The Philippine Online Chronicles

Brillante Mendoza's movies limn the lives of people like a homosexual service masseur (Masahista), a family who runs a porn theater (Serbis), and a woman who is murdered and then chopped to pieces (Kinatay). Nowhere in the director's eight feature-length films is there an attempt to gloss over the dirty, disturbing bits. There is no censoring the man-on-man sex, or the vile sights and sounds of an XXX theater, or the bloody nubs of a severed limb.

There is no distracting from them either. Scenes are shot in natural light, A-list actors are nowhere to be found, and there may or may not be a plot.

Distasteful as this may be for majority of the Philippine movie-going public, Mendoza still makes waves in the festival circuit, having won such prestigious awards as the Caligari Film Award and Golden Kinnaree Award. His latest win was for Best Director at this year's Cannes Film Festival for Kinatay, putting him in the company of Martin Scoresese and Wong Kar-Wai, and many leagues ahead of any other Filipino director from the mainstream.

But then that's the paradox of being an indie director in the Philippines – you can make a name for yourself in any number of international film fests but then go back home to a tiny audience pool and nearly nonexistent revenues. But that's all right – indie films don't set out to impress the majority.

Social commentaries and patchwork videos

Mendoza and his contemporaries have their roots firmly set in the Filipino independent film movement, which began as a subversion of what is commonly expected in a movie. Most of the movies in the 70s and 80s catered to this mentality - that movies should be pleasing to watch, tell a complete story and offer the audience reprieve from their daily lives.

It was in this era when director Kidlat Tahimik came out with a series of movies that defied the quasi-Hollywood formulas of the time. His first film Mabangong Bangungot looked like a “stitched-together home video,” but won the International Critic’s Prize at that year's Berlin Film Festival.

At around the same time, directors like Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal made movies exposing the gritty underside to the stringent, soap-washed surface of Martial Law society. Films like Brocka's Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim and Orapronobis and Bernal's Pagdating sa Dulo and Himala came to be notorious for challenging the censors and presenting issues and social settings without softening or sugarcoating. Some of these movies went up against the Martial Law censure for their portrayal of Philippine society.

Besides a strong tendency towards social commentary, another thing directors following in the footsteps of Brocka, Bernal and Tahimik had in common was that they rarely had a large budget for their films. These movies were 'independent' because they were not financed by any of the big Filipino movie studios, something that was often painfully obvious – film quality was bad, major stars could not be contracted and marketing was minimal.

On the other hand, these movie makers were free of the “compromises of commercial film[-]making”. This drew in a small but faithful crowd of intellectual moviegoers who wanted to see a slice of life exactly as it is.

The harshness of neorealism

Today, the rise of digital technology has made film-making easier, without a large budget. The sensibilities and aesthetics of contemporary indie films still follow those of their predecessors, most notably in Mendoza, whose viewing of the Bernal movie Relasyon was what put him down the path of the indie director.

Characterizing Mendoza and the indie films of this generation are a propensity towards hard-hitting realism and putting on screen those aspects of Filipino society that are usually ignored or glossed over in popular media. As one blog puts it, “They present sensitive issues which studios cannot invest on as they don't see profitability in it, especially that the mass market is looking for forms of escape from poverty and politics.”

A lack of polish in the final product is also typical in indie movies. They still look “brazenly cheap” as Tahimik's movies did back in the day. At their best they resemble documentaries. This crudeness is sometimes deliberate, to further the audience experience of peering into something real, perhaps uncomfortably so.

Although this style has not done the indie scene any favors in terms of drawing in a larger local crowd, international film festivals have been quick to pick up on the artistic potential of these films. Jessica Zafra points out the irony that, “They make movies about the Philippines for foreign cinephiles...They don’t earn money from their movies, but they get to go everywhere.”

Some are critical, however, of the approach Filipino directors take in making their movies. They point to the very thing that makes indie films unpopular at home – that premium seems to be placed on showcasing the unpleasant or unnerving. Images of sewage spilling out into the street, or human feces, and sexual assault are all expressed in full sound, color and vividness. This was the chief critique for Mendoza's Kinatay, which featured not only rape and brutality, but a 40-minute long van ride in traffic at night, in real time and very low light, with all the blaring noise of traffic.

This method of neorealism is praised by some as appropriate in depicting the honestly awful things that happen in real life, especially in the Filipino setting. Mendoza himself says of the film he directed: “I want to show in my film what most other filmmakers would not show: I am showing what is really happening in the Philippines, implicating the military, the police...”

Others complain that in this case, as with several other Pinoy indie films, the images overwhelm all other aspects of the film, including character and story. Critics question why it is necessary to be so harsh on the audience.

Some suggest that it is all a means for indie films to draw attention to themselves. For this reason a good number of Filipino movies that have received accolades over the years have been branded 'shock cinema', in both endearment and derision. As Cannes juror Hanif Kureishi said in describing his experience watching Kinatay, “Sometimes good art is hard...but [Kinatay is] not something I want to see again.”

The indie wave

Despite the critics and the setbacks indie films suffer with no budget and a limited audience, it continues to flourish as an art movement. According to Mendoza, speaking to On Screen Asia, “...Indie filmmakers have taken the lead role in reviving the Philippine film industry as budding directors turn to the genre because they would need less money to produce.”

A majority of films being made nowadays are indie films, with the mainstream cinema drying up alongside them. It also receives the lion's share of critical acclaim and accolades within and outside of the country. Mao Gia Samonte writes “In the world scene, indie films are the ones that are projecting Filipino film talents, and if this projection were to be the gauge, then at no other point in history has Philippine cinema been internationally acknowledged.”

For this kind of growth to continue, directors like Mendoza are willing to personally educate those who are interested in the art of film-making, despite the continuing problem of attracting a financiers and a larger audience.

The independent movie circuit is open to those who seek to get into film-making not just to make a profit, or explore a craft, but to say something significant about one's society. At their strongest, indie movies in the Philippines present the truth, and in a manner that sticks to the consciousness.

Image taken from AllMoviePhoto.com

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