ciao, venezia!

What could be a sweeter vindication!

My film Limbunan has been invited as the closing film in the International Critics’ Week of the Venice International Film Festival to be held from September 1 to 11, 2010.

No Filipino film has ever been featured in the line up of Venice Critics' Week. Seven to eight films are chosen every year from first time directors for this festival section.

Limbunan glimpses into the life of a bride-to-be as she is kept from public view prior to her wedding as tradition dictates. The film follows the ritual motions of the women in a Muslim family after 16-year-old Ayesah’s betrothal to a man she barely knows. It was, arguably, the critics’ favorite in the sixth edition of Cinemalaya.

“[Limbunan] is striking for its patience, and its graceful exploration of a culture that would otherwise face condemnation in the hands of a less nuanced and open filmmaker,” noted Clickthecity.com’s resident film reviewer Philbert Ortiz Dy.

“The film is just beautiful, both visually and thematically. Mangansakan imparts a dreamlike atmosphere to even the most mundane of actions, drawing a connection between past and present, family and culture, tradition and self-actualization,” Dy added.

Critic Francis Cruz hailed its “stylized storytelling and its undeniable splendor, [the film] is most importantly, a very personal ode to his [Mangansakan’s] often misunderstood and misrepresented cultural roots.”

This is the second straight year that a film panned by the jury in Cinemalaya has made it to Venice. In 2009, Pepe Diokno’s Engkwentro was invited to the festival and later won the Best Film in the Orizzonti Section and the Luigi de Laurentiis Award for debut film.

Limbunan will similarly be competing for the Luigi de Laurentiis Award which is given to the best debut screened in all sections of Venice International Film Festival. It comes with a cash prize of US$100,000.

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I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

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what a journey

It has been nine months since the journey started.

I remember very vividly the first time I entered the Competition Office in Horseshoe for the selection interview in November. I remember the agitation, the anxiety of all the twenty semi-finalists of the Cinemalaya grants.

I remember, one month later, the jubilation when I got the letter telling me that I got accepted as one of the ten finalists of Cinemalaya this year.

It was a painstaking journey -the casting, the script revision, the finance mobilization, the shoot- but it was a rewarding one.

Now the Competition has ended. I am grateful for the friendships that I have fostered, the artistic vision that I have fulfilled.

I am also grateful for the trust and confidence of my fellow filmmakers who saw the promise and brilliance of Limbunan despite the loss in Cinemalaya.

But as they say, when a door closes a window opens.

I am grateful to the One for the gift, for the (true) opportunity of a lifetime.

rise of moby dick

Whales are making the headlines these past few weeks. Pro- and anti- whaling countries are embroiled in a tug of war after no compromise was reached in the recent meeting of the International Whaling Commission. Meanwhile, a sperm whale carcass was found near my city -in Samal Island, Davao del Norte- alarming fishermen in the area because of the possible health hazard that the decomposing body of the marine mammal could pose. But the biggest whale news of all is the discovery in Peru of a Jurassic predator three times the size of modern killer whales.

The teeth of Leviathan melvillei (that's the name of the pre-historic whale, in honor of Moby Dick writer Herman Melville) were so large it was initially assumed they were elephant tusks.

"The fossilized remains found in Peru include a jaw bone and several teeth, each around 12 centimeters in diameter and up to 36 centimeters in length."

"The size of its teeth indicate that the mammal fed on large prey, possibly baleen whales which were plentiful at the time of the Leviathan's existence around 12 to 13 million years ago, in the middle of the Miocene Age."