Retrospectives

IN COLLABORATION WITH SOCIEDAD ESTATAL DE CONMEMORACIONES CULTURALES (S.E.C.C.)  

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As so often happens, even in the case of national cinemas that are geographically closer to Spain (just think about the cinema from the old Communist countries of Central Europe, or even that of Austria, the Baltic republics or the Scandinavian countries,....), cinema from the Philippines has always been largely ignored by Spain’s historiography and cultural programming. While it is true that Filipino cinema is geographically distant, it is in fact quite close culturally (now is a good time to recall that the primitive film projector reached the islands while the country was still a Spanish colony, and at the hands of Spaniards) and nonetheless it has mostly been an exception in the programming of film archives and cultural centres, or at festivals, where the likes of Lino Brocka barely managed to slip in, back in the 1980s, as the occasional guest of competitions such as that of San Sebastian, which back then was Spain’s most important window onto international film.

 

   It is also true that the Philippines and its historical-cinematic legacy do not make things easy. It is a country without film documents dating before 1937, a country in which entire decades of production (almost) have been lost, a country from which film was not exported, through festivals, until the 1970s, so it has not been easy to follow the development of its subjects, genres and authors. This is the case to such a degree that the discourse strategy of some of its youngest filmmakers (for example, the Raya Martin of Independencia, 2009) seems to reveal an underlying preoccupation with building a hypothesis about what the country’s early cinema (in his case, that of the 1940s) may have been like, while others, such as the scholar, writer and director Nick Deocampo, concern themselves with examining the very earliest origins of Filipino cinema (in the curious documentary Cine/Sine: Spanish Beginnings of Philippine Cinema, 2009).

The relationship with History in a broad sense, one of the main subjects addressed in Filipino film over the last fifty years, has been examined by filmmakers such as Eddie Romero, one of the key figures in the evolution of cinema in the Philippines, who was so bold as to put images to Spanish colonisation, in a film of fundamental importance, We were Like this Yesterday, How is it Today? (1976); Mario O´Hara did the same with the harsh period of the Japanese occupation, in Three Years Without God (1976), while Raymond Red (who in 2000 received, for his film Shadows, the highest recognition attained up to then by Filipino cinema - the Golden Palm for best short film at the Cannes Festival) put images to the biography of the national hero Andres Bonifacio, in Heroes (1992).

 

   The retrospective organised by the Granada Film Festival Cines del Sur for this year’s edition, its fourth, basically covers the period from the 1970s up through the present. Represented within it are key names in the evolution of Filipino film, such as the aforementioned Romero or the person responsible for putting the Philippines on the festival map in the 1970s and 1980s, Lino Brocka, whose Insiang, 1976, so effectively foreshadows, in its dramatic portrait of the Manila of the people, what would later be the inspiration of younger directors, such as Brillante Mendoza, who is well known by Granada viewers; or that of Jeffrey Jeturian, as shown in The Bet Collector, 2006. And also that of the fundamental Mike de León (Rites of May, 1976), that of no less central Ishmael Bernal (whose hypnotic, nightmarish Manila by Night / City After Dark, 1980, has recently received the tribute of two young promises in emerging Filipino film, Adolfo Alix Jr. and Raya Martin, mentioned above), or the unclassifiable and fascinating Kidlat Tahimik (Perfumed Nightmare, 1977; Turumba, 1981).

At the same time, our retrospecitve has a place for the new batch of Filipino film that international festivals have made it possible to get to know over the past five years, such as Magdalena - The Unholy Saint (2004), by the actress and director Laurice Guillen (who is a member of this year’s jury); Evolution of a Philipino Family (2005) by Lav Diaz; Mendoza’s Service (2008), Imburnal (2008) by Sherad Anthony Sanchez, and Drumbeat (2007) by Alix Jr., in a series of films that offers everything from popular melodrama to sexual rapture, from the pressing need to look at the country’s history to the depiction of religious obsessions and of the damage caused by corruption and underdevelopment.