The Letter I Would Love to Read to You in Person
by Alexis Tioseco
My Dear Nika,
I’ve been asked to write a column for this issue of Rogue, and the topic given to me was myself. I’ve always felt it awkward to write in public spaces about personal motivations behind the work I choose to do, so I have decided to use you as an excuse: there are things that you must know, that you may sense but not understand unless I tell you, and so I shall use this opportunity to put them on paper.
Besides, how could I say no to this offer when just the other day you recalled how an essay that was written by the solicitor of this column—in a previous incarnation of this magazine—played a central role in our being together? One must pay back one’s debts. . .
When we met in Rotterdam last January there was something about you that struck me immediately. It was not your beauty, or rather, not just your beauty, but your manner of speaking: which now sixteen months later still demands so much of me. There is a precious intensity in your gestures, the way in which your eyes dart and hands reach out to grab the right word, that illustrates how strong a desire you have to communicate, especially when the conversation turns toward the things that matter to you—the integrity of your work, the importance of nature, the concern for your brother. (I know what you’re thinking—shut up! I’m not a native speaker!—but this isn’t a question of familiarity with language.)
We both did not arrive at the festival in the best of conditions: you in ill health and from the disappointment of not closing the latest issue of Ekran before leaving Slovenia (compounded by you missing your flight and multiplied by a year’s fatigue of battling for editorial independence) and I from the solitude of learning to live alone, and of not yet having come to terms with the abrupt death of my father seven months before (something which, as you know, I am still attempting to do).
I wasn’t in a very good place the months before we met, reckless and hurried in my interactions with new acquaintances, but in Rotterdam it was hard not to fight for clarity and calm when the person before you, beleaguered and weary as they were, would still refuse to let their words slip carelessly. . .
I know sometimes you may think that it was the fact that we worked in the same field that attracted me to you, but I must tell you that this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Why? Because one of the greatest joys I believe one can feel is to share that which they find beautiful with someone who otherwise wouldn’t have noticed it, and to see it appreciated. This is the main reason why I love teaching and why I refuse to show Lord of the Rings to my students (no matter how fervently my co-teachers insist). It is also the evidence that cinema isn’t what brings us nearer to each other: because in this regard, we are on equal footing, and I must instead find other things in me to share with you. For anyone who knows me, they know how difficult that is. . .
But Rogue wants to hear about cinema! Or at least about my work and what I have done in it. Why it means so much to me, and why I have done the things that I have. So it is about cinema that I must write! Some of this may seem like things you have heard, my dear Nika, but don’t worry, if I am successful it will all come together in the end, and you will see why it relates to you, to us, and to the future.
Allow me to begin with a story, one of which you may be quite familiar.
In 1997, my father decided that my brother Chris and I, together with my mother, should return to the Philippines
(my father as you know had been going back and forth between Manila and Vancouver, never growing quite comfortable in Canada. Remind me to make you a copy of the essay “Where’s the patis?”).
We had moved to Canada in 1983, leaving the Philippines just a few months before the death of Ninoy Aquino and just a few months after my second birthday.
Like most teenagers, I was still growing comfortable in my own skin, or rather trying to, and the thought of moving to another country for my last two years of High School petrified me. I resisted: on one hand, I protested to my parents that I wanted nothing to do with a country that was so class conscious and so corrupt (though I didn’t mind going there for vacation. . .), and on the other hand, inside, I just didn’t want to deal with attempting to infiltrate ill-fated High School social circles in a new country. I was also completely devastated about having to leave the first girl I ever slow danced with in my high school life—Melodie Pangan—who I’m sure never thought of me as anything more than a friend, but who I still called dramatically from the airport, in tears, telling her I loved her for the first time. But I digress. . .
My father seduced my brother and I with the promise of round-the-clock air conditioning and a driver to take us wherever we wanted, which admittedly made the move easier to take (so much for my 16-year old defiance of class consciousness). Both of which, as it turned, were just selling points: things he was able, but unwilling, to provide.
As you know, we are five children in my family, but only Chris and I, together with my Mom, moved back. The primary excuse for it being just he and I was that we were the two youngest, and since Chris was just preparing to enter College and I was finishing my last two years of High School, we would both be able to adjust easier. But the other reason was also that we were men and, as men in the Philippines, he had wanted to groom us to take over the family business, to help maintain what he had established, or build on top of it. The primary reason, I believe, for him wanting my mother to come back was so that Chris and I would. We had grown quite close to my Mom over the years in Vancouver, as my Dad was often away, and he knew that her agreeing to go was the key to being able to bring us back. On the part of my Mom, she was settled in Vancouver, she wasn’t comfortable having helpers live in the house, and was used to cooking and cleaning herself and looking after us. She moved back for him, because he asked her to.
Two years passed, and my mother moved back to Vancouver. She had been battling bouts of depression caused by their fights, by her lack of control of the family, and it was decided that she would go to Vancouver for a while for therapy. I didn’t know at the time that it would be for good, it was supposed to be for two months. She returned for the first time in 2006 for my father’s funeral.
My brother Chris never quite settled in the Philippines. One theory we have was that he never got to imbibe the culture in a manner deeper than gimmicks in Makati—and as a majority of his good friends were foreigners and he had no Tagalog classes, he didn’t learn the language much. The other possibility is that he just wasn’t used to living under my father’s watchful eye. He graduated from University in June of 2001, and by August he moved back to Vancouver.
What was left of my Dad’s dream—of keeping the family together in the Philippines and of one of his sons taking a keen interest in the business? Me. And just me. With less people living in it, the house had more space, and I no longer shared my room with anyone, but I felt more and more suffocated. Upon graduating with my studies directed towards business management, I began working for my father. I lasted from June to November of 2004 before admitting that I couldn’t do it any longer. I would tell you I quit. My father told relatives at family gatherings he fired me. Either story will do now; it doesn’t really matter.
Sender: Dad
Date: 24-04-2006
Time: 05:19:51pm
“BF 2 GF’s rich dad: I wana mari ur dauter,
Dad: Do u work?
BF: Im a theology scholar.
Dad: Can u afford a weding?
BF: God wil provide.
Dad: Wat about a haus, raising a family & education of d kids?
BF: God wil provide.
Later...Mom: How’d it go dad?
Dad: D guy’s poor, & he thinks Im God!”
Sender: Dad
Date: 24-04-2006
Time: 05:22:32pm
“BF 2 GF’s rich dad: I wana mari ur dauter,
Dad: Do u work?
BF: Im a Unvrsty Profsor nd a film critic.
Dad: Can u afford a weding?
BF: God wil provide.
Dad: Wat about a haus, raising a family & education of d kids?
BF: God wil provide.
Later...Mom: How’d it go dad?
Dad: D guy’s poor, & he thinks Im God!”
I never wanted to be a film critic. To this day I abhor using the term for myself, but I’ve begun to do so regularly, just because it makes life easier.
Many filmmakers, especially filmmakers in the Philippines, have a problem with the word critic. We have little to no culture of healthy polemics in the country, as any attempt to consider fault is taken as a personal attack. Rare are those that are able to deal with it properly. One particular filmmaker took objection to the idea of a publication that I was to edit using the title “Criticine”: he had a problem with the word critic being included. A nasty term, I suppose he thought.
The first impulse of any good film critic, and to this I think you would agree, must be of love. To be moved enough to want to share their affection for a particular work or to relate their experience so that others may be curious. This is why criticism, teaching, and curating or programming, in an ideal sense, must all go hand in hand.
The first proper review of a Filipino film that I wrote was on Lav Diaz’s Batang West Side. I knew I liked movies, had even harbored thoughts of making them at one point, and I certainly took a measure of pride in being looked to by my peers as someone whose opinion was worth seeking. But despite this, and despite the surprising satisfaction of first seeing my name in print, I never had any interest in writing film criticism in any serious way.
It was not writing the review of Batang West Side (which I was quite proud of at the time, but look at with a bit of embarrassment for its simplicity today) that changed things for me, but rather what took place before and after writing it: the complete lack of engaging, intelligent writing on the film that engaged more than just the length. (Conrado de Quiros tried, and perhaps his championing was more important than the actual text.) Batang West Side, as you now, is 5-hours long, and if you read most of the articles that I mentioned (I dare not say discussed), this would likely be all that you knew. Even Jessica Zafra, after organizing a screening of the film through her engaging-if-but-short-lived FLIP Magazine (and having commissioned an article from Lav), proceeded to make crude jokes about the film in the letters section of the succeeding issue.
I was a junior in college when the film premiered, and in the five years I had lived in the Philippines, the closest I had come to connecting with culture via cinema were a few jokes in April, May, June, a film about three sisters starring the then quite popular Alma Concepcion and maybe SPO1 Don Juan: Da Dancing Policeman, starring the great Leo Martinez. Needless to say, Batang West Side was a departure, not only in length, but in aesthetic: its rhythm, the distance from the camera to its subject, the duration in which shots were held, the construction of the discourse (equally about past as about present), and most especially in its attitude towards its audience—its stubborn refusal to give in to our inherent need for a neat ending, instead forcing us to draw our own conclusions.
I wasn’t prepared for Batang West Side. I hadn’t heard of Lav Diaz and simply attended because it was during Cinemanila, and it’s not everyday someone makes a film of that length. I was curious. The film stuck with me. Especially so as one of the first films that made me think concretely about what it meant to be Filipino, about the pitfalls of migration. Perils that, I think for the first time now as I type this, my Dad probably understood better than anyone. It’s a shame he never got to see the film.
It was now a full year after Batang West Side premiered, a good few months after I wrote the article, and still little literature was available on the film. I contacted Lav and asked if I could interview him, to which he obliged graciously. The interview ran close to an hour, and I asked him all the questions I wished others had.
Happy with the results, which ran 12 pages long and was published on the website Indiefilipino.com (may she rest in peace, how I loved her so!), I used all the prepaid credit I had to text most everyone mildly interested in cinema in my modest phonebook to plug it. Hardly any of them responded, of course, but there were notes of appreciation on Indiefilipino’s forums, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
There were people, it turned out, who were interested in reading serious writing on serious cinema—it just had to be written and published somewhere accessible.
The first impulse is always one of love.
The more films I saw, specifically local independent films, the more I wanted to see. The deeper I got, the more responsibility I felt, the stronger the need to do something, to share that which I found beautiful.
Writing in English, I never felt much of a need to write about foreign (non-Filipino) movies—though I’m often asked to, and mostly of Hollywood fare. While I love cinema in general, a passion that has grown exponentially over the years, I feel no need to put myself in service of that which doesn’t need it. The feeling has always been: why write about Juno when I’ve hardly read anything incisive put to print about the great animation of Roxlee? Why write about No Country For Old Men when there’s the brilliantly charming films of Antoinette Jadaone waiting to be discovered by readers? The same held true for a stint I had reviewing films every other week on The Breakfast Show on Studio 23. The informal terms of agreement: I could review anything I wanted, local or foreign, new or old, short or long, so long as they could get clips to show. It didn’t make waves by any means—it was but a single segment on a show for viewers with ADD—but I think it meant something to some people: Kris Villarino, the Cebu filmmaker who made the short Binaliw; the group of young upstarts from Davao starting a series of filmmaking workshops that has only grown over time; or the chaotic arrangement of an entire episode on independent filmmaking (before the term was abused) in Christmas 2005 that guested Raya Martin, Khavn De La Cruz, Mes De Guzman, Roxlee, Lav Diaz, Pam Miras, and a very shy John Torres speaking about his short films in public for the first time.
One thing has slowly progressed into another and, what began as a simple curiosity pursued with sincerity, has evolved into a commitment.
Philippine cinema has given much to me, and one must pay back one’s debts.
I never expected to have the opportunity to travel for/from film, especially not on the expenses of others—but, slowly, the opportunities presented themselves. Traveling is a privilege, and not one that I take lightly. In June 2004, as a fresh college graduate, I attended a conference in Singapore. A few months later, on the basis of my writing, I was selected to participate in the Asia-Europe Foundation’s Meeting of Young Film Critics from Europe and Asia. A few months later, I found myself in Berlin as part of the Berlinale Talent Press (though this was only partly subsidized, and it was a last minute loan from my brother in Canada that allowed me to go). A number of trips have ensued, to everywhere from Singapore (7x) to Hawaii, from New Delhi (2x) to Paris, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, and, of course, precious Slovenia, serving on juries and giving talks. All the time I’ve maintained the same stance: that it is important for people to write about their own cinemas and not let it be left to those outside to dictate what matters.
But these tickets, these travels, are expensive. Hotels are expensive. Time is expensive. The pollution caused by airplanes in the sky will cost us in the long run. When you put all these things together, it equals an investment: a serious investment made on and in an individual. Do I sound like I’m taking this too seriously? Allow me to phrase it another way: without the cultural investment made in me, for the work I have or can do with regard to Philippine cinema, I would have never met you. There is much to repay.
I don’t like writing about the Metro Manila Film Festival. I didn’t like it the first time I did it in 2003, nor did I the second or third time. I didn’t like it as well when, with the help of Erwin Romulo, we drafted a position paper seeking reforms in the festival and attempted to rally established filmmakers behind it (signatories included, among others, Eddie Garcia, Peque Gallaga, Jose Javier Reyes, Erik Matti). It’s not fun being told off like I was a two-bit journalist looking for a quote by filmmakers named Laurice. I didn’t like it, but I did it because part of me sincerely believed we could things. A belief that, for a few moments, was infectious, for even those that knew in the back of their mind that nothing would come of it still chose to take part. A friend whose couch I slept on for much of those weeks sent me a text sometime after, a message that now three years later is still saved on my phone:
There’s a line in AGUILA where a Moro secessionist is told his cause is lost. He replies to him that winning doesn’t matter, it’s doing what one feels one should do. That’s wisdom for you.
My dear Nika,
If there has been a single cause of strain that has stuck out in our relationship it is this: the idea of my attachment to the Philippines, the strong desire you see that I have to live and work here, and the way that, perhaps, you see this as a matter of misappropriate priorities. Does a place mean more than a person? Does my work in the Philippines mean more than the possibility of a life with you, somewhere, anywhere else? Must it be you that moves, makes the (I know you hate the word, but let us use it) sacrifice of moving? And what, if anything, does that say about us—that the scales of our love weigh more heavily on your chalice?
I know you’ve come to terms with the idea of moving here, hopefully next year, we discuss—but I still feel the need to talk a bit more about some of my reasons for wanting to stay, at the very least for the meantime. I’m not attempting to compare my affection for Manila with yours for Slovenia, but only to explain the thoughts that go through my head, the things I feel I must do, things that, perhaps, we can do together.
Yours,
Alexis
Addendum
I wish that the Film Development Council of the Philippines would understand the value of the money they’re given and consider going to Paris and spending five million of their 25 million allotment for a showcase given by a young festival as an investment, and not just a vacation.
I hope they support filmmakers with finished work to go abroad to festivals for the pride they bring their country—I wish instead they would support their films locally, and help them get seen by larger Filipino audiences.
I cry for the loss of Manuel Conde’s Juan Tamad films.
I cry for a country that can’t convince a single Filipino-American who owns the only known print of Conde’s Genghis Khan in its original language to return (i.e. sell) the film back to his mother country.
I cry for the generations of Filipinos, myself included, that can no longer see Gerry De Leon’s Daigdig ng Mga Api, and instead have scans of movie ads to admire on the internet.
I mourn a heritage that has allowed the prints of Mario O’Hara’s Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos and Peque Gallaga’s Oro, Plata, Mata to turn flush sepia through neglect.
I cry for a Union and University of the Philippines that conspire in apathy to let the master negatives of treasures produced by Bancom to rot in rooms only air conditioned half the day and in cans untouched for years and years.
I pray for a Senator or Congressman to take the courageous step of drafting a bill to help establish a National Film and Sound archive.
I pray a city government or even enterprising and concerned theater owners will consider settings aside 50 centavos or a peso of a ticket to go toward the preservation of our national audiovisual heritage. There have been flood taxes siphoned from movie tickets. For crying out loud, this should be easy!
I wish Cinemalaya which, thanks to the media and government mileage behind it has a great festive excitement, would actually put their efforts in service of Philippine cinema, and not in their own self-involved attempt to start a micro-industry.
I wish filmmakers would stop listening to Robbie Tan.
I wish Cinema one, which often produces better films that Cinemalaya, would actually give filmmakers some rights to their work and stop swindling them.
I wish Lav Diaz had larger budgets to maneuver and shoot with.
I wish Raymond Red would get to make Makapili and return to making fantastic shorts in the experimental mode.
I wish Mike De Leon would make another movie. . . Please. . . we need it.
I wish Roxlee would get enough money to buy the time to make an animated feature.
I wish everyone would buy a copy of Nicanor Tiongson and Cesar Hernando’s The Cinema of Manuel Conde.
I wish there were more books on Philippine cinema.
I wish there were a series of classic screenplays that would get published.
I wish Cinefilipino would have put out Maalaala Mo Kaya with the reels in the proper order.
I wish Cinefilipino would have put our their Brocka titles with just a little bit of care and affection, providing some writing on the film or some features, and didn’t just throw them out there to earn.
I wish Nestor Torre would open his eyes. . .
I wish the Manunuri books on Philippine cinema in the 70s and 80s would go back in print.
I wish the Manunuri actually cared about Philippine cinema today.
I wish the Manunuri actually reviewed films instead of just giving out awards.
I wish the Young Critics Circle were actually young.
I wish the Young Critics Circle were actually critics.
I wish Francis “Oggs” Cruz, Richard Bolisay, and Dodo Dayao would get space in the broadsheets, because they’re far more interesting than anyone writing regularly there today.
I wish Noel Vera would move back.
I wish Hammy Sotto was still alive.
I wish Hammy Sotto’s manuscripts would get published.
I wish Jo Atienza was still in Manila.
I wish we had a fully supported Film Museum.
I wish we had a Cinematheque.
I wish the UP Film Center had better seats and showed good films.
I wish more non-filmmakers from the Philippines would get to travel to festivals.
I wish film were taught in high schools.
I wish Teddy Co would get the recognition that he deserves for his selfless work.
I wish Teddy Co would write more, as his ideas deserve to be recorded.
I wish co-ops would co-operate.
I wish Khavn De La Cruz would get to make his musical EDSA XXX.
I wish the Max Santiago feature would get made, and that shorts would finally come to my hands on DVD (Hi Marla!)
I wish Tad Ermitaño never stops writing and playing in his cave.
I wish Lourd De Veyra continues writing on actors and cinema.
I wish Raymond Lee UFO successes.
I wish we had more regional feature films and more support for regional filmmakers.
I wish everyone would watch When Timawa Meets Delgado.
I wish someone would lower MTRCB rates for screenings fees, especially for festivals.
I wish someone, anyone, would make a good, thought-provoking film about the Philippine upper-class.
I wish Ketchup Eusebio would get more leading roles.
I wish Elijah Castillo gets to do a lot more films, soon.
I wish Cesar Hernando would get to transfer Botika, Bituka.
I wish filmmakers had some integrity and told Viva to screw themselves when offered another exploitation film.
I wish more people could see the film Bontoc Eulogy.
I wish Vic Del Rosario wasn’t presidential advisor on Entertainment, given the shlock they produce, and, yes, that includes the films which starred First-Son Mikey Arroyo.
I wish Star Cinema would stop. . . just stop.
I wish there was a film library that people could go to and read books on cinema.
I wish the MMFF wasn’t handled by the same people who install public urinals (admittedly useful).
I wish the MMDA didn’t call those circles and boxes Art.
I wish that MMDA Art wasn’t so much better than every MMFF film.
I wish Philippine cinema all the success in the world. . .
First published in Rogue, July 2008. Reproduced with the permission of the Tioseco family.