SFIFF 2012: FESTIVAL REPORT (PART ONE)—By Frako Loden

Several weeks have gone by since the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival (4/19–5/3/12), and the fifty-odd new films I saw there now have an equal chance at living in my memory. Many have faded, some still haunt me. That helps me assemble a list of short reviews, from least favorable to most, as a final recap of this year's festival experience. So many of the films are opening quickly after the festival that the more I procrastinate, the more films there are to see in the theatres and the longer this gets. I saw about an equal balance of documentaries and narratives. Overall the documentaries left the strongest impression this time, running the gamut from excruciating to sublime—but mostly well-crafted and sometimes unusually creative.

Where Do We Go Now? (Lebanon: Nadine Labaki, 2011)—This film did two things. It confirmed my allergy for remote-village parables, and it made me rethink my affection for Labaki's previous Caramel (2007), which at least didn't try to address dire problems with bathetic comedy. The caramel in that film served as a sweet and sticky depilatory for its urban Beirut beauty salon staff and other women, each of whom has a specific problem that can be resolved through group effort. In the current film a remote village maintains a fragile peace between its Christian and Muslim citizens. Although its priest and imam get along fine, the male citizens erupt whenever there's an inadvertent incident in the village or they get wind of the sectarian strife growing in other parts of the country (presumed to be Lebanon). The women, who of course get along fine and can control themselves, devise a plan to disarm the men and prevent a religious war. The caramel equivalent in this film is a strong dose of hashish baked into pastries, which are forced on the men until religious differences give way to bromantic revelry. Then there are the Russian strippers. But just to show it's serious, the film begins and ends with a trip to the cemetery. This is the kind of film that wins audience awards, but it lost at SFIFF to The Intouchables, another facile we-can-get-along bromance. (Press screening)

Next come two unconventional documentaries about the narcissism of their makers. The Sheik and I (USA: Caveh Zahedi, 2012) brought on the cringes like no other festival film. Caveh Zahedi, Bay Area-based American filmmaker, is commissioned to make a film for the Sharjah (Emirate) Biennial. Didn't the Sharjah Art Foundation know Zahedi's previous films and have some idea how Zahedi would react filmically to their rule that the film could not criticize the sheik of Sharjah? Maybe they did and thought he would be just the right director to riff on "art as a subversive act" (a phrase from their invitation letter). Well, I'm sure they rued the day Zahedi brought his family and his crew to the emirate to improvise a film, and this documentary is an often excruciating series of confrontations between Zahedi and his contacts at the foundation when he isn't trying to shoot asininely stereotypical scenes involving a chorus line of men in burkha drag, terrorist children and the kidnapping of the sheik, all employing crew members and people off the street. (Implied threats against the latter for participating in a subversive and ultimately banned film became a point of controversy at some US screenings.) Can a film be accepted as a self-reflexive portrait of an ugly, ethnocentric American when the portrayal seems all too authentic and unexamined? (DVD screener)

I was in love with An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (USA: Terence Nance, 2011) during the first half-hour. My fellow viewers, a large number of whom were young African Americans who all seemed to know each other, shared my delight and even recited some of the narrator's lines. This narrator is every bit as narcissistic as Zahedi's in The Sheik and I, but the film he speaks of is already done: an actual 2006 short film called How Would You Feel? and only half of this feature film's subject. The other half, folded into this short film, is his ambivalent feelings for a young woman who fails to come over as promised, manifested in beautifully inventive visuals. It's a vivid depiction of the colorful chaos that this fairly minor incident provokes in a young creator's mind, but it's also overbearing, repetitive, overlong and unabashedly narcissistic. Like Zahedi's film, the narcissism is so sustained that it feels unexamined. But unlike The Sheik and I, its freshness promises new ideas and methods from its filmmaker. (Festival screening)

It's the Earth Not the Moon (Portugal: Gonçalo Tocha, 2011)—I'm surprised that this won the Golden Gate Award for feature documentary. It's the only festival film I walked out on, after watching 2:15 of its 3:05 running time—I think that's enough to write about a film that makes little of its potentially fascinating subject. I might have found it as fascinating as a dozen people in the row behind me did, if like them I were from the Azores island of Corvo. But I'm not, and another reason for my premature departure was their incessant whispering and pointing out every single thing they recognized. Maybe this was the appropriate response, since the film opens with the bald premise to shoot "every single thing." My viewing companion said he was expecting a film about Corvo, which is a tiny remote island at the very western extreme of Europe, to say something about Europeans on the fringe. Or that the people living there at least have a certain attitude toward mainlanders who share their Portuguese language. Or that the island has a rich history of harboring pirates and whalers. But no. We come back again and again to an old lady who is knitting a traditional fisherman's cap for the director. This is sweet, but the old lady doesn't have anything interesting to say or do about it. Robert Koehler's catalogue description mentions the film's "almost naïve sincerity" as if it were a conscious aesthetic choice. Conscious or not, it's not enough to justify its inordinate length and missed opportunities. (Festival screening)

Another disappointing documentary with a fascinating subject has a mouthful of a title: The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years Without Images (France: Eric Baudelaire, 2011). Under the narrations of an unseen man and woman, we see unpeopled rooms and rooftops of a city. The man is Adachi Masao, a filmmaker who worked under several Japanese New Wave directors and made his own films before joining the ultraleft-wing Japanese Red Army and abandoning Japan for exile in Lebanon. (I'm eagerly awaiting in the Bay Area a couple of films recently featuring Adachi.) The woman is Shigenobu May, daughter of the notorious, now-imprisoned revolutionary and founder of the Japanese Red Army Shigenobu Shigeko, whose support for the Palestinian cause sent her to Lebanon and involvement in a hostage taking in The Hague kept her there. In their adopted country Masao helped raise May for many years. Those with little background knowledge of the Japanese Red Army will struggle to understand the narrations' oblique references, not to mention the landscapes scanned by the camera. They might prefer to see the much more straightforward, and maybe more satisfying, Children of the Revolution (2011; directed by Shane O’Sullivan and viewable at Distrify), a fascinating comparison of the lives and opinions of May and the daughter of Red Army Faction co-founder Ulrike Meinhof. (DVD screener)

I don't have a strong impression of Last Winter (Belgium / France / Switzerland: John Shank, 2011), in which a young man struggles to keep up his father's cattle farm in the face of mounting financial debt and his opposition to the compromises of fellow cooperative members. I do remember its elegiac and observational quality of the nature gradually encroaching on the proud farmer's enterprise. (DVD screener)

Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema (USA: Todd McCarthy, 2007)—Despite my love of films about people who love, promote, revive and present films, I got weary of this documentary early. I thought it was visually unattractive and bloated, with too much irrelevant time spent on the beach with an unidentified Asian woman or in his home village. (DVD screener)

An extremely bleak film, this one fictional, was Goodbye (Iran: Mohammad Rasoulof, 2011). Made by the director of Iron Island (2006) and White Meadows (2010), both of which had grim premises leavened by fascinatingly allegorical settings and unpredictable outcomes, Goodbye at first aroused expectations of a similar treatment. But this film, apparently made under clandestine conditions as Rasoulof awaited the results of his appeal (stemming from his arrest along with fellow filmmaker Jafar Panahi), plays one note throughout, and that is of unrelieved despair. Noora, a young lawyer recently disbarred for political activities, has done everything, including getting pregnant, to improve her and her internally exiled journalist husband's chances of emigrating from Iran. As her pregnancy develops complications and her fixer becomes less available, Noora undergoes ominous visits by government agents and learns that her husband has been imprisoned. Just before the film's climax, Noora voices its obvious message: "If one feels like a foreigner in one's own land, one should leave his country and feel like a foreigner in a foreign land." For a stubbornly righteous woman like her, that's preferable to living in a homeland where offering bribes is a reflexive act and a woman needs her husband's signature for every important decision. (DVD screener)

Dreileben: One Minute of Darkness (Germany: Christoph Hochhäusler, 2011)—For me this was the least powerful of the Dreileben Trilogy. Maybe as a stand-alone it would have had more impact, but as the final film in a triptych it didn't bear sufficient gravity. I had to keep reminding myself that maybe it wasn't the intent of this series of films to evoke the horrifying rituals and history of an entire geographical region like its Yorkshire counterpart, the harrowing Red Riding Trilogy. (DVD screener)

Off Label (USA: Michael Palmieri & Donal Mosher, 2011)—I found this a wildly uneven and unpredictable look at the lives of Americans who have voluntarily and involuntarily served as guinea pigs for pharmaceutical companies. The conditions of those who have survived—one subject was recruited by his unethical physician and committed suicide in a gruesomely drug-induced way—attest to the frighteningly chaotic state of drug trials and a population out of control on psychiatric medications. But scenes like a wedding and the drawn-out pathos of a mother compromise the investigative rigor of this documentary. (Festival screening)

The Day He Arrives (South Korea: Hong Sang-soo, 2011)—I'm not sure how much longer Hong can riff on romantic and professional rejection and the embarrassing behavior that comes from drinking too much. But I'm a fan of his films about self-appointed losers in the film world who get more resentful with each gulp of soju. I also enjoy the zoom-ins that feel more conspicuous and playful with each film and the doubling and repetition that trap his protagonists in their memories and tragicomical defeatism. (DVD screener)

Gimme the Loot (USA: Adam Leon, 2012)—Bronx-born African American teen taggers Malcolm and Sofia roam through the boroughs trying to raise $500 so they can sneak into Citifield ballpark (which they call Shea, naturally) and win fame over a rival crew as "the biggest writers in New York City" by "bombing" the hated mechanical Big Apple that rises when the Mets hit a homerun. Much of the film dwells not so much on the teens' gritty urban life, although there's some of that, but on comical culture clashes between them and other, mainly white, New Yorkers. My favorite sequence involves the pair tailing a young white woman, with Sofia jogging behind her for what seems like miles, and their bafflement when the jogger disappears into a rooftop water tower. The outcome is so low-key as to be anticlimactic, but the fun is in the pursuit through neighborhoods on a hot summer day. (Press screening)

Hysteria (UK / France / Germany / Luxembourg: Tanya Wexler, 2011)—Maggie Gyllenhaal is the life force in this silly but diverting period romantic comedy about the development of the electric vibrator as a treatment for the title "ailment." Set in the 1880s when telephones were a novelty and infectious germs as the cause of disease were just a crackpot theory, the film begins with a progressive young doctor resigned to a job manually diddling middle-class matrons to "hysterical paroxysm" to treat symptoms of unhappiness and frustration. Gyllenhaal plays a socialist-feminist settlement-house worker who fascinates the young doctor and embarrasses her stodgy physician father. Rupert Everett (whose surgically altered face is unsettling in a film set in the Victorian era) plays the young doctor's inventor friend who comes up with an electric vibrator just in time to relieve the latter's repetitive stress injury and bring joy to future generations of hysterical sufferers. After a courtroom resolution that settles everything, the closing credits feature an illustrated timeline of vibrators, ending with the I Rub My Duckie Waterproof Personal Massager. (Press screening)

Old Dog (China / Tibet: Pema Tseden, 2011)—In a stationary wide shot employed through most of the film, a man on a motorbike brings a shaggy old dog into a Tibetan outpost and sells it. Later when confronted by his elderly father, the son says he'd just as soon get money for it as have it stolen like so many others by profiteers. The old man decides to recover the dog. Thus begins a laborious commute from country to town and back again. Business in town is conducted through the smoky din of vehicles and a building construction boom. In the Q&A, the director explained that the Tibetan nomad mastiff, traditionally used by Tibetans as guard dogs and treated as a member of the family, is coveted by wealthy Chinese as a status symbol along with their Hummers. Pema Tseden cited the astronomical prices buyers are willing to pay those who coax, or steal, them out of Tibetan hands. The camera stands back and observes the loss of this symbol of traditional life, as well as the implied loss of potency of the Tibetan family, within a larger landscape of grandeur and fertility. I come to this film not via Pema Tseden's earlier films but through a film shown at March's Asian American Filmfest and directed by Old Dog's cinematographer Sonthar Gyal, Sun Beaten Path (2011), another superb film about life and death in Tibet. (Festival screening)

Choked (South Korea: Kim Joong-Hyun, 2011)—Three months after seeing this film to write the catalogue notes, my most vivid memories are of characters hunched under counters or sitting silently in their kitchens trying to avoid the unwelcome presence at the door: the cop, the creditor demanding money, the relocation thug. When the violence comes it's clumsy and realistic. Woven through these tense proceedings is a thread of unexpected humor and warmth that appears one moment and vanishes the next. I found it an impressive debut with psychological complexity. (DVD screener)

Dreileben: Don't Follow Me Around (Germany: Dominik Graf, 2011)—A group of us recently held a show of hands to say which in the Dreileben Trilogy we liked most, and I was among only a few women who chose this second film. Since the three are so disparate and don't evoke the cumulative horror and sense of place of the Red Riding Trilogy, I found it easy to isolate this film and its psychological acuity. It focuses on Johanna, a police psychologist from out of town called in to help find the escaped killer. Locked out of the hotel (where the young lovers from the first film are spotted cavorting on a bed), she stays with a college friend in an old house that, while being renovated as a bed and breakfast, is yielding up layers from East Germany's past. I'm not familiar with Graf's previous work, most of which is for German TV, and I hope to see his acclaimed 2010 series In Face of the Crime. Aware at least that Graf is famous for his genre films and especially the policier, I was surprised to find that this is more a psychological study of Johanna and her friend concerning the man they unknowingly shared. At least that aspect of the film impressed me more than the police investigation, which veers into the improbable and the comical. (DVD screener)

Valley of Saints (India / USA: Musa Syeed, 2012)—Two young men living by Kashmir's Lake Dal vow to abandon their region's dying tourist trade and go see the world, but their plans are forestalled by a nearby political crisis as well as the arrival of a young woman scientist measuring the lake's pollution. I regret that I took no notes for this debut film and consequently remember very little of it besides the moments of scenic beauty in the gliding boat and subtle glances exchanged by the parties before they're urged to take action. (Festival screening)

Smugglers' Songs (France: Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2011)—This festival was marked by my pleasure with two French period films, a category I usually pass on. I checked this one out of curiosity—actually a desire to see Jacques Nolot, who plays a sympathetic marquis—and found it a smashing entertainment. Set in 1755, the film tells the story of a hearty band of smugglers faithful to the nonfictional anti-tax "Robin Hood of France" Louis Mandrin, who has just been broken on the wheel by the tax authorities. The smugglers clandestinely publish Mandrin's verses with the help of the sympathetic nobleman and carry on a black market of duty-free stolen goods for the people. The film has a winning combination of heroism, humor and realism. It never occurred to me that someone unused to riding in a conveyance, even horse-drawn, might suffer from motion sickness. (Festival screening)

Farewell, My Queen (France: Benoît Jacquot, 2011)—(Opening in Bay Area theatres 7/13, in time for Bastille Day). Now that Opening Night is part of the distant past, what I remember from this costume drama is incessant movement in and out of the chambers of Versailles and the heaving of rich brocades and silken décolletage as word of the storming of the Bastille, and impending doom of the royal family, travels the corridors both upstairs and down. Marie Antoinette's young reader, who suggests Marivaux but ends up looking at fashion magazines with her lovesick majesty, is so besotted by her mistress that she stays at her side even when she learns that the queen heads the soon-to-be-headless list. Frivolity turns to terror turns to serene heroism in an exquisite green dress. For entertaining character turns here's Jacques Nolot again and Noémie Lvovsky as a comically flustered lady-in-waiting. (Festival screening)

Alps (Greece / France: Yorgos Lanthimos, 2011)—By all accounts Yorgos Lanthimos will never be able to live down the shock he caused in the seriously disturbed family drama Dogtooth (2009). The actress who played one of the sequestered sisters, Aggeliki Papoulia, is the protagonist of his new film. Her dancing that was so unsettling in Dogtooth here looks just repetitious. Dogtooth's deadpan conversation style, full of non-sequiturs yet evidently comprehensible to its speakers, is reproduced here. Still, there are genuinely tender scenes in this film that recall the poignant father-daughter sequences in the Lanthimos-produced Attenberg (2010). (DVD screener)

Ethel (USA: Rory Kennedy, 2011)—Once in a while the Pacific Film Archive draws an audience so different from its usual clientele that you can literally smell it. The audience for this documentary wears a fragrance different from the PFA regulars. They're also more audible, with knowing chuckles and sad sighs. Older, mainly white viewers who lived through the Kennedy era of Jack, Bobby and Teddy packed the place and clearly adored this film. It's not hard to love since director Rory Kennedy, youngest daughter of Robert and Ethel, had total access to her siblings and mother as well as loads of video footage of exuberant family outings. She's also a seasoned documentary filmmaker with outstanding titles like Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007) to her credit. Ethel is an affectionate, nostalgic tribute to a woman who modeled for her eleven children a peculiarly American form of noblesse oblige. (Festival screening)

Crulic–The Path to Beyond (Romania / Poland / France: Anca Damian, 2011)—Much of the time I was at sea plotwise trying to follow this eccentrically animated film narrated by a dead man. Maybe a sense of the absurd and the senseless is the desired effect of this plea for posthumous justice for a Romanian man, Claudiu Crulic, who was accused of stealing a judge's wallet and denied due process and died in 2008 after a months-long hunger strike in a Polish prison. A catalogue of his meager personal effects collected by his mother after his death combines photography with drawings in a poignant way. The unpredictable animation and unsentimental, often black-humored narration keep this from being totally bleak. It stands alongside Persepolis (2007) and Waltz With Bashir (2008) in the ranks of politically engaged animation. (Festival screening)

Part Two can be found here.

THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF: SAN FRANCISCO & THE MOVIES—By Frako Loden

My first-ever peek into the National Historic Landmark Old Mint Building at Fifth and Mission Streets was to preview a new exhibit there running only for nine days: "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: San Francisco and the Movies." From June 16 to 24, the ground-floor rooms of this institution will display posters, photographs and artifacts of the love affair between cinema and one of its most photogenic cities, hosted by the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society (SFMHS).

Curator Miguel Pendás first took us to the chamber housing San Francisco's silent-film history, and there Niles Essanay Silent Film historian David Kiehn pointed out the corner featuring photographer / murderer Eadweard Muybridge, who hosted the first moving-picture exhibition here in 1880. You'll be able to watch the highly immersive "A Trip Down Market Street" by the Miles Brothers, who shot it just days before the 1906 earthquake. Materials will commemorate the California Motion Picture Corporation in San Rafael and of course Essanay Studios, celebrating its centenary this year, where Westerns were born and where Charlie Chaplin developed his Tramp character and shot films in Golden Gate Park as well as the studio's headquarters in Niles.



Author / impresario Eddie Muller introduced the film noir room, where the first poster he acquired—of Lawrence Tierney in Born to Kill (1947)—hangs among several others collected by himself and film programmer Gary Meyer. He was thrilled to learn just recently that the former Hearst building at Third and Market where his grandfather was a pressman and which contained a speakeasy, now boasts a cocktail lounge. The gold vault of the Old Mint is now the Maltese Falcon room, containing a figure of Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), a projected "dream" version of scenes from the film, and the mysterious black bird itself owned by John Konstin of John's Grill, where Dashiell Hammett drank, dined and wrote. True to its status in the 1941 John Huston film, the statuette is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.

In the room housing materials from more recent studios like Lucasfilm and Pixar, we were told we could take only wide photos and no closeups. Here you'll see inspirational digital sketches for characters like Edna Mode (from The Incredibles), Wall-E, Princess Merida (from Brave), and many others.

In the main corridor hang paintings by Kim Novak, the eternal San Francisco heroine from her haunting turn as Madeleine in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Pendás says that Novak was offered a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago at the same time she was scouted by Hollywood. After her movie career she moved to Oregon, where she now paints winsome Impressionist-style pastels. Pendás says she felt "vulnerable" about displaying her art for the first time, figuring nobody would be interested. Novak will be receiving the San Francisco Cinematic Icon Award at the SFMHS Standing Ovations benefit gala on June 14. Pendás said, "Frankly, I think she's going to be mobbed."

One beautiful spacious room is devoted to San Francisco's independent, experimental and documentary film scene. The Pacific Film Archive lent out materials including a landmark "Art in Cinema" program put on by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art starting in 1946. Another room features films shot in Chinatown, one of the most photogenic locations in the world, from the early days of the tong-war / opium-den / white-slavery mystique to the pivotal Wayne Wang film Chan is Missing (1982), when Chinese Americans started to explore the district from their point of view.

A wax figure of Clint Eastwood standing on a red carpet before a San Francisco International Film Festival backdrop—you can have your photo taken with him—dominates a room telling the history of the San Francisco Film Commission and the 55-year-old film festival through photographs by Pamela Gentile. Another large room explores movies in the themes of "Cars, Cops and Cocktails," dealing with chase scenes, shootouts and drinks unique to the city. Learn cocktail recipes, test your trivia knowledge (what cocktail did Michael Douglas order in Basic Instinct?), and ogle Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum (did he fire six shots or only five?). The main corridor features photos of local movie theatres by R.A. McBride and set photos from Dirty Harry (1971), Take the Money and Run (1969), and Petulia (1968) by Morton Beebe.

The Vertigo room, showcasing perhaps the most romantic (and geographically accurate) film shot in San Francisco, contains the continuity script and the Vistavision camera used to shoot the film. Most intriguing of all will be the "Contemplating Carlotta" corner, where a bench is set up for viewing a copy of the Carlotta portrait as Madeleine does at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in the film. As you contemplate, you'll hear ambient sounds of old Fort Point, where Madeleine was next compelled to drive her sea-green Jaguar and take a dip in San Francisco Bay.

June 16-24, 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
The Old Mint, Fifth and Mission Streets, San Francisco
Admission $5 SFMHS members, $10 general public
Standing Ovations benefit gala Thursday, June 14

CINEMA GUILD: HAMILTON / PUTTY HILL DVD REVIEW (By Alex Hansen)

Matthew Porterfield's first feature Hamilton (2006) is a low-key affair, following a few summer days in the lives of young parents, Lena and Joe. When the film surfaced in 2006, it must have felt like a breath of fresh air, standing out from the crowded pastures of the American Independent Film, a field that's known for "originality", "daring", "provocation", being on "the cutting edge", and whatever other buzzwords the tastemakers of Sundance and its ilk use to lure in audiences. The last six years has seen a rise in similarly-minded, laid-back, undramatic features, so first-time viewers might wonder what was special enough about Hamilton to get someone like Richard Brody to froth so enthusiastically in his New Yorker review?

Despite it's fitting into the now-fashionable DIY-genre suit, Hamilton is a film that doesn't feel "contemporary". Nor is it a throwback. It exists amid its own timestream. Humble and with modest aims, much like the characters with whom it invites us to spend time (characters who don't appear to have any goals or aspirations, and are content to drift along with life's ebb), in Hamilton things are left unsaid for not knowing where to start or how to say it. Even the filmmaking follows suit. Porterfield makes use of a few motifs / tics (circular motions and loops, objects and bodies moving in and out of frame) and allows these to occur naturally. He doesn't force any "style" on the proceedings. Hamilton isn't a film on which a viewer can make demands or expect "development." You either take it as it is, or you don't. Much like Joe might visit Lena and his baby before they leave town, or maybe not.

The scope expands with Putty Hill, both in cast and environment. A gaggle of people are brought together through the death by overdose of young Cory. We're introduced to family members, close and distant friends (emotionally and / or geographically), some who are no more than acquaintances, and a few tangentially connected folk. Putty Hill resembles its predecessor in pacing and style, with additional touches: the most prominent being the interviews with the characters.

Stylistically, these interviews aren't self-conscious—as in Ingmar Bergman's The Passion Of Anna (1969) or the opening of Hour Of the Wolf (1968)—they're woven into the doldrums. A character will be sitting, possibly thinking, possibly not, and an offscreen voice asks them simple questions. "What's your name?" "How did you know Cory?" "Is this your first time paintballing?" Unless it's a question related to the deceased, the actors answer as themselves, rather than as their character. At first the interviews rankled because I was coming at them narratively: "Why is he asking questions to which we already know the answers?" Eventually it dawned on me that the answers weren't important for the information they conveyed but for the way the answers were given, implying that the way we phrase and word things says more than we think they do. This evolution in Porterfield's work, from simple spectating to scratching at surfaces, could rock a viewer's world (as its handful of appearances on "Best of" lists attest). Personally, I'm more interested in situations and places and how people fit into them, than I am in the actual people. When confronted with these glimpses into real, live human beings—which come from a truthful place and are admittedly of some interest—I can't help but muster more than a shrug. I just don't care. But that's my failing, not the film's.



Even with that baggage, I look forward to what Porterfield does next. His third film I Used To Be Darker (2012) should be coming out fairly soon. The opening and closing sections of Putty Hill—respectively, a tour of and a visit to Cory's house—tickle the right spots. As does the detour to a swimming hole, where Porterfield and cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier shoot bare skin like they're auditioning to be the next Claire Denis and Agnes Godard. And I love how he handles the awkwardness of being reunited with someone who is now more of a stranger than a friend.

Cinema Guild's two-disc collectors edition offers several special features and—though I typically don't give special features the time of day—I'm glad to have them and Cinema Guild always accommodates. Hamilton, which could be considered an extra in and of itself, has some deleted scenes and a very brief interview between Porterfield and Richard Brody. It's more of a chat than an interview that provides an opportunity for Brody to wax rhapsodic. The majority of the extras are on the Putty Hill disc. A 30-minute "making-of" and a commentary featuring Porterfield and three crew members are the main attractions. There are a few deleted scenes (mostly of more interviews with the characters), and also the screen test for Metal Gods, the project Porterfield was about to shoot until the funding dissolved (and whose cast he then rolled over into Putty Hill). There's just enough in the test to see the similarities between the projects and how Putty Hill went off on its own path. This screen test is definitely the highlight amongst the special features. Also of note is the accompanying booklet to the Cinema Guild two-disc release. It's slight in size but the essays by Andrew O'Hehir on Putty Hill and Richard Brody on Hamilton do a nice job of setting viewers up for what they're about to experience. Especially Brody's, as he has more of an opportunity to explain what makes the film so special for him than he does in the Q&A clip.

Of related interest is Andrew O'Hehir's Salon review for Putty Hill.

SAGEBRUSH: i48, h48, & HONOR AMONG THIEVES—The Evening Class Interview With Andrew Ellis

The ninth edition of i48, Boise's annual Forty Eight Hour Film Competition and Festival, is geared to go this coming Saturday, June 9, 2012 at The Flicks. The screening schedule is up at This Lovely Machine, tickets are on sale, and the judges are getting ready to gather Friday night to decide on awards to be announced at the "Best Of i48" Screening and Awards Ceremony at the Egyptian Theatre. My thanks to local filmmaker and community builder Andrew Ellis for taking the time to speak with me about Boise's 48 hour competitions and his own upcoming film Honor Among Thieves.

* * *

Michael Guillén: I'm impressed with the Idaho Film Office's Film Grant Program, which distributes $30,000 annually to enable projects that "will provide valuable on-the-job crew training to help grow the industry in Idaho." As one of their most recent grant recipients, could you speak about your project, how you're applying the $5,000 grant, and when we might expect to see the finished product?

Andrew Ellis: The project is named Honor Among Thieves and it is a script that was written by my long-time collaborator and the typical writer of my scripts, Will Schmeckpeper. It's an interesting and unique process for us in creating the project because typically Will is pretty concrete in his thinking. He usually has a pretty good idea of the story he wants to write and we don't do major tinkering with the scripts in the rewriting process, but this film he wrote was initially set in a remote cabin that we had access to up in McCall and it was really more an idea around claustrophobia and the pressure that can happen to a group of thieves after they've already stolen the goods and they're waiting a short period of time to deliver the goods to the fence, as it were.

The script evolved, and the basic premise remained the same, although—for ease of shooting purposes and other reasons—we decided to reset it into an urban environment. We set it in Boise just so we wouldn't have to travel and take a group of people on location for the length of time. We also didn't like the initial ending and we couldn't quite figure out what it was about. When we figured out the ending, it changed it such that it was more beneficial to be set in an urban area. So the script has really changed and added characters as we've gone along.

Then—as is always the case when you're shooting for next to no money; you're doing it on the kindness of your friends and family and people who agree to be in the thing for you—we had built the script around one of the major characters, a friend of our's who has acted in a number of our films, and he had a health scare and felt that he wasn't going to be able to perform. So we did a quick turnaround and reinvited a friend of our's who we met two summers ago, an actress by the name of Calico Cooper.

Guillén: Ah, your lead actress from Thirty Proof Coil (2010)?

Ellis: Yeah, and she has the distinction of being Alice Cooper's daughter. We called her up on a whim and said, "Hey, would you be able to come up and play this role if we made it happen in just one weekend?" She said, "Yeah, I can. That weekend works great." So there was another round of rewrites to accommodate what had been a character who was male in their mid-50s to mid-60s, to suddenly now being a female in her mid-20s. That took the script into a completely different direction.

But to answer your initial question about applying for the grant, it's a pretty straightforward process. You submit a script or a premise and judging from the feedback we received back from the Idaho Film Office, I think that the characteristic of the project that they ended up approving was that they wanted some sense of security that there was a foundation under the project and that the project would actually get shot. Given our track record over the past 10 years of actually getting projects shot and being able to provide a list of the cast and crew who would be on board to help shoot it and a detailed shot list and shooting schedule—which we were able to do because we had it all plotted out—it inspired confidence on their part that Honor Among Thieves was a going concern and would actually get done.

Guillén: Were you seeking seed money for any particular aspect of the production?

Ellis: Will and I have gotten into the habit of shooting feature films for next to nothing.

Guillén: And very fast! You shot Thirty Proof Coil in six days?

Ellis: We shot it in six days for a total of $5,000. What that represents, of course, is a complete volunteer cast and crew, and a tremendous amount of in-kind donations from people who are supporting us. So I guess our dirty little secret is that we could have shot Honor Among Thieves on that model without grant support; but, the reason I applied for the grant was because the purpose of the grant—as I understand it—is workforce development. What Will and I have consciously or unconsciously done for the last 10 years has been pretty involved in workforce development, in that we try to do a lot of projects and we try to involve as many people as we can, both experienced and inexperienced and give them an actual opportunity to—not just talk about making a movie—but, make a movie. I felt honest and still feel honest in applying for the grant—not necessarily because I needed it to get the project done—but, it did allow us the opportunity to pay people and that was something we haven't been able to do before.

Guillén: That's an admirable direction to go in.

Ellis: Yeah, and I think it's important for our film scene that people can start to expect to get paid something, if not much.

Guillén: I like your term "workforce development" as it clearly articulates the incentives of the Idaho Film Office with its focus on local production, which—as someone who comes from an exhibition and film festival background—is not as familiar a focus for me. My attention has been more on after the work has been done. In that respect, do you have any thoughts on exhibition with regard to Idaho's film culture? Once films have been made in Idaho, what's next? Where can they be shown? How can they distribute out of state?

Ellis: That's the billion dollar question, I guess. I am actually quite excited by the emergence of the Sun Valley Film Festival because we have seen festivals come and go in Boise and within the State. Film festivals have been valuable for me as a filmmaker as an exhibition option. My option now for a public screening is to rent a theater, publicize it, hit the pavement and get as many people as we can. Depending upon whether we are harboring distribution dreams or not, we either offer DVDs for sale at these events or not. I think having film festivals is a critical piece in getting your work seen by the local community and, hopefully, by people from out of town, primarily in festivals where filmmakers are coming in support of their own films. This is an opportunity to show your films to other filmmakers who have their films in the festival. Until recently, there was a five-year run of the True West Festival. Then there was a seven-year run of the Idaho International Film Festival (IIFF).

Guillén: Bruce Fletcher invited me to IIFF in 2007.

Ellis: The post-Bruce organization makes murmurs now and then that they're coming back. I don't know if they're coming back or not; but, it was an important piece in my thinking and, of course, in our process to have those festivals in town. We would gear our production so that we could submit to either True West or the Idaho International.

Guillén: Which leads me to your administration of the i48 and h48 film festivals, which I consider grass roots exhibition efforts. Is i48 a franchised offshoot from the 48 Hour Film Project?

Ellis: It's not. There are 48 hour competitions all over the place. 10 to 12 years ago, or more, the 48 Hour Film Project started in Washington, D.C., I believe. They have franchised so that there are, last I checked, 70 or 80 cities around the country that participate in the 48 Hour Film Project. I freely acknowledge that I lifted the concept from them wholesale and we have always been upfront in all of our publicity.

Guillén: There's never been an issue with that?

Ellis: No. They have contacted us the last two or three years to see if we would be interested in participating in their organization and doing i48 as a franchise and every year I've sent them a kind letter saying, "Thanks, but no thanks." The idea being local control. Why local control is important to me and what I like about it is the accessibility of i48. i48 makes its bread and butter from being something that someone anywhere can do. We've had families with a camcorder participate. We've had groups of middle school kids. We've had church groups. We've had utter beginners participate and they're supported by i48. My primary concern if we join up with the 48 Hour Film Project is that the broader national and international group might make locals folks less inclined to participate if they felt there was a larger external pressure. If you win here, you would be screened in Portland and thrown into a pot. It then becomes a different creature that's maybe more about winning the competition rather than just about participating in it. For me it's very important to nurture and foster a sense of i48 being something that's just valuable and fun to do as a community.

Guillén: How many years has i48 been going?

Ellis: This will be year number nine. It is identical in many aspects to what the 48 Hour Film Project folks do. You have 48 hours to make a film and we give you certain aspects of the film that you don't know in advance. Everybody gathers on Friday afternoon. They get a packet where they're given a character, a line of dialogue, the genre of their film, and then we give them a prop that they have to use and then they have 48 hours to write a story, shoot a story, edit a story and turn it into us.

Guillén: And there are cash prizes for the winners? Where do those funds come from?

Ellis: Those of us on the organizational side spend all year raising the money for the cash prizes from various organizations in town that are supportive of us. The last two or three years we've gotten that money from the Boise Co-Op. Unfortunately, we didn't get it from them this year because of new management. They're restructuring and trying to figure out their role in philanthropy in the community. It's been explained to me that they're trying to figure out what their place in this community is going to be with the opening of Whole Foods so they're regrouping a bit. But we've received support from the Idaho Film Office and private individuals.

Guillén: I take it i48 is a nonprofit?

Ellis: Yes, it is.

Guillén: And since one of the main objectives of a nonprofit is to secure donations, why would you say it's important to support i48?

Ellis: Well, there are two divisions in the competition. There is what we call the open division, which are self-categorizing. If you have made a film before or have made many films or are in the industry or do this for work, we encourage you to go into the open division. Then there is the novice category, which is for people who have done little to no film work before. There are cash prizes awarded to the top two films in both categories. It's $1,000 to the winner of the open category and $500 to the second, and then for the novice it's $500 for the winner and $250 for the second place. Then we have 22 awards that are granted in total and those include recognition for best cinematography, best sound and music, best actor and actress.

Guillén: How are the winners determined?

Ellis: In a very unscientific process. Every film that's finished on time—you have to finish it within the 48 hours to be considered for awards—are then grouped into packs of 12 or 15 films and over the course of the week between the time of the competition and the time of the screening, every film goes through a preliminary round of screenings watched by judges who are a lot of friends of mine that I recruit. They don't have to have any film experience. They're just members of the community. They are tasked with watching all of the films in their block, which are essentially given a thumbs up or a thumbs down. They're not choosing specific awards, they're just saying, "Does this film deserve to go on to the final judging?" So we send every film through a preliminary round of screening, which historically has reduced the number of films by about 50%.

Then all the remaining films are watched in one fell swoop by a finals judging committee. For that committee I tend to recruit folks who have some film experience. It's a committee that ranges anywhere from 9 people to I think it's gone as high as 15. They watch everything in one sitting. They have ballots and in each award category they simply list their top three. Those are then assigned numeric values and then we take the ballots, tally them up, and whoever receives the most points in a category wins.

Guillén: And then there's h48. What prompted you to narrow down the competition to a specific genre?

Ellis: The first two years we did i48, we threw horror in the mix as a genre that teams could do. I was convinced at the end of those two years by friends and feedback that it was an unfair disadvantage to give teams the horror genre in i48 because we do have a PG requirement and, as people said, trying to do a horror film and be nice about it with no gore, no nudity, no swearing, none of the usual characteristics of a horror film really, gutted your ability to do one. Ironically, in year two a horror film won the competition even within those parameters. They did a suspense psychological thing that was visually fascinating. It was technically horrific but really just more suspenseful than anything else. But, I was convinced and I took the horror genre out of the mix, which then prompted six years of people saying, "Why did you do away with horror?" So that was that feedback.

The other thing is that a lot of people who participate are friends or acquaintances of mine so they're pretty frank in their feedback to me and they said, "Y'know, it really hampers our artistic vision a great deal to have this cursed PG restriction. We just want to cut loose and swear. We just want to cut loose and be as dirty as we want to be" and I thought, "Sorry. It's important to me that the festival be accessible to anyone and be something that anyone can come watch with their children within range." But it did get me thinking and so I thought, "I'm going to do an i48 that takes the restrictions off." It made most sense to us to do it around Halloween and to do it as a horror-themed festival. So h48 was born from that.

Guillén: Your first edition of h48 was last October?

Ellis: Right.

Guillén: Is it under the same nonprofit umbrella?

Ellis: It is.

Guillén: I'm not aware of any other 48 hour project that focuses exclusively on horror? That's intriguing.

Ellis: I don't know either. We had a great run.

Guillén: And does h48 have the same prize structure as i48?

Ellis: We had awards for best film, best scream queen, best bad guy and best special effects / gore.

Guillén: As i48 leans into its ninth edition and approaches its tenth, have you given any thought to mounting a "Best of i48" fest?

Ellis: It's like you're inside my head. Yes, I've spoken with the other organizers about this prospect and I have thought about our needing to have an additional evening to celebrate our tenth.

Guillén: And, possibly, you could travel with a program like that?

Ellis: I haven't sat down to watch the winners of the last eight years in a row. I think what you would see is an amazing progression of basic technical talent. What remains universal is the storytelling.

Guillén: I think if you presented it in exactly that context, it could prove to be a fascinating study of the effect of better, more affordable, more accessible cameras in telling universal stories.

Ellis: Yes.

Guillén: Switching to the speculative: do you believe there is a film community in Idaho? And if not, how can we create one?

Ellis: I would say yes and no. You've touched upon what I find to be the most fascinating part of all of this. I like to make films because it is one of the most fun and pleasurable ways that I know to recreate with my friends. I don't identify myself as a filmmaker. It's not part of my identity. What I do identify myself as—both in my day job and my filmmaking pursuits and with i48 and h48—is I do view myself as a community builder. At the end of the day I'm far more proud of my contributions to building a community than necessarily the films that I have made. I'm proud of them too, but I feel that my time on Earth will be valuable not necessarily for the films I leave behind but because of the connections that were made and the community we've built. It's been a passion of mine.

I say yes and no because—when I moved back to Boise in 2001—I arrived with a theater background. It was at the time when digital technology was just starting. You could make a film on a little Sony digital 8 camera you could buy for $300-$400. You could pop it into your PC on a rudimentary nonlinear editor and actually for the first time in my life make a movie without having to shoot on film or go to a community TV station and edit on their big editing suites. I was incredibly excited by it all and wanted to learn more; but, I had no training, no background, nothing. I had a theater background but no film background. So when I came back to Boise, I wanted to plug into the film community, having the analogy of the theater community, which—prior to my moving away—I had been plugged into. I knew a lot of the people in the theater community. I foolishly assumed the same thing existed for film. I learned pretty quickly that there wasn't. So what I did was to start inviting every person I bumped into who was an aspiring filmmaker or film enthusiast over to my house once a month. We would have these gatherings where we would show our films to each other.

Guillén: Was this Small Pond?

Ellis: Yeah.

Guillén: So you started Small Pond as well?

Ellis: Yeah. Those monthly gatherings turned into Small Pond. Although I don't say this with too much nostalgia, there was a brief utopian period from about 2003 to 2006 when Small Pond was at its most vibrant. Quite frankly, none of us knew anything and so there was a necessity to depend upon each other. The community was very small. At that time, I would say there was a community. If you talked to someone randomly about, "Hey, I want to get involved in film", they would say, "Well, you ought to go to a Small Pond meeting." For a time I really felt there was a sense of community where people where helping each other out with their projects, knew about each others' projects, and there was a "one for all, all for one" spirit.

Small Pond, in a way, was a victim of its own success. Things grew up. The film industry—through a lot of the efforts of the Film Office—became more of a possibility here. The Idaho Media Professionals formed. A lot of professionals had moved into town and were living here but hadn't made their presence known. So the scene matured considerably and I don't think that it's ever stopped maturing.

I remember when I got here in 2001, they were shooting a film called Tattoo, A Love Story. Though David Klein, the cinematographer, didn't live here, he was a local kid who had gone on to become Kevin Smith's go-to cinematographer. After shooting Clerks (1994), he became a household name in the industry. So he came back to Boise to shoot Tattoo, A Love Story with a consortium of filmmakers [Gen Art] who were based in New York City. They came into town and their budget was $400,000-$500,000, which was pretty considerable, particularly at that time, and they shot it on 16mm. They used a lot of local actors. It's a well-done film. You can watch it on Netflix. They finished it and they came back and screened it at The Egyptian. They had two screenings, both of which sold out. There were lines around the block. I went to one of the screenings thinking it was some little thing that only I knew about and it ended up everybody knew about it. In 2001-2003 Tattoo, A Love Story was the only feature film shot in this town and it was an event for this town. By my count, 8-10 feature films got shot in Boise last year.

Guillén: You mentioned that Small Pond was a victim of its own success. For lack of a better term, why did it subtropify?

Ellis: You mean why did it die?

Guillén: Yes.

Ellis: Two things killed Small Pond. One was YouTube. When we started, YouTube didn't exist and so—if you wanted to screen something and have people see it—you needed to have a venue. Filmmakers came and supported Small Pond because they wanted to be able to see their films and have people watch them. Once YouTube became a pervasive part of the culture, you could almost see the plunge in attendance at Small Pond because the idea of being able to share whatever you might want by simply posting it online took over.

Secondly, our message board killed us. The message board was a good idea in the sense that it was an easy way for people to continue the networking and talking to each other; but, it also became too easy for people to start sniping at each other. It became toxic and, unfortunately, alienated a lot of people. We had a group of 40-50 people who were pretty heavily involved and went to all the screenings and met each other. It was a sizeable group of spectators who skirted around the edges and read the message board. When the message board took a toxic turn, we lost all those people.

Guillén: So to wrap up here, what is your vision of a filmmaking community in Boise, Idaho?

Ellis: For the last 10 years, I have been proclaiming, mostly to empty walls....

Guillén: They listen the best.

Ellis: ...about my vision of the role of filmmaking as an art form in the community and that it could—with the advent of affordable digital technology—be something that is as much a fabric of our local artistic life as pretty much every other art form. Boise has a vibrant community theater scene—people will put on a show and folks will come and watch it—and obviously we have the orchestra and the opera, and if you want to watch live music you can do so any night of the week at some bars in town. So there already is this acceptance of locals doing art in the visual arts, music and dance, opera and community theater. What there hasn't been is an acceptance or an audience for locally-produced cinema. The truth is that—prior to 15 years ago—filmmaking was too prohibitively expensive so the studios had to do it for us because we couldn't really produce much locally. My opinion now is that there is this explosion of locally-produced cinema and anyone with a few nickles and some initiative can make a film. So we really need to position local filmmaking in general as something that is a part of the local fabric; something that people will go out and support.

The problem with audience building is, as you've indicated, a lack of exhibition. The option, as I mentioned earlier, if you want to have your film screened is to go to independent venues like The Egyptian or The Flicks—we're totally dead-ended by chains like Edwards—and ask, "Will you allow us to rent this space?" It's frequently cost-prohibitive. It costs $1,500 a pop to rent The Egyptian and Carole Skinner at The Flicks has always been supportive but she's got to make a buck too so it costs $400-$500 to rent a screening room. Now that she's gone all digital, maybe we can get one of her smaller screening rooms at a more affordable rate?

YBCA: NEW FILIPINO CINEMA—Essay by Philbert Ortiz Dy

With "New Filipino Cinema" poised to launch tomorrow evening at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), I'm grateful to Joel Shepard for granting permission to replicate Philbert Ortiz Dy's essay accompanying the film series. Philbert Ortiz Dy [Facebook] graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2005 with a degree in Management Information Systems, but has since then channeled his energy into writing. His short story "The Great Philippine Space Mission", won second place in the 1st Philippine Graphic/Fiction Awards sponsored by Neil Gaiman. He has written for some of the country's top broadsheets and magazines on subjects as diverse as fashion, music, art and politics. He is currently the resident film critic for the Philippine website Clickthecity.com and a writer-at-large for Esquire Philippines.

* * *

Depending on who you're listening to, you might have been told that Filipino cinema is in the middle of a revolution, or on the cusp of one, or has already gotten stale. Or maybe nobody's ever told you anything about Filipino cinema. This is understandable. We are a small archipelago on the other side of the world, and aside from our seemingly endless supply of talented singers, we rarely make the news.

But if you've been told anything about Filipino cinema, it's probably true. We are in the middle of a revolution, and on the cusp of one, and we've already gotten stale. The truth in this country is always complex, and our cinema seems to reflect it.

The last decade or so has seen Filipino cinema die and be reborn. At one point, the country was home to one of the most prolific film industries in the world. The country has a surprisingly long history in filmmaking, and by the 1950s, we had entered a golden age of cinema. In the 1970s, we had our own New Wave, defined by socially relevant films driven by accomplished dramatists. By the 2000s whatever filmmaking tradition the country had was largely considered comatose if not dead. A lack of quality, combined with greater competition from Hollywood and the Asian economic crisis, pretty much sank much of what people thought of as the local filmmaking industry.

And then a lot of things suddenly started happening. In 2000, Raymond Red won the Palme d'Or for his short film Anino. In 2001, Lav Diaz released the five-hour Batang West Side, which seemed to indicate that Filipino film still had the capacity to be bold and challenging. Digital filmmaking entered the picture, which made production a lot more affordable. New festivals opened up, each with their own corresponding grant system, giving would-be filmmakers venues to fund their ideas. Filipino films traveled the world and won all sorts of awards. Brillante Mendoza won the best director prize at Cannes for Kinatay. Pepe Diokno and Lav Diaz received honors in Venice. And so on.

This might sound like an amazing decade for Filipino film, but the truth is a little more complicated. The grant systems are arcane and often involve some sort of creative interference, which makes the idea of independent film a little suspect. The mainstream studios still mostly churn out formulaic dreck, and audiences continue to reward them for it. Meanwhile, it's difficult to find a venue willing to screen the films that win acclaim abroad. The only independent films to consistently make a profit are a new wave of badly made gay exploitation films, which seem to have no artistic ambitions beyond sending a parade of naked bodies on screen to serve as background to a culture of cinematic cruising. When one says "indie" in the Philippines, most people will think you're referring to these exploitation films, of which there is a new one almost every week.

So it goes. There is a revolution, but it hasn't really changed things yet. It is an ongoing struggle that doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. But there are reasons to be optimistic. The last couple of years of Filipino cinema have been truly exciting, and there's a vague sense that we're on the verge of something profound.

The last couple of years have seen the return of the documentary film to our shores. Driven by affordable cameras that can roll nearly endlessly, a small group of documentarians has arisen to capture the strangeness of the nation. Corinne (aka Monster) Jimenez's Kano: An American and his Harem was a work five years in the making, and the result is an astounding exploration of the darkness of a man's soul, and the society that gave him a home.

The truth is becoming a theme in the country, with new movies purposefully blurring the lines between reality and fiction in fascinating ways. The return of the documentary seemed to coincide with a series of movies that blend the form in varying degrees with narrative fiction. Antoinette Jadaone's Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay crosses the line between truth and fiction so readily and easily that it makes the distinction irrelevant. Christopher Gozum's Lawas Kan Pinabli makes the separation clearer with distinct segments, but uses that distinction to make audiences question the very idea of truth. It is a form that we seem to be remarkably comfortable with, the postmodernity casting vibrant shadows that resemble the country's complicated relationship with reality.

The other regions of the country are beginning to tell their stories as well. The Philippines is much more than imperial Manila, and filmmakers from Cebu, Bacolod, Pangasinan and dozens of other places are starting to have their voices heard, creating a more vivid picture of the diversity of the archipelago.

And most heartening of all is the development of a true independent industry. Filmmakers are separating themselves from the grant systems and just going at it on their own. This has led to a wide berth of films that can't be defined by a single characteristic. Jade Castro's Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings co-opts popular forms of mainstream cinema to tell a deeply subversive tale that serves as commentary on the country's macho culture. And thankfully, it found success with local audiences, beating out both local mainstream releases and Hollywood blockbusters.

What is it that is going on in Filipino cinema? It's a difficult to question to answer. It has died and it has been reborn. Then it might have died again. It won favor abroad then went out of fashion. It is being ignored at home, even as some films find an audience. The mainstream is becoming irrelevant, while still remaining the most powerful force in the industry. Filmmakers are coming out of nowhere and disappearing just as quickly. There are angry filmmakers, and talented filmmakers willing to work within the system. People are making bigger films and smaller films and projects that are a little harder to define. Everything is happening all at once, the story as convoluted and strange as everything else in this country. But through this struggle, a lot of great movies are emerging, and all of it is worth watching.

YBCA: NEW FILIPINO CINEMA—BOUNDARY (2011)

A half hour into Benito Bautista's Boundary (2011) [Facebook] and I'm mesmerized by Bautista's orchestrated sense of foreboding, McCoy Tarnate's neon-stained and vehicularly claustrophobic cinematography, and the grating disquietude of Coke Bolipata's anxious violin score. This is Manila neo-noir, darkly beautiful and atmospheric with distrust, uncertainty, desperation and pathos.

As synopsized by Joel Shepard for YBCA's "New Filipino Cinema" series: "Boundary is set in the crowded urban roadways of Manila during Christmas. A nervous taxi driver picks up an easy-going businessman as his last passenger for the night. Their journey together to a far-flung suburb takes a wrong turn in more ways than one, and becomes a wickedly tense portrait of urban anxiety and shifting identities."

Winner of the NETPAC Award at the 2011 Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival as well as a special mention in that festival's South East Asian competition, it's easy to understand how Boundary ended up on Oggs Cruz's Top 15 Feature Length Filipino Films of 2011 at Lessons From the School of Inattention, where he praised a storyline "that unites top-level corruption with bottom-level criminality."

That storyline bears striking similarities to the urban narrative of Amok (2011), undoubtedly because it shares John Bedia's co-authorship. "New Filipino Cinema" provides a fantastic opportunity to experience Bedia's burgeoning screenwriting talent, as both of his film credits to date have been programmed into the series. Whereas Chard Bolisay was referencing Amok when he wrote that the film's denouement was a "gala of predictable outcomes and unpredictable victims", his observation could just as easily apply to Boundary. Bedia likewise seems drawn to the interior world of vehicles, momentarily safe from but ultimately encroached upon by the menace of Manila. He scripts the permeability of this boundary.

How directors Lawrence Fajardo and Benito Bautista have stylized the mise-en-scène of Bedia's confined vehicular sequences in their respective films is an equally fascinating consideration of the auteurial conversion of word to image. Amok's diurnal and sweltering visualization is in sharp contrast to Boundary's lustrous nocturnality, awash with vivid oranges and greens bleeding in from the city's neon lights, as well as the Christmas lights strung up within the cab's interior. Tarnate's containment of so much color and movement within the constraints of the vehicle is downright masterful. I found myself frequently intrigued by his shifting camera placement and wondering how even one more person (i.e., the cameraman) could fit into an already crowded cab?

In the role of the guilt-ridden cab driver, Ronnie Lazaro—who I last saw in Affliction (Yanggaw, 2008), reviewed by both Oggs Cruz and Chard Bolisay—exudes the sweaty desperation of Manila cab drivers sympathetically described by Cruz at Lessons From the School of Inattention. His fare, the ruggedly handsome Raymond Bagatsing, suggests a different temperature of menace. Together, within the confines of the cab and the guarded limits of their conversation, they reflect in microcosm the shady ways of the outer world.

Boundary negotiates its interior and exterior spaces at YBCA's "New Filipino Cinema" on Friday, June 8, 9:00PM, with Bautista in person to Q&A with his audience. I envy this opportunity as Boundary has emerged as one of my favorites from the YBCA series. Ticket info can be found here.