Director Deocampo at center stage for Philippine film fest
By Bruce Emond
JAKARTA (JP): Tall, slim and boyish at 42, Nick Deocampo does not look like someone all too ready to rattle the moral conventions which define society.
But the independent filmmaker has made his art a mission to delve beneath the veneer of decorum which governs our lives, putting at center stage the human flotsam and jetsam who are so often swept aside for the good of the grand picture.
His works -- some of them focusing on marginalized women, child prostitutes and transvestite entertainers of his native Philippines -- have been commissioned by such organizations as Japan's NIK and London's Channel 4. They have been feted at international film festivals around the globe and earned him a reputation in some circles as the "moral conscience" of the Philippine film world.
Deocampo remembers falling in love with images on screen as a boy when his mother took him to see Fellini's Satyricon in a rundown movie theater near their home on a small island off Luzon.
"There are parts of the film where the characters turn to the camera and speak directly to it, like they are talking to you. For me it was like an affirmation. I was touched by that."
He later moved to Manila to study theater arts at the University of the Philippines and continued on to a one-year film scholarship in Paris. His coming of age as an independent filmmaker was during the waning years of the Marcos dictatorship in the early 1980s.
"I realized that short films were an alternative to commercial cinema, that it could redefine what cinema is as an alternative space," Deocampo said at his hotel in Central Jakarta, where he has come to show his films this weekend at Teater Utan Kayu in a festival of Philippine short films.
"The films also serve a social function in showing things like poverty, politics, prostitution, defying censorship."
It has also been an opportunity for him as an Asian to give his perspective because "so much of our history has been written by white people and seen through their eyes".
His first film, Oliver, made in 1983, was a documentary of a transvestite entertainer living with his young son and grandmother in a Manila slum. It was the first of what he calls his "Super 8" trilogy, which also included Children of the Regime (1985), about how child prostitutes are served up like candy to foreign pedophiles in a small town, and Revolution Happens Like a Refrain in a Song (1987), Deocampo's personal account of the People Power revolution.
He continued to make acclaimed films in the 1990s, such as the 16 mm Private Wars and The Sex Warriors and the Samurai. He continues to direct today but he is also a scholar and teacher. He is nurturing young talent through his Mowelfund Film Institute and his month-long visit to Jakarta is part of an Asian Public Intellectual Fellowship from The Nippon Foundation to study film in several Asian countries.
With the upsurge in technology, these are exciting and challenging times for filmmakers, Deocampo said.
"The old economic idioms are changing, and it's coming into Asian societies and film, too. It's not going to be about producing for the mass market anymore, but about niche markets, where people will be choosing what they want to view."
Four of Deocampo's films and seven by other Philippine filmmakers will be shown on Saturday and Sunday.
Private Wars (1996, 60 minutes). To be shown on Saturday at 4:30 p.m. The story of Deocampo's search for his father, who left the family when the filmmaker was still a boy.
"In this I was able to put together three layers of history -- the history of a nation, the history of a family and my personal history," Deocampo said. It was also a means for him to confront his own "private war" about his sexual orientation.
It will be followed at 7 p.m. by the showing of other shorts:
Manila Child (Nonoy Davidas, 1993, six minutes), an animated story of a poverty-stricken mother desperately trying to dispose of her baby.
In Manila (Mike Alcazeren, Josephine Atienza and Ricky Orellana, 1989, about six minutes). An impressionistic portrait of the Philippine metropolis.
Lightning (Joey Agbayani, 1989, 10 minutes). A rambunctious comic book satire of a truth-seeking journalist up against a crooked politician and his private army. Like Pinnochio's nose, the newsman's pencil acts as a barometer of the lies being fed him.
True Blue American Coconut Grove (Luis Paredes Quirino & Donna Sales, 1989, nine and a half minutes). An experimental film produced by the Goethe Institut Manila, it is the story of "a guy with a gun and a girl who dies in the end".
The Other Side of the Volcano (Ellen Ramos, 1997, 10 minutes, animation).
A Study for 'The Skies' (Raymond Red, 1989, 10 minutes). A man's struggle to reach the heavens.
Trip (Jon Red, 1993, 11 minutes). A young boy goes to the city for the first time and learns about urban life through the characters on a jeepney.
Only Deocampo's films will be shown on Sunday, beginning at 5 p.m. (there will be a talk led by the filmmaker at 7 p.m.).
Isaak (1993, 10 minutes). A meditation on the complex relationship between fathers and sons. "It's utterly allegorical, the story of how sons can become the victims of a very patriarchal system," Deocampo said, adding "it's my most psychoanalyzed film".
Memories of Old Manila (1993, 22 minutes). The story of Manila, in Deocampo's vision once the envy of the Orient but now sunk into despair.
"It's a syncretic view of my country's history in 22 minutes, of an imaginary journey into the very real experience of 500 years of colonization."
The Sex Warriors and the Samurai (1995, 26 minutes). Deocampo calls transvestites his "heroes" for what they have to face in society, and this is the story of a Filipino female impersonator working in Japan, which occupied the Philippines in World War II.
"This is really a portrait of how a female impersonator has been socially processed to become a human commodity for the entertainment capital of Japan, but it's also a reassessment of the geopolitics between our two countries which shared a very bitter experience," Deocampo said.