There are films that right from the first shots and sounds create an eerie atmosphere, disturb the viewer and put them in a situation of inaccessible unease. These are films which don’t often reveal their true nature until much further into their duration, but which seduce and are difficult to let go of. They are films which announce undisputed talents, directors capable of introducing tension and anxiety in the composition of a shot, with smooth and slight movements of the camera, with mere editing cuts. Wanted: Border is one of these films and the director, Ray Defante Gibraltar, is a candidate as an absolute revelation of Far East Film 2011.
Produced as part of the Cinema One Originals series and financed by the Philippine TV network ABS-CBN, Wanted: Border was shot in 2009 and won a total of seven awards at the festival that Cinema One presents every year. Until now though, Gibraltar’s second film has not had a première outside the Philippines — the same as the subsequent Brod (2010), while his debut film When Timawa Meets Delgado, an independent film applauded in his country, has not been viewed much outside the archipelago. It really is about time for Ray Gibraltar to be discovered!
Wanted: Border, the title already is intriguing; due to a spelling mistake, the advert “Wanted: boarder” reads “Wanted: border”, which introduces an aspect of prolific significance. The search for a border, for a limit, for a defined space or a boundary line which must not be crossed is well suited to the intimate and stylistic nature of the film and also to its content. With jolts and thrills, fascination and disgust, Gibraltar’s cannot be easily defined and it refuses to be categorized as any kind of particular genre.
The complex semantic fabric of the film reveals potential for reflection about Philippine identity, so permeated with Roman Catholicism, about the manipulation of power, the naivety and weakness of the poor, about the class war but more frankly, about the country’s past and recent History, where the real monsters were (and are) very, very human...
To summarize, or rather, reconstruct the plot of the narrative puzzle that Gibraltar elaborates through an editing style which is not linear, made of cuts, fragments, ellipses and a constant to-ing and fro-ing of different levels of past and present — a powerful jumble, which seems chaotic, but that once assembled reveals to be disturbingly coherent and glaringly fortuitous — is almost an act of betrayal in terms of the film. Wanted: Border is one of those films it’s best to know little about, so that its revelations can be enjoyed moment by moment.
It is enough to know that the ingredients and spices which make up the recipe include the crucifixion rituals carried out in the Easter period in certain regions of the Philippines (we are in the province of Iloilo), the popular superstitions connected to the dreaded aswang, a kind of rainforest vampire, usually female, delicious local dishes made with human meat, sexual frustrations and incest, as well as the bloody anti-communist repressions of the time under Marcos’ dictatorship. All of this is carefully combined in an atmosphere which is surreal, but rooted in a context of blood-curdling realism.
As a complement to the work of realization and editing which is of extreme precision and Franciscan essentiality (the 82’ duration is truly impeccable), Wanted: Border also has a deeply suggestive and original soundtrack which is far from conventional (as proved with the abrupt changes in sound in the accompaniment to the end credits).
And Gibraltar’s film would certainly not be the same (and so enchanting) if it were not for Rosanna Roces’s interpretation of the main character, Mama Saleng. In her intense, ecstatic, exhausted and crazy expression, we can see the abyss from which Wanted: Border has drawn its greatness.