At this year’s Binisaya Film Festival, perspective is king

“The festival is always interested in the filmmaker’s voice and the exciting new perspective the film is bringing into the world,” Keith Deligero, filmmaker and founder of the Binisaya International Film Festival, told Rappler when asked about the festival’s programming this year. “Most film platforms say [the] story is king. It’s not like that here,” he continued.

Now in its 14th iteration, this year’s Binisaya, held in Cebu and available online via Vimeo On Demand, boasts nearly 40 films across four categories (Shorts, Horizons, World, and Shootout), including a slate of films from production group Archipelago as its closing set. Also part of the festival are talks by longtime film programmer Ed Cabagnot and Cleaners director Glenn Barit on “Pinoy indies as community spaces” and “Transitioning from short filmmaking to feature-length filmmaking,” respectively.

As its niche yet committed audience is well aware of, Binisaya remains to be among the most active film festivals in the country championing Visayan sensibility as well as regional and world cinema, unfettered by ever-fraught commercial demands. 

In many ways, the festival is an assertion of unbridled filmmaking, considering that “there is so much gatekeeping in cinema,” as Deligero put it. “We must let cinema be cinema,” he said.

And despite Deligero’s insistence on the festival putting a premium on perspective more than anything else, there is still so much to gain from this edition’s participating films in terms of caliber, insight, and imagination. Such has always been the merit of film spaces on the periphery.

Roland Cartagena, whose short film Old World is part of the Horizons category, holds a parallel sentiment. “Direk Keith said ‘the future of Philippine cinema is in the regions,’” he shared.

“I think the significance of film festivals like Binisaya lies in how it is able to represent, highlight, and support filmmakers from the regions who might not get as much leverage if they entered festivals here in Metro Manila, either because of competition, logistics, discrimination, or other barriers,” explained the Caloocan-based director, whose film, like many films in the lineup, operated on a shoestring budget.

Cartagena said further, “I think the ongoing movement of recognizing cinemas from the regions is an important step for Philippine cinema, considering the current discourse on our cinema being Manila-centric. I think it is about time – not only for stakeholders who are responsible for funding and support, but also on the reception side, in the audience and the public – to extend space to films coming from all over the islands.”

Zamboanga del Norte-based filmmaker Kyle Erika Saycon, the mind behind Pagtaghoy sa Hangin under the Binisaya Shorts category, also recognizes this ever-widening gap, noting walls directors from the regions have to scale, especially in terms of support.

“If we can provide more funding, mentorship, and educational opportunities, I believe the filmmaking scene in Zamboanga del Norte and in other regions could flourish even more,” she said.

Saycon added, “I have always stood firm in the fact that there are so many rich cultures and stories from the regions that the world deserves to know. If we give our emerging filmmakers a chance, we’ll get to hear more of these incredible stories. And it’s not just about supporting their talent; it’s about sharing and preserving years and years of heritage.”

Indeed, Binisaya 2024 attests to this earnest attempt at surfacing such stories. Featured here are six films that I regard as personal highlights across different selections, films whose artistic merit are not limited to how they capture the temper of our times, films that harness vantage points and at the same time articulate insights of value.

Uwan Init by Faith Aragon (Cebu, Philippines; Binisaya Shorts)

The premise of Faith Aragon’s Uwan Init is pretty straightforward and levelheaded, as it journeys with two female laborers – one a vegetable vendor, the other a virtual assistant working remotely – to present two material realities that are vastly different.

Even if its visual scheme, the use of the split screen, can be a little on the nose and measured in its effort to sketch the class divide, it’s a treatment that performs the film’s commentary on vantage points and the labor landscape in the country, exacerbated by a climate that’s becoming way more volatile and cruel than ever. Here, comfort and struggle sit cuttingly side by side, and Aragon pulls it all together in so short a time.

A Summer’s End Poem by Lam Can-zhao (China; Binisaya World)

Lam Can-zhao’s Berlinale prize-winner A Summer’s End Poem marvels chiefly because of its visual lexicon that by turns feel so wistful and suffused with life. Its central character, a country boy who takes an afternoon in the city to spend his savings on a dream hairstyle (the kind that pop stars would usually sport) as he nears middle school, is another addition to the long line of cinematic protagonists discovering the erratic nature of growing up.

Lam’s images glow in its perfect composition and texture, which blend well with the rich and ripe soundscape; it’s an approach that does not merely tour the spectator around the sights, but actually locate them into the lead character’s inner life, this small pocket of time the film is trying to grab ahold of.

There aren’t as many novelistic details in the film as the viewer would like to expect. It follows a fairly familiar plotline and yet still manages to make it work, to activate conversations that have long preoccupied teenage lives at large. Past this, there’s an anxious equanimity in the film that allows it to express what it wants to express about the incoherence of change and for that very expression to be so honest, so pulsating.

Old World by Roland Cartagena (Caloocan, Philippines; Binisaya Horizons)

There is no sensory deprivation in Roland Cartagena’s Old World, especially in the way it wields natural light and natural sound to craft a film that does not weed out clarity of insight from its simplicity. The story tracks a poacher hunting for pitcher plants, now slowly going extinct in the film and in real life, who comes across a telephone in the middle of the forest; its ringing towers over the euphony of birds and rustling plant life to which the man is forced to listen.

There’s a voice on the other end of the line, but its figure, its face, isn’t privy to us. It seems like a mother awaiting her child’s return or a complete stranger in grief, as if in search of reprieve. It feels like a voice that has existed in time before memory, a voice that frets over her ever-growing hair and how visitors arrived at her place, one after the other, to pluck its strands and how she felt every single pull.

Of course, Cartagena finds a fitting metaphor in this device, paired with a beautiful, Apichatpong-esque mounting, in all its greens and browns, to meditate on “extinction, exploitation, existence, and ecology, where the world is a forest and mankind is its poacher,” as he puts it.

There’s some sort of double vision here, not literally, but in the way it looks into the past and future, at once tracing sources of wounds and ways of healing. Equally integral is how the film insists on the use of Subanen, a language chiefly spoken in Zamboanga Peninsula, the native tongue of the director’s mother who also did the narration, for how it captures so much feeling and richness. Subanen, as the director notes, is rarely rendered on screen, and it’s so symbolic in this case that it perfectly articulates and intimates the film’s central assertion on this ever-shifting world.

Bisagras by Luis Arnías (USA; Binisaya World)

Luis Arnías’s Bisagras is one heck of a vision, where movement, narrative daring, and experimentation all commingle, outlined through a Black consciousness. It is a work that maps the transportation of enslaved African people to the United States and its cruel legacy (see this story from The New York Times), as encountered by the director’s ancestors. 

Rendered entirely in monochrome, the film chiefly relies on images of water, the urbanscape, and features of Black people often presented in close-ups as its visual paraphernalia, and you can feel the texture and wondrous forms that’s being created before you with how the film toys with light and shadow as well as its editing. 

There is no dialogue throughout the work, yet the film negotiates its way by documenting all the goings-on in the places it visits in a manner that feels so lived-in and infused with unbridled musicality, as though we’re actually part of this whole retracing of personal and broader histories. 

The film doesn’t feel the urge to annotate what it presents to us. If anything, its openness is an embrace, for it affords us an interval to parse its meaning, whether that meaning be considered in the context of memory, identity, colonial violence, or urban development. In no way does it come across as perfunctory or pretentious; it simply puts faith in the viewer and its own mode of articulation.

Pagtaghoy sa Hangin by Kyle Erika Saycon (Zamboanga del Norte, Philippines; Binisaya Shorts)

Kyle Erika Saycon’s Pagtaghoy sa Hangin is heady with broad pronouncements. At times, one can appreciate this effort to discourse on the grand; at others, it simply confuses the narrative’s momentum. At the heart of the plot are two boys, Isagani and Tomas, entertaining a rumor about an old man they regard as the one responsible for the extreme heat and heavy rains that have plagued their community’s crops. He’s a witch who curses the land, or so the story goes, and it quickly escalates like wildfire. 

The unruly camerawork and fickle pacing, odd as this approach may be, allows the film to relentlessly build on its premise, until it lands on a stirring endnote. And while the entire argument on the intersections of community, superstition, state neglect, and climate change do not exactly cohere into something solid and sharp (mostly an outcome of wayward writing), one can let it pass for how the film is eager to commit to its vision, to harness every material at its disposal, and to chronicle a reality that keeps repeating among the masses.

The Steak by Kiarash Dadgar (Iran; Binisaya World)

Kiarash Dadgar’s The Steak recounts a harrowing real-life incident in southern Iran and renders it on the screen with the brio of drama. In the film, a mother warmly prepares food for her daughter’s birthday, but everything goes awry when military personnel invade their area, prompting residents to abandon their homes and escape for survival. 

Every frame, despite the subdued palette, is active and terrifically constructed, and you can sense the director’s intensity and commitment in making this piece, which is surprisingly shot within a day.

Beyond this, the film is a demonstration of triumphant soundwork. In the house, there’s the continuous ticking of the kitchen timer, the sizzling of the frying pan, or the creaking of an opened cabinet, but in the close distance, you can hear the gunfire and explosion, the houses burning, and all the warm lives screaming for help.

And you can feel how the picture tools this soundscape, forgoing any dialogue, to fuel the trepidation that looms over the story, until it crescendos into the final burst of emotion – so chilling in its magnitude and exactitude.

Considering its closing image, with the tasteful meat now burned and the grease splattered across the window and kitchen counter, it is clear that this is a film that confronts head-on the cruelty that lingers after the fact. It is compelling for how it is able to land gracefully on its metaphor and speak of the particularities of war that easily get ignored and buried, the many inner lives reduced as collateral. – Rappler.com