santos, who played Lucero’s earthy mother. Hers is a meaty, somewhat tricky role—one rarely seen in Philippine cinema—and she pulled it off magnificently. Abad Santos deserves serious awards consideration next year, as well as more film roles that showcase her range. She’s that good.
Unshakable fixation
Like Apocalypse Child, Water Lemon also features an unusual character, only more so: Filemon (a convincing Jun-jun Quintana), a young man with Asperger’s syndrome who has an unshakable fixation on water—an element that claims lives as often as it gives, that can trap people as much as it can offer an escape—particularly sea levels.
The film, set in the coastal town of Mauban in Quezon province, follows the socially challenged Filemon’s interactions, not only with his school superintendent-mother (a very fine Tessie Tomas, who won best actress), but also with the infatuated misfit (Meryll Soriano) stalking him, the operator (Alessandra de Rossi) of the Internet café he frequents, and her maternal grandfather (best supporting actor winner Lou Veloso)—all of whom have their own little stories.
Lorca directed Water Lemon with noticeable restraint, only adding a few flourishes (the scenes involving Filemon and his female chatmate from the Seychelles, though not exactly original, are quite effective), and I like how he and editor Benjamin Tolentino established the pace of the film to reflect the setting’s laid-back, quiet atmosphere.
But as far as I’m concerned, the best thing about Water Lemon is Lilit Reyes’ Pylon-winning screenplay. I admire how well-structured it is, how distinct and well-drawn Reyes’ characters are and how he treats them—and the audience—with respect, and how he employs humor appropriately (i.e., not at the expense of the protagonist’s condition).
All-out comedy
And speaking of humor, there’s plenty of it in Patintero—not surprising, since it’s the only all-out comedy in the Circle Competition lineup.
Winner of QCinema’s audience-choice and gender-sensitivity prizes, Patintero centers on a young girl named Meng (Nafa Hilario-Cruz)—derisively called patalo by her schoolmates because she always loses in every game she joins—who forms a team with her nerdy best friend, the new kid in school, and a superhero-costumed boy for a patintero tournament, to be held during a Linggo ng Wika (Filipino Language Week) sportsfest, just to prove that they’re not losers at all.
Much has been written on how funny Patintero is, and how it deals with friendship, the value of winning and the dignity in defeat, that its more serious (and more touching) aspects—the fact that Meng and her elder brother Manuel are being raised by their maternal grandmother (Suzette Ranillo), that their mother is an overseas Filipino worker and their father is absent from their lives—are sometimes overlooked.
In a way, I found Patintero to be the most interesting of the Circle Competition entries, mainly for two things. One, the film played like an engaging live-action comic book, and not because of how the filmmakers rendered their end credits. The extreme close-ups, the quick cuts, the use of slow motion during the patintero scenes, the low-key special effects and, most especially, the humor—it reminded me of a comic book, and I’m almost sure it’s intentional.
And two, the appearance of the best friend (Tarek El Tayech) of Meng’s mother and his lover (Brian Sy). Here you have two tall, pleasant-looking and straight-acting men whose relationship was never ridiculed or cast in a negative light in this children’s film—possibly a first in Philippine movies.
And the fact the two men received a more prominent role in Meng and Manuel’s upbringing at the end acquired a significance that, I believe, goes beyond the movie—one that suggests how our tolerance for such relationships has deepened.
If QCinema 2015 would be remembered for anything, I suspect it would be for that one. That would not be a bad thing, really. If nothing else, the films screened at this year’s edition of the festival raise the bar for next year’s.