When the Apocalypse is Over: New Independent Philippine Cinema
“These digital, radically color-graded, and/or square or vertically framed alternate dimensions offer new ways of seeing Philippine myths, pasts, presents, and futures. The interdisciplinary roots of the foundational First (50s-60s) and Second (70s-80s) golden ages of Philippine cinema’s filmmakers—comedians, lawyers, doctors, therapists, pianists, psychic trainers, shamanists—persist today in the graphic designers, animators, colorists, VFX artists, singers, and DJs who comprise the new voices behind these features and shorts. But their bombastic styles differ dramatically from their classically trained or genre-ingrained progenitors. Without leaving history behind, these films leave stale influences behind, warp them, flail some way somehow off the beaten path. With forms that are heavily motivated by VFX, post-production (processes in which the directors are often heavily if not solely involved), unlikely aspect ratios, etc. the body of work looks and moves in a way that actually feels new.
Many of these stories imagine absurd, alienating worlds and characters who long for something or someone outside the limits of their heavily manipulated frames.” Programmed by AE Hunt.
Cleaners
Karl Glenn Barit, Philippines, 2019, 79 min
Coming-of-age film about high school classroom-cleaners for the school year 2007-2008. Set in the backdrop of a Catholic school in Tuguegarao City, the characters deal with different pressures of being proper, pure, and popular, while slowly discovering that the world is dirty and superficial to begin with.