The term regional cinema was coined, or became a wave in the landscape of Philippine cinema, with the inception of the Cinema Rehiyon, an annual exhibition and gathering of regional cinemas and filmmakers all over the Philippines, led by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). It has always identified films with a certain rootedness to place, culture, language, and local realities where it came from, whether the filmmaker comes from a province, town or city, or speaks a regional language.
While this sense of belonging to a region or ethnolinguistic group remains to be true for most of the films that continue to come out from the regions, regional cinema’s usual preoccupation with place-rootedness is coming to terms with the realities of migration and globalization. How does ‘regionality’ or a distinct regional ‘sensibility’ emanate from a ‘transregional’ film, for instance? Where does its rootedness take place?
For filmmakers who have moved places, and are moving in and out of regional–even national–borders, living outside the immediate realities of their hometowns, defining and engaging with a regional cinema and one’s identity as a regional filmmaker becomes challenging–a theorizing that should also be grounded in the conditions of filmmaking in the regions, the opportunities, or lack of it, that shape the practice.
This Minda Salida podcast discussed Filipino films–two 2023 Cinemalaya narrative films and one 2012 documentary film–that depict the liminality of the regional space with characters arriving and departing, leaving and coming home.
In Gitling directed by Jopy Arnaldo, a Bacolod-born translator and Japanese filmmaker meet in Bacolod at an international film festival, where the latter is premiering his film. And yet, it isn’t much about Bacolod as a place, or the Chicken Inasal that the two ate together, but more about the mechanics of translation, and the possibilities offered by it, paralleled by the potentiality of romance from chance encounters.
Meanwhile, Ryan Machado’s Huling Palabas depicts a provincial upbringing in the town of Looc, Romblon, where a movie-obsessed and fatherless teenager and his best friend come of age in the midst of a waning VHS era. The film is also an exploration of queer identity, and how folklore, fiction, and migration shape our way into the world. It presents the region as a locus of departures and arrivals, of the push and pull of the old and new.
In Sherbien Dacalanio’s Ang Pagbabalik ng Bituin, a Mindanao-born domestic helper working in Manila travels back and forth to her hometown in Cabadbaran, Agusan del Norte via the RORO bus bringing with her pirated DVDs and establishing a mini-movie house with her neighbors as patrons. As much as it is about the homecoming of the titular Estrella (star, in Spanish), this fascinating 2012 documentary, which was part of the Daang Dokyu, opens up the discussion about film access and distribution.
The podcast ties up neatly the themes discussed in the films into a narrative that is also about movies and watching movies as a collective experience.
This podcast is completed under the author’s Arts Equator Fellowship. The views expressed are solely of the author.
Special thanks:
Rap Meting of TimeWRAP Films
Executive Producer: Yas D. Ocampo
MindaNews Editor-in-Chief: Bobby Timonera
Hosts, Minda Salida: Jay Rosas and John Bengan
Gitling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eILaN4P6kRc
Huling Palabas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flz260WfCaw
Ang Pagbabalik ng Bituin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZZ4YVYSnig
