Director Deocampo at center stage for Philippine film fest
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.