FILM WRITINGS ARCHIVED: 2007 & 2008 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, Program Notes
*2010 LOS ANGELES ASIAN PACIFIC FILM FESTIVAL Coming 4/29-5/8 http://asianfilmfestla.org/2010/
There may be more polemical works, but there are few more audacious in form.
John Torres’s TODO TODO TEROS and YEARS WHEN I WAS A CHILD OUTSIDE are two gloriously disjointed and poetically cubist works that are challenging yet mesmerizing in their experimental zeal and romantic heart.
2007 was my first year as a programmer I remember quite vividly waiting at the DGA lobby waiting for the screening of TODO TODO TEROS. I struck up a conversation with a young filmmaker that had a short film in the festival. He was debating on what film to see next. I can’t remember what he was planning on seeing but I mentioned to him that TEROS was about to go on. He was a Filipino American filmmaker and I asked him if he had seen many films from Philippines. I told him he hasn’t seen anything like this…anywhere. I described it a bit, not really trying to sell him on it. It didn’t appear he was all that interested. I mentioned to him that this was my favorite film in the festival. He still didn’t appear impressed. He took off. I assumed he went and caught that other film (I think it was a comedy from Hong Kong or something.)
A few minutes later I saw John Torres walk in the door. I recognized him from a photo I saw online while researching my writing assignment. I approached him and we chatted. He was a bit guarded, but we talked about our backgrounds and filmmaking. That kind of broke the ice. I mentioned how much I loved his film. Not sure he thought I was sincere. Somehow we talked about a project I had been thinking about for years. We spent most of our chat with him trying to convince me to make that film. I have yet to make that film, but after meeting him as well as a group of other filmmakers from Philippines that year, I have been inspired to continue to pursue making films as well as being an advocate for Filipino Films here and abroad.
For that young filmmaker I talked to in the lobby, as the lights went on for the Q&A for TODO TODO TEROS I saw him sitting in the audience. He thanked me later for convincing him to see the film. He said he had never seen anything like it before and enjoyed it immensely. I introduced him to John.
In my mind, this is what the film festival is really about. To open a world of movies to an audience ready and willing to be inspired.
Here are my notes from 2007 and 2008.
-2010
TODO TODO TEROS (2007)
Filmmaker as terrorist.
A bold concept brought to dizzying and intriguing light in award winning Philippine director John Torres’ remarkable Todo Todo Teros. Recently honored with the Vancouver International Film Festival’s coveted Dragons & Tigers Award and the Singapore International Film Festival’s NETPAC/FIPRESCI Award, Torres’ first feature length film is, described by Film Comment as, a film “of sumptuously visualized romantic mind slush.” *
From the subversive Bohemia of filmmakers, musicians and other like minds that comprise the Philippine underground arise a boundary defying film comprised of existing and seemingly disparate footage linked together to fashion several narrative and observational threads. Among them are the nocturnal street life of Metro Manila and the counter culture inhabitants that populate the cities’ landscape. Another is a loose story of a group of terrorist/hired guns presented as a surveillance camera footage. And finally, a series of a brief flirtation engagingly shot entirely in P.O.V. while the filmmaker was attending a European film festival. All these elements are interjected with on screen text and an unassuming voice over from the filmmaker projecting a whispered inner monologue that gives the film its intimacy and charm. Slyly hitting on several issues facing a generation of Filipinos in the age where some things remain the same but the avenues to express them have greatly expanded. Richly layered with the cacophony of Manila traffic, movie theatre drum circles, jam bands, and a dubious language lesson on a Berlin park bench, Todo Todo Teros proudly belongs in the ever burgeoning Philippine digital cinema movement.
A modern cinematic mosaic of longing, obsession and paranoia pasted together with wit and romanticism like a dreamy video blog, Todo Todo Teros is a dazzling, multi-dimensional and sensual expression of vulnerability and subtle defiance. Heartbreaking at times, yet the passages of delicate, sublime beauty and genuine affection are the strands that absorbs the audience.
YEARS WHEN I WAS A CHILD OUTSIDE (2008)
Rudolfo Torres authored a series of self-help books in the 1980’s to help parents “raise brighter children.” At one point he lost the fortune he amassed and it was soon revealed to his wife and children that he had a separate family on the side, a development that caused his son to move out.
The son is internationally acclaimed filmmaker John Torres and this film is a promise by the filmmaker made to himself and to his mother. His intention was to make a film about his father and about the night he told them he had fathered a child with another woman. While putting it off, as he worked on several uncompleted projects, the film about his father continued to haunt him. Years When I Was a Child Outside arose from the vestiges of those projects. The film invites us in Torres’ rumination as he works out his dilemma through the creative process. What we are rewarded with is an artistic endeavor that examines themes of duplicity and life’s transitory and evolving nature.
An artist of fluid and organic bent, Torres is at the vanguard of a cinematic form (or lack of form) where there is no line between documentary and narrative, where the canvas is unfixed and elusive. The film collects a series of disparate segments conceptualizing duality and contradiction held together by Torres’ radical and poetic vision. These passages include an incomplete love story in which the production was derailed due to unfortunate casting; a teacher from a rural area whose home is being poisoned by chemical spraying; a conversation with exiled Jose Ma. Sison, founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines; a segment on National Artist Napoleon Abueva and his employee who claims he has been creating work in the artist’s name; a piece about pen pals and voice tapes amongst domestics in Saudi Arabia.
Innovative and ambitious in style, for the uninitiated, the challenge is to follow and the filmmaker welcomes that as he himself is with you on the journey. Torres’ playful experimentalism is always buttressed with a mysterious romanticism and refreshing idealism creating a film of self-reflection so intense that one cannot help but examine oneself in its light.
