A film of hope, redemption and green bones
Green Bones is largely a prison film, though all its publicity and promo seem to deliberately avoid using the word ‘prisoner’ and instead refer to jailed characters as ‘persons deprived of liberty’ or PDLs
Among the 10 entries in the 2024 Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF), only Green Bones has the nerve to declare mightily that “it is a movie of hope and redemption.” All the others mouth in their publicity yarn something about the immense thrill their entries will make the viewers experience inside the movie house.
Green Bones is not a religious film despite its promise of “redemption.” Judging from its teasers and trailers, the movie doesn’t seem to have a single scene showing any character praying to God or talking about their faith in God that can free them from whatever unfavorable circumstances they have fallen into.
Green Bones is largely a prison film, though all its publicity and promo seem to deliberately avoid using the word “prisoner” and instead refer to jailed characters as “persons deprived of liberty” or PDLs.
Dennis Trillo as Domingo Zamora.
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF GMA PICTURES
By now, you must have read, heard, or watched that the movie’s title refers to bones that literally turn up green after their owners had been cremated. It is said that only people cremated and known to be good most of their lives will produce green bones. It is just a superstitious belief.
The stunningly goodlooking actors Dennis Trillo and Ruru Madrid topbill the film. The former portrays a PDL and the latter the warden in the jail house where Trillo’s character has been incarcerated for some years and is about to be paroled. The warden is against the particular prisoner to be for some mysterious reason.
As part, most likely, of GMA Pictures’ publicity strategies, it is not revealed who among the narrative’s character (or characters) dies, gets cremated, and the remains yield some green bones. Such yielding is rare but has been noted by scientists as an event that has nothing to do with the virtues of the cremated. Good old Google has many entries why some bones turn green soon after cremation and most others don’t.
Trillo’s character is described in the film’s publicity mill as a “hardened criminal” whose imprisonment in the narrative is due to his killing of his own sister and the daughter of that sister.
‘Green Bones’ is not a religious film despite its promise of ‘redemption.’
