Raya Martin

Garbiñe Ortega, Artistic Director of Punto de Vista, came up with the idea of creating a collective audiovisual project in which several filmmakers would make a filmed letter addressed to another filmmaker they did not know personally and who was as far as possible from their own cinema. This is how THE LETTERS THAT WEREN'T AND ALSO ARE was born. The result is an exciting journey through their affinities, their admiration and their creative processes.

Tracing the figure of the spirit through Philippine film, Raya Martin enlists archives, apps and AI to work against the colonial gaze, and wonders, amid the restrictions of lockdown, ‘how do we watch movies without cinema?’

The story takes us into the colorful pop-culture world of these four 13-year old friends, back in the days when video games were still a novelty. Mimaw and her friends Paolo, Kachi and Gilligan go on a journey of self-discovery together as they play games and wrestle with new dilemmas – puppy love, circumcision and other horror stories.

It is deep autumn — I wonder I never thought I'd be lost and searching for one warm, friendly smile — but I got me some people and I know that they love me And I know just where to look this time. "Here is my music. It is all I have to tell you how I feel. Know that your love keeps my love strong." —Stevie Wonder

Kinet's Halloween Omnibus feature.

A found footage of reporters lost in a haunted jungle.

The EDSA revolution brought an alt to a new form of experimental cinema that was emerging during the Marcos regime. This is a recovered excerpt from a video experiment by the almost unknown director Arturo Madlangbayan, as re-edited by Miko Revereza and Raya Martin.

A famous American filmmaker travels to the Yucatán to scout locations for his last movie. The Mayan Apocalypse intercedes

Short film by Raya Martin, published as part of After Cinema Words, a project considering the work of director Carlos Reygadas, here responding to a still image from the 2005 film Battle In Heaven.

In Raya Martin’s thuggish fable of disengagement, a teenage girl grows distant from her parents before possibly vanishing altogether. But this is no angst drama. It’s defiance against a kind of ordered existence, treating death like a game, living life in a soft-focus daze, ready to evaporate if pushed far enough. The girl and all the other faceless kids wander numbly in slow motion through the brush, through the parental jabber, only the electronic drone keeping them from losing their bearings.

Four cinephiles in a hotel room in the middle of the night ruminate on La última película, Dennis Hopper, and the state of cinema.

A nursery rhyme hovers over shadowy fragments of time, of arrivals and departures and the illusion of passage they evoke.

A group of friends, sharing a passion for cinema, assemble in Corregidor, a small island in Manila Bay that has preserved relics from the Pacific War as its foremost attractions. There, they explore the island and retire in a rustic mansion used once to make silent films. Outside the city, the woods and sea become a meeting place for more movie personalities and it all becomes a celebration of what was left behind.

August 11th 2011 was one of the best days of my life: I had a trip with my father to Locarno, where I met and interviewed Raya Martin, a director I deeply respect and admire – definitely one of my heroes. My first idea was to produce the classical “auteur profile” documentary (full-coverage interview occasionally featuring archive images), but since I was having such an inspiring and exciting chat with Raya I realized that the “institutional” approach was way too cold and inappropriate: why not present a film theory essay as if it was a home movie? After all, it was me and my father on a holiday trip... Thus, in my little, amateurish instant-movie I applied Raya's “autohystoric” (autohysteric?) method as naively as possible, hoping to put forward a manifesto for a cinema lived on your own skin.

Raya Martin loves old silent films and knows better than anyone how to use old moods and techniques in his own films. You could say that he loves experimental films and that he manages to revitalise the old techniques. Here he looks at boxers, even though we hardly see them.

A man travelling on the sea.

In another lifetime, a Spanish couple takes drugs and teleports through their television set. A troubled young man travels through the countryside and meets a lost woman. During the trip, they discover a museum housing the expatriated paintings of the most important Filipino artist of the revolution. Eventually, the Spanish couple disappears toward their colony. Inspired by one of the earliest teleportation accounts, which happened between the Philippines and Mexico during the colonial period.

Documentary profiling the directors involved in the loose Philippine New Wave filmmaking movement.

Early 20th century Philippines. The sounds of war signal the arrival of the Americans. A mother and son flee to the mountains, hoping for a quiet life. One day, the son discovers a wounded woman in the middle of the forest, and decides to bring her home.

Mother gets a visit.

A one-sided romance, from the gazer (JK Anicoche) and the subject of his gaze (Abner Delina), a sleeping man wearing a coat and a top hat.

Rita is named after a famous American movie star whom her late, former actress grandmother once adored. She lives in one of Manila’s oldest districts with her busy mother and entrepreneurial aunt. Years later, she is still the same girl enamoured with television, now also tending to her aunt’s stall selling pirated DVD movies. Elsewhere, there survives footages of a movie done before the war.

Purports to document the production of a short about a young man’s first sexual experience while doubling as a coming-out film and a multiply layered making-of movie.

Filmmaker John Torres describes his childhood and discusses his father's infidelities.

Impressionistic images from a train ride.

Mix-mastering history, the paranoid thriller, the documentary and the landscape film, pic tells of very different fates for two sets of brothers in oppressive Philippine settings.

Martin travels to Itbayat island, of the Batan group, on the far north of the Phillipines, to record the customs of its inhabitants and their life away from modern civilization. Itbayat is open to visitors only in the summer; the storms raging in the region completely isolate the islanders for the rest of the year. The camera gives them the chance to tell their stories. “I was interested in understanding the characteristics of the community beyond its practices and traditions”, says the director. Winner of the Best Documentary award at the .MOV, Manila’s alternative festival dedicated to digital film.

What follows is a black-and-white silent film set in the 1890s during the brewing Filipino revolution against Spanish colonialism. A series of tragic and comic sequences tells the Three Ages of an Indio (“common man”) as he progresses from boy bell ringer in a village church to teenage revolutionary to adult theater actor rehearsing a popular Spanish play.

Raya Martin's award-winning short film Bakasyon is about a young girl who goes to the province to take care of her grandma, where she discovers strange and mysterious things about her lola's identity. The 15-minute film won the Ishmael Bernal Award for Young Cinema at the Cinemanila in 2004.

Plot unknown.

A narrative about being stuck in a strange mystical island. It's a landscape that's at once familiar, aggressive, drifting, odd and unexpected.