United in love for the movies

United in love for the movies | Daily Tribune

More funding yields stars

The ongoing film festival may be funded by a nationwide chain of Puregold supermarkets, but still has to be considered “small.” After all, its entries are shown only in a few cinemas at Gateway Mall 2. When Quezon City holds its own film festival, the entries are screened at several malls, including one in Makati.

But CinePanalo’s ongoing second edition has become more exciting than the first one because of the organizers increased funding of P3 million for each of its eight entries, thus enabling its directors to afford casting hot young stars in their full-length entries.

This year’s edition has entries that top-bill young stars Khalil Ramos, Jameson Blake, KD Estrada, Alexa Ilacad, Kira Balinger, Janella Salvador and RK Bagatsing. The ever-credible JC Santos, Allen Dizon, Jane Curtis-Smith, Romnick Sarmenta and Ruby Ruiz are also given top billing in some entries. Ara Mina and Nikie Valdez have cameos.

Almost all these aforementioned stars are variously nominated at Wednesday night’s award ceremonies at The Elements at Vertis Central in Quezon Avenue, Quezon City.

Fabulous decision

The results of the awards rites may help improve the box-office revenues of the winning entries. The festival goes on till 25 March. Tickets are at only at P250 per. Gateway 2 is very cozy since its still spanking new. Its floors are so glossy and clean that the mostly young crowd that flock gala screenings feel at ease sitting down at the floor while waiting to be let in for the screening.

The festival was conceived to reflect the personal little triumphs of Pinoys despite persisting difficulties in their lives for whatever reason. Killing and breath-gasping dying scenes seem to be not allowed in CinePanalo entries. A fabulous decision, we assert.

There were supposed to be eight full-length entries this year, but the documentary Food Delivery had to be pulled out due to “external factors (pressures?),” according to festival director Chris Cahilig and the film director, documentarist Baby Ruth Villarama.

Food Delivery deals with the dangers and difficulties to deliver food and other supplies to the ship that guards Philippine waters against intruders. We all know that for years now, it’s the Chinese government that has been grabbing land and water properties from us.

Ruby Ruiz

We have watched Co-Love, Journeyman, Olsen’s Day, Salum and Sepak Takraw. What I have yet to watch are Tara Illenberger’s Tigkiwili and Catsy Catalan’s Fleeting. The former has Ruby Ruiz portraying one of the main characters.

Ruiz seems to have replaced Dolly de Leon as the favorite actress of indie filmmakers before De Leon made it really big in a credited role in the Cannes-winning Triangle of Sadness, prompting her to be based where she has a foreign movie or TV series to shoot.

Both Ruiz and De Leon even used to put up with appearing in movies with no solo credits. Ruiz became an actress that has to be given starring credit after she appeared in an international TV series top-billed by Nicole Kidman. De Leon actually appeared with Kidman ahead of Ruiz in a separate series.

Ruiz is not only Tigkiwili in this year’s CinePanalo, but also in Journeyman, top-billed by JC Santos, and in Sepak Takraw, where she portrays the main female character.

So far, so good

We enjoyed almost all the five entries we have seen so far. Only one is slow-paced, Sepak Takraw, and, perhaps, understandably so, as it is in a tribal forest in Nueva Visczaya, where a family has become dysfunctional because of poverty and loss of land ownership.

“Co-Love,” headlined by Blake, Balinger, Estrada and Ilacad, is really about collaborations among vloggers who are lovers and then become ex-lovers, prompting their ex-boyfriends to be collabs. A twist in gender personalities will develop in the storyline though the script only implied the change in gender status among the lovers. There’s only one scene that foreshadows a gender character change. A sister of one of the four vloggers will tell their mother that she is in love with another girl.

Co-Love is by a first-time film director, the cheery Jill Singson Urdaneta who is a biological male.

Blake and Sarmenta top-bill Olsen’s Day, which ends with a surreal touching twist that can happen only in film and in literature. Olsen, as portrayed by Blake, is a magnetic, memorable character. The film is a love story in two guises: A son’s love for his mother who has dementia, and the mother’s love for the son’s father whom the son can’t remember. The name Olsen in the story is a pun for a folk religious practice. JP Habac helmed the movie.

Journeyman has JC Santos portraying a boxer who cannot become a champion not because he is not good enough to be one. The movie has Santos at his most buffed body — and his most moving portrayal. Ruiz plays a pseudo-mother to Santos’ character.

We certainly will not object if Santos wins Best Actor and Ruiz Best Actress for Journeyman directed by the Lat brothers Christian Paulo and Dominic.