Dante Perez
Marinduque, an island province in the Philippines 172 kilometers south of Manila, is where the largest mining disaster in the country’s history occurred. MINA, an environmental activist trying to make ends meet financially, sets out on a journey to Marinduque to seek answers to the mining disaster. She joins a secret organization led by FRANCIS who feeds her confidential information regarding the people responsible for the tragedy.
What can a family do if someone disappears in a dictatorship? You can’t go to the police for help or information. Many families were affected in this way by the cruelty of the Marcos dictatorship (1972-1986). The film shows one of them as an example of paradise lost.
Years ago, Tina (Andi Eigenmann) was sent away to the United States to live with her aunt because of an incident involving her parents that has never been explained to her. She moves back to the Philippines into their old home, hoping for a new start. Unfortunately for her, shes not alone in the house. The kitchen is home to a demonic, human-eating refrigerator. Tina must dig into the past to discover the truth about what happened to her parents, and to find a way to defeat the infernal appliance.
Says Sister Angela, the woman of the wind: "I’m not just having sex, Father. Yes, there is lust. I'm not a hypocrite. But my main discourse is the purpose of this body. To be very blunt, Father, we only live once. I want to understand and feel the use of my breasts, my vagina, my mouth, and all parts of my body. In my view, I can only move to the next level, on the so-called spirituality, once I've addressed the issues of my physical being. In my view, there is a need to destroy that physical being, our animalistic nature, before we can achieve true spirituality. Let’s crush the animal in the man, Father. That’s fundamental to me."
Deliberately structured and less beholden to its narrative, the film is told in three parts, with each part pertaining to each of the three visits of the time-travelling visitor from when the country was fighting for independence from Spain.
Tony de Guzman is an anti-hero. Life, according to him, is short, brutal. It’s never on your side. Grab what you can, when you can. Settle scores. Be randy. Defy the rules. Cheat the system. Toughen it out. Tony knows nothing but tough times living, as he does, in the bleak circus of the slums he calls home. This is his story and the story of the world he lives in: a hopeless, closed-in decrepit world gone to seed. MONDOMANILA is an unflinching and unflinchingly funny look at life in the underbelly of the urban diaspora … with songs.
Ferding, Santos and Willy only drink in despair. One day, a Canadian woman’s visit changes everything.
Hong Sang-Soo’s Lost in the Mountains (South Korea, 32min) the visitor is the supremely self-centred Mi-Sook, who drives to Jeonju on impulse to see her classmate Jin-Young – only to discover that her friend is having an affair with their married professor, who Mi-Sook once dated herself. The level of social embarrassment goes off the scale. In Naomi Kawase’s Koma (Japan, 34min), Kang Jun-Il travels to a village in rural Japan to honour his grandfather’s dying wish by returning a Buddhist scroll to its ancestral home. Amid ancient superstitions, a new relationship forms. And in Lav Diaz’ Butterflies Have No Memories (Philippines, 42min) ‘homecoming queen’ Carol returns to the economically depressed former mining town she came from – and becomes the target of an absurd kidnapping plot hatched by resentful locals. Serving as his own writer, cameraman and editor, Diaz casts the film entirely from members of his crew and delivers a well-seasoned mix of social realism and fantasy. —bfi
A story about victims of summary executions. Three people start a strange therapy to escape their agonies.
An intimate epic made with uncompromising and austere seriousness that patiently and methodically observes the collapse and hopeful revival of a poor farming clan.
