A national artist delivers a powerful message urging us to embrace and celebrate our cultural heritage, highlighting its richness and greatness, and encouraging us to avoid being mere imitators of modern society.
Masato Hara made his directorial debut in high school in 1968 and achieved a reputation as a young prodigy. Many years later, he continues to make films and show his old experimental 'live-screening' films, but is saddled with massive debts. This film follows eight years in his life.
As the ultimate enfant terrible of Philippine cinema, avant-gardist Kidlat Tahimik refuses to settle on anything, whether it’s the telling of a colonial past, or any version of this film, which he’s been making and revising for nearly four decades. BalikBayan, which means “returnee” in Filipino, is partly about the homecoming of the historical figure Enrique of Malacca, a Malay who Tahimik first played and brought to the screen in 1979. As the slave of the 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan he circumnavigated the Earth, before returning home as a free man. Old footage of Enrique, played by the young Tahimik, is mixed with the fictional story of a mysterious old man, played by the present-day Tahimik, and documentary footage of a contemporary artist community in Baguio, in northern Philippines. In this version, Redux VI, Tahimik continues his quest to reconsider the Philippines’ colonial legacy. Shot on 16mm (1979–1980s) and video (1990s–2017).
A machine capable of recording ideas directly from the mind is invented, and an out-of-work comedian suffering from depression uses it to learn if he still has the gift to make people laugh.
Magellan, the famous navigator, met his untimely death in the Philippines before he could circumnavigate the globe. Ironically, it was his slave and translator Enrique who most likely was the first to achieve the historic feat.
This film is a record of the first Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. It reflects the various ways the festival was given shape by nascent global changes embodied by Perestroika, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and many other contemporaneous events.
Eric de Guia (born October 3, 1942 in Baguio City, Philippines), better known as Kidlat Tahimik (a Tagalog translation of "silent lightning"), is a film director, writer and actor whose films are commonly associated with the Third Cinemamovement through their critiques of neocolonialism. One of the most prominent names in the Filipino film industry, he has garnered various accolades locally and internationally, including a Plaridel honorarium for Independent Cinema. He is dubbed by fellow filmmakers and critics as the "Father of Philippine Independent Cinema".
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