Filipino cinema is generally said to be 100 years old, but the exact year of its birth is up for debate. The issue divides film historians – the few of them that we have here, anyway – so much that the centennial celebration was divided into two halves. It started in the last six months of 2018 and continued into 2019.
For the majority, the idea of “cinema” is still tied to the commercial, so the birth of Philippine cinema is marked by the first full-length Filipino film, Jose Nepomuceno’s Country Maiden (Dalagang Bukid), which appeared in 1919. Though this is certainly the first Filipino-produced feature film, many forget that cinema isn’t only limited to full-length films.
Nick Deocampo (guest at FEFF 2018), perhaps the most prominent Filipino film historian, says that it can be argued that the establishment of Nepomuceno’s studio Malayan Movies in 1917 signaled the birth of Philippine cinema. Deocampo even noted in a Facebook post that Nepomuceno first made a newsreel in Cebu (and not in Manila, the country’s capital) in 1918, technically producing the first Filipino film. In that case, the centenary celebration might have been a little late. In any case, these films are gone, considered lost, and they only live on as a handful of stills and summaries.
The spectre of romance still hovers over the preferences of the local audience. In 2019, four of the highest-grossing films were about love. Hello, Love, Goodbye brought together the country’s biggest love teams (that is, actors who are often paired to depict lovers on screen) to produce what is now the highest grossing Filipino film of all time. Alone/Together featured another huge Filipino love team, but that was more of a Trojan horse, as the story is about female empowerment.
#Jowable was an irreverent story about a loveless woman and her quest to end her singlehood. Just a Stranger was a May-December love affair featuring two actors with a 10-year age gap, although the performers look so young that the main conceit isn’t very believable. But Just a Stranger still raked in ₱100 million ($2 million). Trust a household name and a hot male star in an exotic setting (Lisbon, Portugal), and a scandalous affair between two good looking stars with a strong following, to rake in a decent amount of cash.
The year delivered a mixed bag of Filipino films. There was a wide variety of films coming from different points of the cinematic spectrum, as evidenced by the top-ten grossing films of the year. For the first time in five years, there were more non-romantic films in the top ten than romances.
The family drama Miracle in Cell No. 7, a remake of the South Korean movie of the same name, came second, and made waves when it was released during the very commercial Metro Manila Film Festival at the end of the year. That was a bit of an anomaly. Its lead actor is a former matinee idol (Aga Mulach) whose box-office wattage varies, especially in a film festival where bona fide hitmakers such as Vice Ganda and Coco Martin – two big film and TV stars whose names alone are reason enough for people to buy a film ticket – are the top draws.
But the story was enough to tug at the sentimental Filipino heartstrings – especially during the holiday season. A mentally challenged father is wrongly accused of murdering and molesting a government official’s daughter and is sent to maximum security prison. The warden and the prisoners despise him at first, but it soon becomes clear that he is innocent. His only child is soon allowed to visit him in his prison cell often while the ragtag bunch of officials and criminals around him help him with his case.
It becomes a gripping drama, despite the familiarity of the story. It’s difficult to say no to a heart-wrenching story of a father and his young daughter, especially in a Filipino setting where family relationships matter more than anything else. Miracle at Cell No. 7 became the top grossing film of the film festival, earning ₱543 million (around US$2.7 million), besting the films of Vice Ganda and Coco Martin, whose films end up earning ₱348 million ($6 million) and ₱90 million ($1.8million) respectively.
Celebrity power still dictates the profitability of a film, and that is a template that won’t go away any time soon. The exception last year was #Jowable, whose director was plucked from obscurity after several of his short films featuring bitter, loveless characters went viral on social media. The #jowable (the closest English translation would be “boyfriend or girlfriend material” or “a catch”) characters resonated with an audience that’s always up for content anchored in the painful search for love.
#Jowable’s lead character Elsa is played by Kim Molina. She is mostly known for bit roles in films, but she has also headlined the successful run of a theatrical play based on – what else – some of the most popular Filipino love songs. Elsa frequently rants about her love life (or lack of it), drowns her sorrow with alcohol, and prays to the Lord to send someone to pound her senseless. It’s an interesting mix of conservatism and vulgarity – the two godawful characteristics of Filipino romances. Society still counts on women to act like country maidens, and thinks they simply exist to be wooed. But at the same time, women are depicted as sexual beings who are sexualised into submission.
Filipinos do love a dirty joke, and #Jowable has plenty of them, combined with quotable lines about love. This makes for a relatable and meme-able film. Despite the commercial success that it has enjoyed, #Jowable met with dismal reviews and was criticised for featuring problematic and racist depictions of various characters. It’s almost as if it is intentionally defying political correctness.
It is worth noting that the most commercially successful films of the year feature remarkable female characters who map their own trajectories. This is true in Hello, Love, Goodbye, where Joy (Kathryn Bernardo) follows her dream of becoming a nurse in Canada instead of staying in Hong Kong for a boy; in Alone/Together where Tin (Liza Soberano) pursues a career in the arts – a unique choice in the Filipino romcom universe – instead of working out her relationship with Raf (Enrique Gil); and even in The Panti Sisters, where three transgender beauty queens (Paolo Ballesteros, Christian Bables, and Martin Del Rosario – none of whom are transgender, by the way) struggle to define their own identities in a very patriarchal family.
The “strong female character” isn’t a stranger in Philippine cinema, an industry where female filmmakers command a strong following (as with Cathy Garcia Molina and Antoinette Jadaone who directed Hello, Love, Goodbye, and Alone/Together respectively). But to have all these characters on the screen in the same year – under the cloud of a government which consistently undermines the role and rights of women – reveals an undercurrent of resistance to the traditional depiction of females in romantic stories. The knight is no longer required to save the damsel, he is but an accessory to her self-actualisation, an aid to fulfilling her own destiny.
But what of the year’s best films? There was a smaller pool of good films in 2019 despite the increasing number of films being produced. There are the obvious picks like John Denver Trending, an intense film about cyberbullying which impressed when it premiered at the Cinemalaya Film Festival. It was the only notable film of the festival, aside from the quietly powerful Edward, about a young boy taking care of his father, who is confined in hospital.
The usually reliable Cinema One Originals Film Festival also had a weak year, with only one memorable film, The Same People (Sila Sila), which was about the complicated relationships between a gay man, his ex-boyfriend, and their friends. The alternative QCinema International Film Festival had more to show in terms of quality. Older film festivals have become, as film critic Oggs Cruz puts it, “another factory that churns out content,” and seeking out new voices has become secondary to putting out barely coherent movies with recognisable actors. Most of these films are forgettable and do not live on after the film festival is over.
QCinema took an interesting direction with its feature film competition. The case was to see how homegrown films would fare against neighbours in Thailand, Vietnam, Taipei, etc. The competing Filipino films were premieres, and had lower budgets than their competitors, some of which had already made the rounds in international film festivals.
The top prize went to a Filipino film, Glenn Barit’s Cleaners (Suburban Birds won the NETPAC Jury Prize) – and rightly so. Cleaners is, undeniably the best Filipino film of 2019, and one of the most exciting films to come out in recent years. It stood out strongly even among the few outstanding Filipino films of the year – or even the decade.
Cleaners takes the collective experience of high school and visually transcribes on to the screen it in highlighter-pen colours and the mind-numbing gray of Xerox print. The filmmakers achieved this effect by exporting an offline cut of the film at eight frames per second, printing each frame to look like a photocopy, and manually colouring each of one with highlighters. Then they scanned and edited the coloured frames as the final offline cut. It’s an insane process that should have taken years but director Glen Baritt and his production team finished it in mere months to make the festival deadline. It’s an effect akin to the real-life paintings in Loving Vincent.
Cleaners colours its characters in specific hues that add a layer of verisimilitude to each small story. It’s as if someone made a film out of your high school yearbook. The film’s five vignettes progress from the absurd (a self-conscious student shits her skirt during a school presentation) to the alarming (a young boy experiences the beginnings of corruption via his politician parents).
Cleaners relies on the specificities of being a young adult in the 2000s to illustrate an experience that is universal. It offers a panoramic view of what the Filipino coming-of-age experience is like, never forgetting the small heartbreaks, petty disappointments, and riotous times that everyone experiences. It’s puberty as an apocalypse.
Perhaps it is only right to usher in a new century of Philippine cinema with filmmakers like Barit, who are uncompromising in terms of the vision that they want to commit on screen. Aside from the visual effects he used in the film, he insisted on hiring first-time actors in Tuguegarao City, Cagayan where the film is set (it is also his hometown). Other producers would have asked Barit to cast actors who are more popular, but the director wanted to stay true to the spirit of the story.
“For an industry that already has their own set of notions of what sells, film companies can be naturally allergic to these new forms,” said Barit in an interview with CNN Philippines Life. “At the same time, it is admittedly a logistical nightmare within a limited timeframe. The risk for it failing is too high for them of which, from their business standpoint, I do really get. Most suggested compromises were to do with the film’s look, like maybe the entire thing doesn’t have to be photocopied or maybe just shoot it conventionally. Or some suggested that it can be shot somewhere nearer to Manila. There was a time when no one believed in it but me. But luckily, I’m very stubborn and stupid.”
The new century of filmmaking comes during an age where streaming is upending business models. It’s harder to convince people to go to the cinema to see anything but a tent-pole release. But more and more people are getting access to films that otherwise would have vanished in cinemas via streaming. Viewers are spoiled for choice and are becoming more adept at understanding different filmmaking styles and storytelling devices.
Local films aren’t just competing with other local films anymore, they’re also competing with what’s on Netflix, Prime Video, and even YouTube. The attention-based economy would have you believe in big data but the success stories of smaller films such as Cleaners, and production studios such as Black Sheep (responsible for Alone/Together and two of the more critically acclaimed romantic films of the year Between Maybes and Once More with Feelings), suggest that maybe there’s a light at the end of this small tunnel, even if it's been 100 years coming.
Don Jaucian