It was the year of restoring classics, from Bona to Jaguar to José Rizal; radical independent films entering the Criterion Channel; axed screenings and public viewing bans suffered by the likes of Lost Sabungeros, Alipato at Muog, Marupok AF, and Dear Satan; soaring ticket costs and declining audiences; and rare box office hits enjoyed by Un/Happy for You and Hello, Love, Again. Yet another frantic year for Philippine cinema.
In no way does it mean, though, that local creators did not produce movies this year that remind us no other medium could meet the power of cinema. Some of these titles not only distracted us from routine demands of life but also dared to imagine alternatives, despite many despites. Sampling the bounty is already taxing; summing up what is arguably the best, as canon-making goes, requires a whole lot of commitment and a little dose of insanity.
The movies that bubbled to the top of this year-end list, I realized, are ones that respond to the many urgencies of our time — not that movies always have to sponge its zeitgeist, but it’s particularly telling in a year suffused with spectacular political rifts and drama. From festival breakouts to gems under the radar, these are the finest works local cinema could offer this 2024.
Best film festival
Though far from perfect chiefly due to hurdles with screenings, ticketing, and technical delays, the 12th edition of the QCinema International Film Festival still towers above local film fests, boasting an expanded slate of world cinema darlings and homegrown titles, section debuts, short film-focused programming, alongside industry initiatives through its project market, panel sessions, masterclasses, and critics lab. It is a befitting coming of age, in the way coming of age is always marked by a kaleidoscope of emotions.
Honorable mentions
First, our honorable mentions.
Leave it to Whammy Alcazaren to bring a serious amount of heat in yet another sleek, whimsical, polychromatic joint in Water Sports, about two sad boys trying to swim their way through doomsday.
Evoking a similar energy is Iane Patacsil and Raya Martinez’s Beep Beep, a propulsive, hybrid film about a multiverse of madness and hardened life in the Philippines, featuring the underrated Sharon Ceneta and every animation style you could think of.
From one bizarre world to another, there’s Kukay Zinampan’s RAMPAGE! (o ang parada), a heist drama set in a world where queer bodies are killed and taxidermied, which finds notes of profundity in its exploration of intimacy and caring systems at the heart of contradictions.
Just as peculiar is Ashok Vish and Maria Estela Paiso’s Cannes short Nightbirds, which blends local bird mythology with a popular blood sport involving roosters in a trippy experience, driven by Pokwang’s glowing presence.
Another piece that would make a fitting companion, though in a totally different tone and genre, is Bryan Brazil’s Lost Sabungeros, a documentary trailing the painful disappearance of cockfighting aficionados since 2021, which, despite its glaring flaws, reckons with essential questions about impunity and injustice.
Two more titles that move towards a grander, militant purpose but remain underseen: Ulap Chua’s Rod, a four-minute experimental recounting of a people’s strike in Escalante, Negros Occidental under martial law, rendered through a single recurring image and eerie soundscape driving its point so effectively; and Darryl Villafuerte’s Piling Obrang Vidyo entry Daíng, which surveys the quotidian lives of the fisherfolk and residents of a Bulacan coastal town threatened by a reclamation project, boldly pointing fingers at actual systems cheating these people out of their livelihood.
And finally, two dramas about selfless parental figures, buoyed by terrific acting: Zig Dulay’s Green Bones, a bifurcated, post-Duterte tearjerker wrestling with the shrapnels of grief and psychology of truth; and Sonny Calvento’s Primetime Mother, a striking depiction of motherhood as spectacle and how capitalism gives license to exploitation, filtered through a visual grammar that is by turns glittery and gloomy.
15. Bahay, Baboy, Bagyo (Miko Biong)
More technically adept films may have probably knocked off this Manila film fest entry from this year-ender, but it makes a sound case for itself as a sober portrait of displacement seen through young but un-infantilized eyes. In director Miko Biong’s hands, a pedestrian street game uproots something else entirely. Never flat, often affecting.
14. Text FIND DAD and Send to 2366 (Kent Michael Cadungog)
Copping the Short Film Special Jury Prize at the debuting Puregold Cinepanalo Film Festival before competing at the 2024 Singapore International Film Festival, this lovely sight from Kent Michael Cadungog extends its story — which finds a teenage girl taking her shot at an upcoming reality television show on the off chance of seeing her estranged father — a generous dose of absurdism to tease out its commentary on the contrivances of exploitation and pitfalls of spectatorship.
13. Outside (Carlo Ledesma)
Out on Netflix, this latest picture from Carlo Ledesma, which is closer in tone to Kenneth Dagatan’s In My Mother’s Skin, functions more as a character study than an outright adrenaline-spiked zombie movie, which succeeds by giving its domestic horror its own sensoria, yielding deep emotional currents and compelling performances from Beauty Gonzalez and Sid Lucero as the central couple.
12. Mama (Alexandra Brizuela)
Shit doesn’t just happen, argues this brief, well-thought-out documentary about Rodrigo Duterte’s dehumanizing drug war that refuses to solely track the carnage but instead intimates the forces motoring the lives of its subjects forward. Part ode to motherhood and part memory study.
11. Silig (Arvin Belarmino and Rithy Lomorpich)
Screened at the 77th Cannes Film Festival as part of an omnibus film project by Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Arvin Belarmino teams up with Cambodian director Rithy Lomorpich in this warm, over-the-top, manically edited short about unexpected returns and lives not lived, anchored by an affectionate dynamic between its leads, Angel Aquino and Sylvia Sanchez.
10. Invisible Labor (Joanne Cesario)
Joanne Cesario’s Invisible Labor, now being scaled up to a full-length title, owes its provenance to the invisible work of archivist Rose Roque, who in turn has documented the story of Carlito Piedad, a utility worker at IBON Foundation credited for rewinding videotapes from Kilusang Mayo Uno not only to preserve the material but more urgently the back-breaking stories it houses.
There’s a time-slipping juncture in the film where it gracefully rewinds footage of a strike in which a crowd of protesters are seen braving the water cannons tooled violently by state forces, invoking the spirit of a movement from the past still bleeding into the present, from one Marcos regime to another.
Cesario, alongside the community of cultural workers behind her, re-stages these labored lives onscreen to make us look close and hard and profoundly process how this nation continues to render these very lives invisible.
9. Tumandok (Kat Sumagaysay and Richard Salvadico)
This debut feature, steered by the duo of Kat Sumagaysay and Richard Salvadico, may not strictly seem like cinéma vérité, but essentially functions as one in the ways it upholds the truth of its characters, real-life indigenous peoples in a tight-knit community in Iloilo fighting tooth and nail for their ancestral land —all of whom are first-time actors, led by Jenaica Sangher and Felipe Ganancial.
The directors’ evocative mounting harnesses the riches of the terrain, in all its greens, yellows, and browns, with a soundscape that provides an interval for us to ruminate on the way in which capitalist encroachment factors into a disenfranchised population’s culture and survival. Movies like this so often feel exploitative, but Tumandok totally thwarts that notion by affording its characters the dignity so casually plundered by private, corporate greed.
8. Ghosts of Kalantiaw (Chuck Escasa)
Special Jury Prize winner at the 2024 Sinag Maynila Independent Film Festival, back after a four-year hiatus, Chuck Escasa’s Ghosts of Kalantiaw follows a fraction of history in a small Aklan town, about a chieftain said to enact the first legal, precolonial code in the Philippines, which turns out to be a hoax and a money-making venture that parallels how the country’s politics work at present, to the extent that a late dictator’s son now rules the roost.
Fusing talking heads, archival images, reenactments, and animation by alternative cinema titan Roxlee, the documentary mines a wealth of meaning because of its ethnographic specificity, showing us that so much of our capacity for greatness has been lost to mythmaking and empty deliverance. Indeed, the mind creates its own fictions.
7. Yung Huling Swimming Reunion Before Life Happens (Glenn Barit)
Produced as part of the US video release of and a sequel to his debut feature Cleaners, Glenn Barit’s latest short, about a group of high schoolers reuniting for a swimming trip, flexes how the director has practically perfected the lexicon of nostalgia.
Here, he still rebels against the pretty and polished, favoring the appeal of a guerilla-style mounting, pixelated pictures, tight close-ups, slipshod transitions, and poignant music not only to encapsulate the spirit of the 2010s but also to pal around with the push-pull thrills and hurts of hindsight, adulthood, labor, and even migration. The movie runs the gamut from sincere to silly, from bitter to sweet, and by the time it arrives at its coda, all the emotion crushingly swells.
6. Isang Himala (Pepe Diokno)
Most titles at this year’s Metro Manila Film Festival demand some suspension of disbelief for its stories to work — and this daring, unfairly under-seen reinvention of a biblical collaboration among three local cinema giants, presenting an enduring tale of a nation in search of salvation is the best the festival could offer.
Director Pepe Diokno, screenwriter Ricky Lee, and composer Vincent de Jesus plumb the depths of the original material, the many lives it cycled through, and the gifts of its theater actors to conjure a spectacle — this thing so spectacularly mastered by this country’s false messiahs — articulating why the Philippines is what it is now and how its people, always desperate to breach an impasse, cling to fraught faith to alter the fates of their lives.
5. Phantosmia (Lav Diaz)
Devoted viewers might argue that Phantosmia, Lav Diaz’s eighth film at Venice, is a corner already mapped in his corpus, most recently in Kapag Wala Nang Mga Alon and Essential Truths of the Lake, both about military men compelled to relive their storied past.
In this case, a recurring olfactory malady leads an ex-sergeant to a penal colony tenanted by hardship and violence, functioning as another sweeping projection of the Philippine milieu.
Phantosmia is among the auteur’s most accessible visions to date, which remains durative, deeply monochromatic, suffused with archetypes, and propelled by spellbinding turns from Ronnie Lazaro, Janine Gutierrez, and Hazel Orencio. Clearly, history is a metal and Diaz is the magnet.
4. Makamisa: Phantasm of Revenge (Khavn)
The father of Philippine digital cinema concocts another joyous, avant-garde bombardment of sounds and visuals, burns and scratches, and poetry and philosophy in this hand-colored, frenetically edited 35mm silent film, a competitive entry at this year’s FIDMarseille, which dares to reframe and repurpose a revolutionary hero’s unfinished novel to enunciate not the arcana of our colonial past but how we scale down its weight just as we abandon a film form that has heralded so many wonders we enjoy now.
At the center of the allegory are mad woman Sisa Bracken (Lilith Stangenberg), wretched poet Simoun Rizal (John Lloyd Cruz), and malevolent Spanish curate Father Agaton Damaso (Khavn himself), whose propulsive turns run counter to the cinematic and social decay the director tries to manufacture onscreen. Simply punk and feverish.
3. Kinakausap ni Celso ang Diyos (Gilb Baldoza)
All of Gilb Baldoza’s previous social realist shorts point to this lived-in, elegantly mounted drama that won the director the top prize at the 2024 QCinema International Film Festival. Propelled by a never-better performance from its lead Bullet Dumas, the movie embraces a simple tale about a father who is willing to go to absurd lengths to secure his family’s future, which doubles as a terse probing of everyday labor in the Philippines in all its complexity and insidiousness.
And just when you think the story is bound to approach an overly-familiar route, Baldoza takes you elsewhere — to a wild, weather-bending alternative that’s always been characteristic of his sharpness and empathy as a director.
2. Alipato at Muog (JL Burgos)
In a year of documentaries and docu-fictions, Alipato at Muog stakes its place as the sharpest among the crop. The movie, helmed by JL Burgos, migrates between timelines and moves towards the collective to chart the disappearance of the director’s brother, activist Jonas Burgos, nearly two decades ago, and how his story spills over into patterns of impunity and indignity that repeat regime after regime.
What Burgos calibrates here is an unflinching indictment of present-day Philippines, of a country that’s often comfortable burying its past. Above anything, he liberates his brother and all the desaparecidos from the capture of the state’s imagination, which feels like watching embers refusing to snap, from the point of view of the fire.
1. Objects Do Not Randomly Fall From the Sky (Maria Estela Paiso)
A response to her debut short It’s Raining Frogs Outside, Maria Estela Paiso’s latest is an absolutely radical, rare work of art that doesn’t only offer insight but probes its very insight. Centered on a young girl morphing into a fish and recalling the fraught state of the fisherfolk in her Zambales hometown, the film takes an intimate, experimental approach to articulating harsh truths.
Paiso submerges the whole thing in deep blue, toys with mixed media, harnesses sound, and exposes the imposing systems that leave populations disenfranchised. But what animates the film further is how Paiso refuses to cede an inch to mere pathos and instead pays close attention to the inner lives that make a community survive, that no violent forces could ever encroach and drown.
It’s a visually contained craft that’s simply sui generis. – Rappler.com
