Acclaimed Filipino film director and Cannes Best Director recipeint, Brillante Mendoza, was in Israel this past week, screening his films at The 2010 Cinema South International Film Festival. Filipinim have migrated all ready. Come and gone, like missed.
Brillante Mendoza exposes the medea mechanism of "paradoxical irony" in his award-winning film, "Kinatay" [Tagalog for "The Execution"]:
"Critics simultaneously objected to what they saw on the screen and complained that they were unable to see with sufficient clarity what they did not want to see."
"Movies have such a tremendous effect on the audience. For that reason it's important to me to give viewers freedom of choice. I show them an existing reality. I present the issues connected to it but I don't tell them what to think, what's right and what isn't, I don't judge or preach. In the end, the viewers make up their own minds about what they see."
"It's important to me that movies portray a community, not just the individual within it; that way the movie not only tells a story but also exposes the system that enables it to happen." — Brillante Mendoza
"You can't show acts in a refined, polite way. You have to shake up the audience and create a cinematic experience that represents the horrors that are depicted in the film, and which are carried out by people who aren't even psychotic, who are simply using the power that has been given to them."
Brillante Mendoza compares the Israeli/Arab conflict with the conflict "that has existed in the Philippines for 100 years between Christians and Muslims, a conflict that has only been getting worse in recent years."
"In my next film I will touch upon this conflict, and it will be the first Philippine film that is not specifically meant for entertainment to deal with this issue. We're all in the same boat." — Brillante Mendoza
I am so friggin' excited for this, you don't understand. A Filipino perspective on the human condition is not to be underestimated.
"The cinema I do is Third-World cinema and always will be. I will never have the budget of a Hollywood director and even if I were given one I wouldn't know what to do with it. I have to accept this, and work within the limits it sets for me." — Brillante Mendoza
"I discovered the kind of film I wanted to make, when I discovered myself." — Brillante Mendoza
DISCLAIMER: His films are not for the faint of heart.
DISCLAIMER: His films are not for the faint of heart.
Ode to Brillante
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