Baff

THE OTHER MODERNITY: MALAYSIA AND PHILIPPINES.

A decade ago, Southeast Asia represented a terra incognita in cinema. In the West we barely had any news at all about what there was south of the Chinese insular area (Hong Kong and Taiwan), with the very relative exception of Thailand. And it’s precisely from there that a cult figure would appear: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, hero of a cinema that is ethnographic and experimental at the same time, tracker of fables and fabulist of a “Third World” that’s already, suddenly, postmodern. Without the impact of his films and without “Taiwanese” inspiration (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang), it’s impossible to fully understand, for example, the growth of Malay and Filipino films at festivals, although the equation is incomplete if we avoid the role played by the Hubert Bals Foundation, linked to the Rotterdam Festival.

Actually, the Malay cinema that usually gets talked about is the one produced by a select group of filmmakers and artists who make up a certain community. Among them, Ho Yuhang, James Lee or Tan Chui-mui: almost all of them belong to the Chinese substratum of Malaysia’s population, and not to the Muslim. They are cultured urbanites who exchange jobs and means of production. They make films that fit the existing model of “Asian art cinema” like a glove: contemplative but without gravity, statements in present continuous but very elliptic, close to intimate chronicle but with no reverse angles, and woven with light situations under which some event is brewing. Such sophistication makes them exportable, in comparison with those others, more oriented towards popular realism, that are produced from the Muslim “shore”–like Yasmin Ahmad’s. Not that this means, as the omnibus-film 15 Malaysia (2009) seems to demonstrate, that something like a split exists between one and the other.  

The Filipino case is very different. We DID know some big names from this tradition. Basically, Lino Brocka’s, who represents a watershed for filmmakers as diverse as Brillante Mendoza or Raya Martin: Raya’s cinema, for example, aims to, pardon the expression, deconstruct Brocka’s realist tradition, to approach his country’s history –four centuries of Spanish domination, among other things- from the staging of the myth and the investigation of its marks on the present, as shown by Independencia (2009) and Manila (2009, directed with Adolfo Alix Jr.). But the inheritance of Filipino independent and realist cinema doesn’t run out with Lino Brocka: as shown by the milestone that Manila by Night (1980) by Ishmael Bernal represents, as well as the contemporary breath emerging from recent films like Children Metal Divers, by Ralston G. Jover (2009) or Squalor, by Giuseppe Bede Sampedro (2009): Philippines, in short, as noise and fury, as hectic present and occult past.

Luis Miranda
Las Palmas International Film Festival
Coordinator