CINEKATIPUNAN: UNDERTOW
Feat: the works of Tara and Joee.
Mag:net Katipunan
4:30pm-7:30pm
January 3, 2009 (that means today/tonight silly)
Saturday
FREE ADMISSION!
NAGLAHONG BUHAY
Directed by: Gabby Fernandez
Running Time: 15 mins
PANDORA
Concept, Sound, and Directed by: Stormy (Joee Mejias and Tara Santelices)
Running Time: 2 mins
Any crisis, be it a failed relationship or a loved one's death, leads one to question his own identity & Weltanschauung. What went wrong along the way? Would the world be my refuge, or my own version of hell? Pandora is a surreal, disjointed study of looking at the ways people cope with these questions. One can shut himself off from everything else, or one can lose himself among everything the world can offer, in an effort to repair his fragmented identity. In the end, the choice is a gamble; anything can open the floodgates to more pain & emptiness. Pandora says: ask & you shall receive; but what it is you'll receive, you are never sure.
Pandora was part of a series of 4 youth-directed short films called Cyclorama, which dealt with the self's seach for identity & unanswered questions. Cyclorama was a finalist in 2007 UP POV FilmFest; Pandora can be watched occasionally at mag:net Katipunan's film screenings.
UNDERTOW
Written and Directed by: Tara Bosch-Santelices
Running time: 20 mins
Mid-21st century: The Philippines is moving slowly towards prosperity & development. Her sprawling, polluted megacities are famous for exporting a quality product- human capital. Many of her citizens are being rigorously trained to be domestics, personnel, workers, & professionals of the highest quality, then exported to developed countries. Society is fragmented, with the urban populace living in a highly consumerist, corporate system, while on the fringes live the poor & displaced indigenous people.
One of these dislocated tribes have been known with a lifestyle, culture, & livelihood tightly entwined with the deep blue waters of the Philippines. Yet the seas had become so polluted & toxic due to uncontrolled industrialization that they were forced to relocate to the megacities, hoping to have a better life while keeping their culture intact.
Inam, a member of the tribe, feels confused & constrained by his roots. Lured by dreams of wealth & escape from poverty, he leaves his people to enter the capitalist rat race- by training as a domestic in one of the centers. At first the rigorous, totalitarian mental, physical, & psychological training goes well. But soon Inam starts to perceive the undercurrents of the system that tear him away from his identity & his roots.
*Stormy is the collaborative effort between Tara BoschSantelices & Joee Mejias. With Joee's background in production design & Tara's in political science, their works merge both surreal & challenging aesthetics & intelligent social/ideological commentary using different media, such as video, shirts, graphics, sketches, short stories,& music.
They are inspired by such material as vintage science fiction, the surrealist & expressionist movements, Neo-Gramscian & queer theories, & industrial/electronic music
