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VANCOUVER PREMIERES!
Alongside other Filipino filmmakers such as 2006 VIFF Dragons & Tigers winner John Torres and the legendary Lav Diaz, Raya Martin (b. 1984) is creating new waves in cinema.
For his first feature, Filipino director Raya Martin embarked on an ambitious project: a silent, black and white film, set in the 19th century in a rural Filipino community, Maicling pelicula nañg ysañg indio nacional (O Ang Mahabang Kalungkutan ng Katagalugan), A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or, The Prolonged Sorrow of Filipinos).
The film is set in the 1890s when, in the Philippines, a bloody rebellion was being fought against the Spanish colonial rulers. In three beautiful personal stories about Indios the film tells the tales of ordinary local men in the colonial period.
For its strangeness and audacity, Indio has reminded more than one viewer of the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and like the Thai director’s Tropical Malady, it comes in two drastically dissimilar parts. The first, shot on DV, is a short story about suffering told one night by a husband to his wife, who cannot sleep. This initial separate-the-men-from-the-boys patience tester (barely lit, the scene actually takes a while to develop, as the wife shifts and shuffles in her bed) eventually gives way to the “Short Film” proper: a series of episodes set near the end of Spanish colonial period tracing the development of a common man (“indio”) and set to improvised Chopin-like music by fellow Filipino filmmaker Khavn de la Cruz.
Pastiche is far from Martin’s mind: for one, there’s no film history in the Philippines to tear apart and reassemble. Unlike the work of Guy Maddin, with whom Martin’s film was compared in the Hong Kong film festival’s program, Indio fills in an historical gap. It does so with constant invention and poetic beauty.
In conjunction with Martin's 2006 A Short Film About Indio Nacional, we'll screen his latest, the extremely personal Autohystoria, called by Variety 's Robert Koehler "easily the year's most radical and astonishing film."
In a contemporary city, the story is told of two brothers: an older brother who has lived in the city for a while and a younger brother who has just arrived in town. They haven’t seen each other for a time. Parallel to this, the film looks back at a true event in Filipino history. In 1897 two brothers, Andres Bonifacio and the younger Procopio, were executed in the mountains for treason and incitement. The elder brother founded Katipunan (a revolutionary movement in the spirit of the legendary Filipino national hero Jose Rizal) and was accused of betraying the revolution by a rival faction led by Emilio Aguinaldo, who later became the first president of the Philippines.
Raya Martin is arguably the most highly touted young filmmaker in the Philippines today. The first Filipino filmmaker to be selected in the prestigious Cinéfondation Residence du Festival de Cannes and recent winner of the Prince Claus Fund at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Martin, only in his early 20s, is certainly a director to watch, and another bright spot in a region that just might be experiencing the ripples of a New Wave.
Raya Martin is a satirist, allegorist, poet, fabulist, and filmmaker...I'm only too pleased to welcome yet another major new voice in the field of Philippine cinema.—Noel Vera
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