There is not much to do but surrender to Giancarlo Abrahan’s Dagitab (alternatively titled The Sparks), a film that holds captive its audience. It radiates in visual and textual opulence that only the deftest of hands can achieve. One scene in particular makes a perfect summation of the film as a fine work
Tag: Cinemalaya 2014
Nora Aunor on Cinemalaya Posting Films on YouTube: “I think it’s like stealing.”
As predicted, the Awards Night for Philippine independent film festival Cinemalaya was, to sum up in two terms, very awkward. Winning Best Actress for Joel Lamangan’s Hustisya, Nora Aunor expressed her thoughts on the issue of Cinemalaya uploading previous years’ full-length entries to YouTube for free, saying it is tantamount to stealing.
1st Ko Si 3rd
In Real S. Florido’s 1st Ko si 3rd time plays two roles: one that creates a void and another that fills it. The case of Cory, an ageing woman compelled to rekindling an old flame, is curious and endearing, yet touches something deep and true: time is an eternal debt
Children’s Show
Only a few frames from completely wallowing in its relentless, almost-stifling realism, director Roderick Cabrido’s debut feature Children’s Show swivels to the truly weird and beams us out of the film, where it is most necessary. Knowing when to retreat back a step shows calculation in his film’s ultra-violent madness;
#Y (Hashtag Y)
Gino M. Santos’s follow-up to his exuberant if shrouded debut The Animals is set once again within a circle of upper-class, party-‘till-drop youth (here, a quartet of twenty-somethings) frequenting night bars as if they were their sacred intersections, flush in neon lights and pumped with skittering beats and booming synths. The
Mariquina
Jerrold Tarog’s ingenious work in last year’s Cinemalaya-entry Sana Dati distinguishes him as a man of fine, filmic talent: his film, closing the famed Camera Trilogy (sided with Confessional and Mangatyanan), is about acceptance and closure; yet it goes in all sorts of direction, transforming a simple romantic tale into
K’na, the Dreamweaver
“When Kana, a young T’boli woman, becomes a dreamweaver, she has the chance to weave together her village’s warring clans. But, will she give up true love to do so?”
Asintado
“In the middle of the preparation for Taong Putik Festival, a young man penniless and in love, takes on a drug courier job that goes terribly wrong. To save him, his mother now makes the most difficult decision of her life.”
