LET ME put this down before I forget. A few weeks ago, an old Hong Kong friend named Peter Gordon wrote me to invite Filipino writers to vie for a new essay prize sponsored by the Asia Business Council and Time Magazine.
Called the Asia Challenge 2020 Essay Prize, the competition seeks to generate fresh ideas for tackling key challenges to Asia’s continued competitiveness and development, as well as encourage young professionals to make an impact on public policy and business in Asia. In 3,000 words or less, entrants need to deal with these questions: What is the most important challenge facing Asia over the next decade? Why? What should be done about it?
The contest is open to all Asian nationals under 32. The deadline for electronic submissions to prize@asiabusinesscouncil.org is August 31, and the prizes are $3,000 for first prize and $1,000 each for two second prizes, to be awarded in Singapore in an all-expenses-paid ceremony. You can find more information about the prize in http://www.asiabusinesscouncil.org/docs/AsiaChallengeEssay.pdf.
It’s great to have people like Peter pushing Filipinos to engage themselves more deeply in these pan-Asian endeavors. A publisher and a longtime Asia resident, Peter was the Executive Director of the Man Asian Literary Prize when I and subsequently Krip Yuson went to Hong Kong as finalists a few years ago, and Peter was so convinced that Filipinos had it in them to win the prize (which Miguel Syjuco did, last year) that he came over to Manila to speak before young Filipino writers to get them to write more novels.
While this essay competition goes beyond what many people think of as creative writing, it’s nonetheless an interesting barometer of not only how Asians write, but how Asians think, and if I were only 24 years younger I wouldn’t think twice about contributing my 3,000 words’ worth of contemplation about the Asian future, for the chance to eat my fill of chili crab along the river in Singapore.
I HAD a very interesting lunch last week with the highly accomplished director Joel Lamangan, whose new film “Sigwa” was going to be screened at the UP Film Center later that afternoon. I’d asked Joel to meet with me to be interviewed for a book I’m writing about the award-winning actress and humanitarian icon Rosa Rosal, who counts Joel among her best friends and with whom Joel had worked on the TV series “Vietnam Rose” a few years ago. I’ll tell you more next time about that book and its inimitable subject—whom a recent Reader’s Digest survey named the Philippines’ Most Trusted Person and who celebrated her 60th year with the Red Cross last month—but let me segue for now into another topic to which our conversation drifted, perhaps inevitably: the state of Philippine cinema, and what can be done about it.
Let me preface that by saying that Joel and I had collaborated before on an unabashedly commercial film project, the Sharon Cuneta starrer "Ikaw" (1993); we hadn’t seen each other much since, so this was a happy reunion. Joel reminded me that I had a whole other life in film as a screenwriter, from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, during which I scripted more than a dozen films for the late Lino Brocka before moving on to work with the likes of Laurice Guillen, Gil Portes, and Marilou Diaz Abaya.
“Why aren’t you writing for the movies anymore?” Joel asked.
“Well, there doesn’t seem to be much of an opportunity to do good, serious movies for mainstream cinema these days,” I said. “You could go indie, but you can’t make much of a living there, it’d be a labor of love.”
In truth, I’d been out of touch with the local movie industry for so long that I had no real idea where things stood at the moment. I knew that we had a vibrant indie scene—with Cinemalaya just having been held and with new directors like Brillante Mendoza and Lav Diaz earning accolades abroad—but other than that I didn’t know what was going on. The last Filipino movie I saw and frankly enjoyed was “A Very Special Love”—in DVD format, on a bus on the way to Baguio. Call me an unsupportive, colonial-minded hypocrite, but that’s the way it is. I think I’ve paid my dues to the industry, and I don’t think watching Pinoy movies should be a patriotic duty, but an experience you should look forward to for both pleasure and enlightenment.
At any rate, I threw the question back to Joel. Where, exactly, is Philippine cinema these days?
To begin with, said Joel, only about 25 to 30 movies a year get turned out by mainstream producers. That’s a far, far cry from our heyday back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when the figure easily breached 200, putting us just below India as Asia’s most active film industry.
So what happened? Well, the Hollywood blockbuster, for one thing, and then the oversize growth of the studios and the high costs of production that favored safe, formulaic movies, and then, most recently, the dominance of the major TV networks not just in their medium, but in film production.
“It’s the TV networks that basically dictate these days what gets shown on the big screen,” said Joel in so many words. “The big stars are under contract to them, and they have the power to promote their movie projects all over the media.”
Because TV’s staple is the telenovela or soap opera, and because these telenovela-trained stars are the same ones who appear in the movies, a curious phenomenon has emerged. “The acting in our movies is very soap-operatic. The actors don’t know any better.”
Also, and perhaps more alarmingly from a purely aesthetic point of view, directors and writers are now often overseen if not overruled by “creative committees” who may be more concerned with bankability or with how difficult some stars are to deal with than with a project’s truly creative aspects. (I’d had my own brushes with this “management by committee” in the big studios, where everyone’s brother and alalay sat down to make suggestions about the script.)
You’d think that the solution to all this would be to go indie—independent films, after all, cost only about P3 million to make, and give directors and writers much greater latitude to try new things—but think again. “No Filipino indie films have made any real money,” said Joel. “They may garner critical success and attention abroad, which is good, but at the same time, they have been drifting farther away from the sensibility of ordinary Filipinos. They no longer know or use the language of the masses, both verbal and non-verbal. So they haven’t really made a major impact on the local market. Think about this—our best-known film directors abroad such as Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal were first accepted here before they gained international attention.”
So what needs to be done? “We need to set up a National Film Commission, like most major film-producing countries have, even Bangladesh, to help Filipino filmmakers market their films abroad. These commissions make sure that their films are in all the right markets, are properly dubbed or subtitled, and so on. Instead of giving cash awards or rebates to a few good movies, why don’t we solicit and fund good scripts? Also, we directors should find a middle way between patronizing and alienating the Filipino audience.”
With a new administration in place, Joel echoed a perennial plea of mine: “Culture needs to get the attention and respect it deserves, perhaps through a Department of Culture. The government should see us not just as entertainers for intermission numbers, but as an industry capable of employing thousands of people and generating many millions of income, with the right supportive policies.”
Amen, Joel Lamangan! And thanks for lunch.
(Image from igma.tv)