Ang Panggahasa Kay Fe: A rupture of faith
By Tito Genova Valiente
Perhaps, it is because Alvin Yapan is not a woman that he is able to form a discourse of enchantment around the violence against women. Perhaps, it is because Alvin Yapan is a man that it is enchanting to see him able to put the tormented position of women in our city in a new light, in an acutely searing light that is part magical and part surreal.
The core of the story is very simple: a wife comes home after working for a few years abroad to a husband who seems not to welcome him back. Dante, the husband is protective only in the traditional sense of a man being physically present around a woman. Something, however, seems to bother them. Tension, not love, frames the husband and the wife. Up to that point, the story is common.
This theme about abuse of women has been abused by mainstream cinema to the point that instead of giving voice to those who are abused, those films have simplified the issue at the level of the personal. Yapan’s language is never about simplifying and the simple.Read more
Kinatay: Cry slaughter!
By Lito Zulueta
“KINATAY,” for which Brillante Mendoza won the Best Director Award of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, is one wild nightmare romp though the underbelly of Manila life on the literal level, and a plunge into one of Dante’s Inner circles on the spiritual level. It is the director’s unsentimental Quiapo epic, “Tirador” (2007), recast into something more focused, even harsher, a centripetal drive toward the heart of darkness.
The movie starts off all bright and airy enough. Peping (Coco Martin), a young criminology student, is getting married, and the audience sees him and his fiancée happy and excited as they take their vows and are joined later by kin and kith for a modest reception at a restaurant. Later he goes to a Quiapo school for the day’s classes (perhaps at the Manuel L. Quezon University, which somehow makes references to “Tirador”), and when the audience starts to wonder how he’s going to raise a family now that he’s married but still in school, they see him suddenly pounding the inner-city beat where he does his practicum while earning on the side: he clearly is a runner for the protection racket by the local police.Read more
Kinatay: Sa dambana ng Kinatay
Ni Roland Tolentino
HINDI ko gustong naririnig ang direktor at manunulat na tinatalakay ang kanilang obra. Parating sobra, wala naman ito sa natunghayan pero mala-magic na ipapaliwanag ng artist na ito ang kanyang layon. Sa literatura, sinasabing “the author is dead” sa akto ng pagbabasa. Walang babalingan na awtor bilang sanggunian kung ano ang kanyang intensyon o kung ano ang dapat nitong afekto sa mambabasa.
Pero naiiba ang open forum na kinatampukan ni Brillante “Dante” Mendoza, dahil masalimuot ang daan tungo sa Philippine premiere ng “Kinatay” (2009) sa UP Cine Adarna. Ito ang gabi ng pagpapakita ng mga ulo ng hydrang administrasyon ni Gloria Arroyo. Una ay ang pagpasok ng MTRCB na lahat ng pelikulang ipinapalabas sa Cine Adarna ay dapat dumaan daw sa kanilang pag-aproba. Ikalawa, na sa kaso ng “Kinatay,” magfa-file sila ng TRO (temporary restraining order) kung hindi ito dadaan sa screening ng kanilang opisina.Read more
Hospital Boat: Revisiting the war in Mindanao
By Bienvenido Lumbera
DIRECTOR Arnel Mardoquio whose “Hunghong sa Yuta” (Earth’s Whisper) rated an impressive number of nominations from the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, has a new film. “Hospital Boat” revisits the war in Mindanao, and this time Mardoquio’s script has broader concerns.
The movie, against the background of war, touches on the Muslim fight for independence, the work of health workers in coastal villages of Mindanao, the plight of evacuees and the evils of warlordism. Such concerns call for epic treatment of the problems that make Mindanao a daily hot topic for the national media.
The boat serving as the pathetic central image of the struggle to bring relief to war victims is whatever available banca that can bring the medical doctor and the nun from village to village. Dr. Sittie and Sister Claire are the principals in the narrative that take the viewer from sequence to sequence depicting scenes of poverty and need and the alleviation that outside help can offer.Read more
Himpapawid: Rebel without Marx, A desperado’s flight to perdition
By Mario A. Hernando
An old newspaper item about a man hijacking a plane and dropping from the sky 5,000 feet below has intrigued filmmaker Raymond Red well enough to imagine the circumstances and details that led a desperado to take this extreme course of action. The result is “Himpapawid,” a well-crafted social drama and thriller that takes us into the life of the wretched of the earth, without wallowing in melodrama and voyeurism that characterize most films about poverty and the downtrodden.
By no means a socialist or ideologue, Red nevertheless sees the futility in venting one’s rage and exasperation without a higher purpose or maybe, without the guiding hand of comrades. That hijacker is Raul, a loner and oppressed laborer who seems to get the lower end of the bargain at every turn. The first time we see him, he is pleading with his boss at a construction site not to fire him. He wants to go home to the province but wants to get his job back when he returns. The foreman wouldn’t budge. This early we see a steaming human volcano, ready to explodeRead more