Independencia

At the turn of the twentieth century, a mother (Tetchie Agbayani) and her son (Sid Lucero) flee from the American occupation of the Philippines and hide out in the forest. Together they grow potatoes and learn to hunt, beginning a new life that comes full circle when the son grows older and has a boy (Mika Aguilos) of his own with a stranger (Alessandra de Rossi), apparently raped and abandoned by the Americans. 24-year-old Raya Martin's black and white film Independencia is the second in a planned trilogy on imperialism in the Philippines and it is a work that is searing with intensity and deeply felt love of country. The first film, a silent feature, dealt with the Spanish occupation and a planned third film will cover Japan's rule.

Independencia was the first Filipino film to be selected to the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was shot on a sound stage in homage to the early days of American cinema. It recreates on set the dense jungle of the forest with its exotic animals and insects and the pounding rainstorms with its lush soundtrack recorded elsewhere. As Martin explains, "The film refers to the way those early movies were made, reconstructing the location indoors. We created a forest inside a studio, mixing painted backdrops and live elements. Almost all of it was shot indoors." Though the backdrops are painted, the film never feels artificial but always vitally alive in the importance of its message, the humanity of its characters (though they are broad characterizations), and the childlike wonder of the world it creates.

The only actual historical realism in the film is the showing of newsreel footage of an incident that happened during the American occupation where a young boy was gunned down by soldiers for stealing a piece of fruit from a vendor. While Independencia is a tribute to American cinema, it is also a lament for the loss of Philippine independence and culture. Though the viewer is always aware of the film's highly stylized and often melodramatic aspects, director Martin and cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie have created a breathtaking montage of sight and sound and the historical, cultural, and mythological images haunt us long after the 77-minute film has ended

In this film 24-year-old Raya Martin, the first Filipino director to be chosen for a Cannes Cinéfondation film-making workshop, shows the ambition of the very young. He takes on the entire history of colonization in the Philippines as his subject. And he comes from a country that has been colonized and dominated by Span, then the US, then Japan, then the US again. But Independencia, whose 35 mm camera work is by the French cinematographer Jeanne Lepoirie, and which if you can really separate the two is more remarkable for its lovely evocative black and white look than for its narrative, approaches its subject indirectly. Skillfully appropriating the style of long-ago local studio films (silents, and early talkies) and reveling in their artificiality, soft focus and fixed camera positions, it depicts a young man (Sid Lucero) and his aging mother (Tetchie Agbayani), who slip off into the forest to live in hiding because they feel an invasion is coming -- the invasion of the Americans. (This is not merely symbolic, but happened during the various invasions, that Filipinos escaped and lived dangerous hidden lives in the hinterlands.)

The look evoked is of the films made during the American occupation, while the events take place during the same time. The forest/jungle that dominates the scenes is lush and gorgeous and luminous. The son and mother find an abandoned shack and live there. The son later finds a wounded and raped girl (Alessandra de Rossi) and takes her back to the shack. Later his mother dies. The story jumps forward, after the brief interruption of a segment from a mock-propaganda film justifying American soldiers shooting a boy who steals in a village market, meant to take the place of an old style cinema intermission break, to some years later when the young woman and the son are now living together as husband and wife and have a young son -- or rather, are raising the boy with whom she was pregnant when she arrived (Mika Aguilos). Since he is light-skinned, perhaps he was fathered by an American, and that indeed is indicated by a fugitive line of dialogue earlier.

There are several important sequences of oral storytelling, and a pungent speech in the film's Tagalog language in which the little boy describes exploring and seeing a golden man by a river whose hair and body are so bright he can't look at them. (A savior, or a white oppressor? The boy's father?)

The film, which is rich in insect sounds throughout (as well as intrusive music) ends with a spectacularly loud and lightening-filled typhoon when the little family is broken up. The little boy is left alone and driven over a cliff by the invaders.

At the risk of seeming superficial, one has to say that the visuals are what sing in the film; the narrative is allusive and symbolic and you can make what you want of it, but the images provide immediate rewards. As Deborah Young writes in her Hollywood Reporter review, "Though everything is obviously shot on a studio set with potted plants and a painted backdrop, the effect is to cast the characters into a magical world that can be both quaint and wondrous." Moreover the whole film shows the beauty of shooting with a lens that has a shallow depth of field, and the evocation of silent-era film-making at times is remarkable. Independencia is an experimental work (Raya Martin has spoken of being inspired by Stan Brakhage's painted images in his final shots of the boy, with the colorless landscape suddenly painted red), but visually it is stimulating to the imagination, and the apparent simplicity belies the richness of the effects. Like many a talented young artist, Martin seems self-absorbed, pretentious and naive, proclaiming at Cannes that he hoped people would get "to die for their country and for cinema." Time will tell if his talents will bear solid fruit or get lost in showy gestures. Meanwhile, he has ideas more mainstream cinematographers may want to steal.

Independencia is the second in a trilogy, following A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (2005), which dealt with the struggle for independence from Spain in the late 19th century and was made in the style of silent films.

Shown at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard series (along with a short, Manila shown out of competition). Seen as part of the main slate of the New York Film Festival, October 2009.