Balikbayan cinema comes to Manila
In the fast-moving local film industry, there’s a lot of creative effort that falls through the cracks. Filipino films, short or feature, hardly get the airing they deserve, even in Manila, let alone on foreign screens.
Trying to rectify that a bit, Cine Balikbayan took over Dengcar Theater at Mowelfund last weekend, launching its first exhibition of films from the Filipino diaspora. The launch screened 13 short films and one feature film on closing night—the Slamdance Film Festival honorable mention feature Alice-Heart directed by Mike Macera, which earned an outstanding acting prize for its lead actress Lissa Carandang-Sweeney at Slamdance this year. It was preceded by another Philippine premiere, the short film Flip the Record directed by fellow Slamdance alumna Marie Jamora.
According to event organizer Ren Aguila, Marie knew Lissa through Cinema Sala, the US-based Filipino film advocacy, and helped get the indie film Alice-Heart a screening in New York.
“Marie told me, ‘We really should get Flip the Record shown in Manila,’” Aguila recalls. Jamora and husband Jason McLagan worked to put together the best version of it for its first screening in Manila.
And it looks great: a short, nostalgic introduction to teen wannabe DJ Vanessa—or “Van”—and her Fil-Am family in the California ‘80s, when turntables ruled the weekends. I had to ask Marie—since the film ends as abruptly as the finale of The Sopranos—if there’s a full-fledged TV series arc in the works. “We developed it and actually pitched it in 2021, during pandemic times, but that was before I’d directed a lot of television,” she says. (Jamora has since directed episodes of TV shows Queen Sugar, Fire Country, The Cleaning Lady, and Matlock, among others.
She now says she has an “idea to bring the pitch back.”
“I think I know more, after directing more television, about how to make a TV show on a budget. Before, I had huge plans: it was a very expensive, unsustainable show. But we did write out a pilot, we have a pitch. It's still my dream to make it a TV show; there’s still no American-Filipino show on television in America.”
She’s also busy on a new feature film project (secret!) and working on a re-release of Ang Nawawala, the 2013 Gawad Urian award nominee and Slamdance Grand Jury Prize nominee that same year. Slamdance, the “alternate Sundance” film fest held previously in Park City, Utah, has been a thread, it seems, connecting Jamora and the Fil-Am film community. The fest’s embrace of Alice-Heart, and its star, furthers that connection.
As played by Carandang-Sweeney, the titular Alice-Heart is one of those mumblecore heroines you’d find in, say, Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha—someone whose chutzpah exceeds her current level of competence—but with a twist: “I had never played a mixed-race character before,” she said, and “Mike (Macera) allowed me to interject anything I felt fit the character.” Set in Philadelphia, in glorious black and white (a “budgetary” consideration, we learn), it follows a Fil-Am trying to finish a writing class to graduate from college, constantly being nudged into adulthood by her Filipino mom. Carandang-Sweeney says it was a mix of her own details and Macera’s own life: “Mostly it comes from growing up in the US, the admiration I have for my mom, what she did there for us,” but also “a lot of the character is based on Mike’s life, that bravery and courageousness he—and I, likewise—wish we had, that tenacity to confront people, that fiery passion. I think that characters like that are really interesting.”
Alice-Heart embraces the mumblecore aesthetic—low-budget, character-centered scripts that are often improvised—in a way that’s easily relatable to local audiences. It helps that the actress lives with several Alice-Heart people. “It was easy to work with Mike, he’s my best friend in real life, also my housemate. I live with three other members from the Alice-Heart film. We’re all one big production house.”
Aguila plans to bring Cine Balikbayan south, and to Makati, next.
“Our main goal is to connect Filipino creatives with the diaspora. We have the contacts; we just need to connect them,” he says. “The second phase of Cine Balikbayan is to take recent Filipino films that have not gotten an airing in the festival circuit in the US or North America. Because they’re also curious about what we’re doing here.”
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Cine Balikbayan is a joint effort of Gate 11 Films, Gladiola Films, and Rattan Creative Projects, with the Mowelfund Film Institute as partner. For more information on the program, contact renpaul@gmail.com. Visit the program’s official Instagram page at cinebalikbayan.
