Check out the
Arkipelago sponsored Filipino films program of the
2002 ASIAN AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL! Stay tuned for related Arkipelago sponsored events, you may have a chance to meet some of these filmmakers!
Here are the list of
Filipino films being shown, and a
press release.
And speaking of film festivals:
Published in the 1998 program/zine for Arkipelago's Filipino Film & Video Festival, Sa Pinilakang Tabing:
"If You Want to Know What We Are" By Dionisio Velasco
"He who does not look back from whence he came will never ever reach his destination."
- an old Philippine saying, as quoted in Bontoc Eulogy
They were displayed like animals in cages for all the world to gawk at. They were the Igorot people from the Philippines, men and women who ate dogs, not hot dogs like at a baseball game or on the 4th of July, but bow-wow woof-woof dogs. The fascination with the "savages" at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair provided all the attraction of a carnival sideshow. "Bontoc Eulogy," by Marlon Fuentes, sets up this spectacle as the framework for his pseudo-documentary film about the personal exploration of a Filipino American who tries to unravel his ancestral heritage. The film, featured in Arkipelago's annual festival Sa Pinilakang Tabing (On the Silver Screen) in 1996, foregrounds the treatment of those Igorot Filipinos at the World Fair as a defining moment in Philippine-American relations.
The juxtaposition of Filipinos in cages with the advancements of American science and technology was of course a not so subtle declaration of racial and cultural superiority. That this attitude has not changed much since then is evidenced in recent sniping remarks by Hollywood celebrities in the mainstream media. Witness: Howard Stern joking on the air about "Filipinos who eat their own children," and then there was Liam Neeson telling a writer from GQ magazine about the Filipina women he¹s got tied up‹as in bondage in his bedroom. Recently, Emmy Awards host Joan Rivers, before cutting to a commercial, granted her national TV audience permission to either "feed your dog, walk your dog, or if you¹re Filipino, eat your dog." Are you ashamed of being Filipino yet? Let's assure Ms. Rivers that her pedigreed French poodle Kiki is in no danger of being skewered by our Filipino barbecue sticks. Biro lang. (Just kidding.) Yes, some of us do eat dog, Ms. Rivers, but for your own edification, the dish is called azucena, and it goes very well with San Miguel pale pilsner.
We Filipinos can be overly defensive and hypersensitive when it comes to being confronted with some of the above images and representations of our selves. We tend to take these things personally. We get pikon. But if we don¹t like the way we look, or the ways in which we are made to look in mainstream media we have to stop getting so defensive and literally take offense. If we are media makers, if we make images on film, on video or on our Macintosh computers, and combine them with sounds, music, words, then we represent our Filipino selves by presenting the many angles, facets, faces and phases that we are endowed with. What we produce is something akin to a new Philippine cinema.
The above preamble serves to point out only one thing: when it comes to building community, and increasing awareness of a blossoming FilAm film movement, Arkipelago's annual festival, Sa Pinilakang Tabing, featuring new films and videos produced here and in the Philippines, is a vital force at the forefront of Filipino American cultural/arts presentation. This year's [1998] festival, which marks the event¹s fifth year, begins on November 14th and continues until November 21st.
Since 1994 Arkipelago has provided an alternative space for independent film and video artists to screen their works. But Sa Pinilakang Tabing did not just come out of nowhere. To get properly grounded in the recent history of independent Philippine cinema in New York one has to go back ten years to 1988 when maverick filmmakers Nick Deocampo and Raymond Red each had retrospectives of their Super-8mm films at the now defunct Collective for Living Cinema. Both Deocampo and Red came out of the Mowelfund Film Institute in Manila. Throughout the 80s and into the 90s Mowelfund has been a fertile breeding ground for young Filipino filmmakers. For young Filipino American filmmakers at that time the presence of Deocampo and Red in New York was a shock of recognition at their own potential to produce Pinoy experimental films.
By 1990 Luis Francia and Noel Shaw had completed their too-long-to-be-a-short, but not-long-enough to be a feature Super-8mm film Flip's Adventures In Wonderland. Deocampo and Red had both assisted in the first third of the production of that film, which had screenings at alternative film venues like the Gas Station (a junkyard cum scrap metal art performance space) and the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village. That same year Artists Space in Soho presented a one-night-only screening of Kidlat Tahimik's seminal work Perfumed Nightmare. Most memorable that evening was when, during the notorious circumcision scene, a gentleman in the last row fell off his chair fainting, and halting the screening for several minutes.
In 1991, Youth for Philippine Action, an organization of young Filipino American activists hosted, in conjunction with Pilipino Pilmmakers Pare, a night of Filipino and Filipino American short films. The event, which was called Boses Pilipino (Filipino Voices), was in many ways a precursor to the Arkipelago presentations today. But that¹s another story.
The visions and perspectives of film- and videomakers who have been showcased in the first four years of Sa Pinilakang Tabing have certainly been various and wide-ranging. In personal documentaries like Nick Deocampo's "Private Wars", Veena Cabreros-Sud's "Stretchmark" and Michael Magnaye¹s "White Christmas" and we get a first person diary style-account, a poetic musing and travelogue, respectively. From the personal to the more politically motivated we¹ve seen documentaries produced in the Philippines‹like "Toxic Sunset," by Benjamin Pimentel and Wella Lasola, which attempted to expose the culpability of the U.S. Military over alleged dumping and waste left as a legacy of the naval and air force bases, and "FIND: A Ten Year Search For Justice" (produced by the Families of Victims of Involuntary Disappearance) in which the phenomenon of forced disappearances throughout the Marcos, Aquino and Ramos eras is examined.
The short narrative film format has also been well-represented in past SPT festivals. "Good Sense of Style" by Desireena Almoradie,"Waiting in the Wings" by Charles Uy and "Silencio" by Michael Arago have all exhibited strong dramatic story-telling characteristics. These three shorts, each directed by a young Filipino American filmmaker, display the kind of clean and crisp production value evident in most film school projects.
A more mythic kind of story-telling is attempted in Ellen Ramos¹s "The Other Side of the Volcano" (Doon Sa Kabila Ng Bulkan). A meticulously crafted, hand-painted animation, the film unfolds like a dream as it recounts the sublime worldview of the Aetas people. A different kind of dream state is realized in Fruto Corre¹s cinema verite "Tupada." Bizarre and surreal are apt descriptions of the scene during the Philippine presidential campaign that Corre¹s ubiquitous camera and microphone capture in 1992. "Tupada" offers a harshly critical look at the wacky follies of an election season that is uniquely Filipino. But more than espousing a wickedly political sense of humor the real saving grace of the film is Corre¹s compassion toward the mass of humanity that make up the Philippine voting public.
The humor quotient goes way up, however, in Ernesto Foronda¹s "Back to Bataan Beach" and in Rico Reyes' "Karaoke" videos. Playing off the style of "extended" trailers that Hollywood studios employed in the 50s and 60s, Foronda embraces American pop culture while at the same time poking fun at it. And by using an all-Filipino cast in his raucous beach romp, Foronda casts a sharply critical eye at young Filipinos' wholesale consumption of all things Amerikano. Meanwhile the "Karaoke" videos by Rico Reyes hold a mirror up to the Filipino¹s passion for "minus-one" singing. Give us a microphone, a cassette tape with pre-recorded backing music and maybe a few drinks and we¹ll give you belt-it-out singing a la Whitney Houston.
From the straightforward and conventional to the subversive and irreverent, the myriad films and videos exhibited in Sa Pinilakang Tabing (SPT) over the first four years of the festival's young existence have exposed the welling up of talent and verve in this new Philippine / Philippine American cinema. How do you distill images that are purely Filipino? You don¹t, and you can¹t. Filipinos are a people of too many tribes with too many outside influences, colonial or otherwise, for any clearcut definition of a pure Filipino. Because a millennia before the so-called multicultural movement in America was cheapened by the political motives of status quo educators, policy makers and the czars of culture and media, Filipinos were already inherently a multicultural peoples. Picture a film, unrolling before your eyes, spanning islands and oceans.
Our last festival was in 1999. Cross your fingers that SPT comes alive again this year...
