A stone’s throw from Arcega’s
Nice neighborhood, in case you happen to pass by there, the old Lantana Street in the quiet, residential part of Cubao, which cuts across New York and Boston streets with its Boston Gallery and old trees whose gnarled roots jut out the sidewalk, till at last you land on Aurora Boulevard—a highway with its own overhead light rail system.
Years ago, my cousin, high school batch mate Melissa, lived on Lantana, in the neighborhood that was a stone’s throw from Arcega’s department store also on Aurora, the selfsame pioneer strip mall in the ‘70s where I finally was able to catch Godfather 1, after watching Godfather 2 in the States on an exchange scholarship—and Sonny Corleone banging away at the bridesmaid against the door of an upstairs room where a wedding reception was being held.
From Arcega’s, you can take a jeep to Manila all the way to Vito Cruz, where the Rizal Coliseum held the occasional rock concert when Pinoy rock and roll was then ascendant, a blurry star that guided many a fledgling jeprox through the cough syrup and hazy Benzedrine days. As Himig Natin played in the dark, it felt like a thousand eyes were watching, but of course there were no lighters held aloft, only cousin’s hand seeking reassurance amid the rowdy throng.
I had a chance recently to return to Lantana and the old haunts of protracted adolescence by way of an invite from the nearby Mowelfund Film Institute, which was screening seven entries from their intensive workshop for students and other young guns from all walks of life, not least the streets that intersect both the noisy and quiet parts of Cubao.
On the sixth floor of the Mowelfund building on Ilang-Ilang Street near corner Rosario is the Dengcar theater, where the shorts Bayral, Dear Satan, Adobar, Ang Huling Liham, Negative Pare, Vivid, and Living Spaces were screened on a Saturday afternoon, eve of St. Patrick’s Day—not that it had anything to do with the Irish, but watching the work of kids that could be the grandchildren of Raymond Red and the nieces and nephews of Khavn dela Cruz felt like stumbling on a four leaf clover of Philippine cinema, with all the wildness and offbeat humor of these young desperadoes.
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Of the entries, what stood out at least for me was Ang Huling Liham, with Soliman Cruz as a postman on his last day of work due to inevitable downsizing in a technological world, and as he goes about the rounds to deliver the last batch of letters, the only one left is that addressed to himself, Simon Lirah Talaga. Moving through the alleyways and obscure patches of his well-worn life, Mr. Postman sees flashes of his past until he winds up in a cemetery, dead but doesn’t know it. Or is he? Unsure, because the short is a wonderful tribute to the burned down Central Post Office in Liwasang Bonifacio, the shots of rain in and around the gutted historical building a fitting rhapsody and coda for days when letters were written in longhand.
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Bayral examines the recklessness and irresponsibility and downright gung-ho ethics of social media, as we follow a production team of three in their hunt for subjects to upload onto their accounts, the weirder and more hits and likes the better, the sensationalist bent of tabloids taken a notch or two further. It is the right short to kick off proceedings, with its predilection for distortion and absurd dance numbers including the cleaned-up scavenger, and where the trip to the taong grasa’s shack turns into mayhem when an unexpected domestic situation presents itself, disturbingly on live camera. Here, too, is the visual equivalent of rap sampling, as found footage from the almost lost short How to Perform in Front of Lizard by Roxlee and Ludwig Ilio are inserted for good measure and random effect.
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Metro Manila Film Festival actor Cedrick Juan takes an unpredictable turn in Negative Pare, which is about two friends drinking in a quiet bar and one of them has a problem because his girlfriend is pregnant and he doesn’t know what to do—and so he discusses with his bestie the possible options in this crossroads. The almost dance-like sequences of the girl and Juan as they go through a pantomime of longing and falling out are a bonus in this tale of love gone awry, and the actor’s return to his indie roots speaks volumes on his belief that you can’t get to where you’re going if you don’t look back from where you came.
The four other shorts are no slouches themselves, needless to say, as father and daughter Rez and Cai Cortez give color and shade to their respective entries, Adobar and Dear Satan, while Dennis Marasigan is excellent as an anti-communist lawyer in Vivid, and Living Spaces that wraps up the afternoon features a family in dissolution as they literally move house from conventional home to condo and as usual most affected is the child, his ordinariness a revelation through a most extraordinary depiction.
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The walk through Lantana street afterwards was also extraordinary in its ordinary route, in the magic hour passing by the Immaculate Conception cathedral and the bells ringing at angelus, a stone’s throw from Arcega’s that is no more and Melissa resembling an Allman Brothers song now married to a sculptor, and a news release says the Rizal Coliseum is ready to host PBA games, even as two of three members of the Juan dela Cruz band have gone the way of the wind.