Tsardyer (2010)

Banditry, Kidnapping in Mindanao

By Butch Francisco

Any hardcore journalist will kill – or will even risk getting killed – for a scoop. In news programs today, it’s all about having stories that are exclusive, exclusive, exclusive! That’s what all their headlines scream.

Only very few of today’s journalists, however, can still do undercover work because everyone has become a celebrity. Those who are not on TV are on Facebook. The production staff who join the raids on sex joints are often green, their journalistic instincts yet to be sharpened. They can flush out all the sex workers from those seedy establishments week after week, but has anyone bothered to look into the operations of those powerful people running and/or protecting these prostitution joints? It’s back to business after some palms have been greased.Read complete review

Technology Transfer and Negotiations, Batteries not Included

By Tito Genova Valiente

Tsardyer is a film that illustrates how Information Technology connects all our islands and all their people. If mobility between and among classes and ethnic groups cannot be brought to reality by education, then another more mobile structure, that of mobile phones can do so. The narrative of Tsardyer, as cinema, is so compelling I wait for the next ad man to use and fuse the stories so his firm could tell the story of technologies and territorialization and deterretorialization. In between such narrative, we could perhaps have a glimpse into what troubles some political groups in Southern Philippines and how we never can really understand what those brothers and sisters of ours there want from our national government that serves only a few.

In other words, however central the mobile phone in Tsardyer, we will never see this cinema put to work by mobile companies based in our country and anywhere else.Read complete review