Maicling pelicula nañg ysañg indio nacional (O Ang Mahabang Kalungkutan ng Katagalugan)
Philippines,
2005, 96 min
Shown in 2006
CREDITS
- dir
-
Raya Martin
- prod
-
Raya Martin, Arleen Cuevas
- scr
-
Raya Martin
- cam
-
Maisa Demetillo
- editor
-
Louie Quirino, Anne Esteban
- mus
-
Khavn dela Cruz
- cast
-
Bodjie Pascua, Suzette Velasco, Lemuel Galman, Mark Joshua Maclang, Russell Ongkeko
- source
-
Raya Martin, 37 Toribio Street, BF Homes, 1720 Parañaque, Philippines. EMAIL: rayamartin@gmail.com.
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Raya Martin in attendance.
OTHER
Nothing from the Philippines—except perhaps the early work of Cannes winner Raymond Red—prepares you for this stunning debut feature from 22-year-old Raya Martin. Its title may be misleading at first (it is a feature, not a short), but it makes you realize that film is but a fleeting moment in the long tragic history of the ordinary man. A man tells a sleepless woman a story about the cause of disharmony in the world. 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. But as everyone flees from the encroaching war, the Indio contemplates a more significant dilemma: escaping his troubled soul. Mapping the tragedy of the Filipino psyche and spirit under successive colonizations has been the sustaining theme for the country’s great artists, from Jose Rizal to Lino Brocka to the epic films of Lav Diaz. Martin brings a profound poetry to this legacy, creating a world that is at once mysterious and recognizable, and a film that uses the silent form and modernist piano score to struggle against the repressions of politics, religion and art. In marrying the history of a nation with a historical film form through his unique vision, Martin has created one of the truly original works of contemporary Filipino cinema.
—Roger Garcia
FACTOID #200
Rockers, an entry at the 1978 SFIFF, was the first and only Jamaican feature film screened at the San Francisco International.
