Portrait of the Anguished as a Filipino

walden, 14/05/2006 v kategoriji novice, zapisi

pi??e Noel Vera

I first encountered Lav Diaz’s rather unique sensibility in Joey Gosengfiao and Lily Monteverde’s Good Harvest Film Festival, in 1998. The film was Serafin Geronimo: Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcion, starring Raymond Bagatsing, a minor Filipino-Indian actor (his surname is derived from “Baghat-Singh") who plays Geronimo as a kind of Raskolnikov figure, haunted by guilt for his part in a kidnapping gone horribly wrong. It was not a perfect film, I thought – the pacing was sluggish, half the scenes were dramatically stillborn, and there was no production value to speak of (it was one of Good Harvest’s “pito-pito” (seven-seven) films, reportedly made for around 50 to 65 thousand US dollars, shot in seven days (actually around ten), and post-produced for another seven (actually ten to fourteen)) – but two things about it stood out: it had an unusually thoughtful tone, and it had a riveting lead actor. beri naprej | read more