Friday, March 29, 2024

Circle

History on the silver screen

Survivors of the Siege of BalerREMEMBER Baler.

In commemoration of the Spanish-Filipino Day, the Instituto Cervantes organized a public viewing last June 27 of the film Los Ultimos de Filipinas (1945), which portrayed the events of the “Siege of Baler.”

Often obscured in the pages of history, the “Siege of Baler” was first immortalized on screen during the reign of General Francisco Franco, Spain’s authoritarian leader from 1936 to 1975.

Directed by Antonio Roman, the film retold the experience of the Spanish soldiers trapped inside the church, until the day they surrendered to the Filipinos. It was a story of courage, confusion, and hope, with a tinge of humor.

UST’s environmental dozen

TWELVE artists of different philosophies and artistic styles were brought together by their environmental advocacy in Our Mother’s Boiling Point, which ran recently at the Lunduyan Art Gallery in Quezon City.

Zeus Bascon, JL Burgos, Con Cabrera, Leo Castillo, Mideo Cruz, Arthur dela Cruz, Mariuz Funtillar, Milmal Onal, Marga Rodriguez, Dicky Joe Santos, Katrina Tan and Felix Petel Jr., all graduates of UST, showed works that generally depicted nature’s degradation due to pollution and exploitation.

Mariuz Funtilla, a Fine Arts in Painting graduate, used cigarettes and other smoking paraphernalia in a mixed-media work, “Hindi Ka Pa Ba Naiinitan?”

“It’s ironic that everything that I put in the work destroys the ozone layer, but this art work tells its audience to stop (from smoking),” Funtillar told the Varsitarian.

Painting the town GREEN

MANY Filipinos who experience traffic jams, knee-deep floods and crater-riddled streets share the dream of rebuilding Metro Manila.

Now, they can give their recommendations on how to rehabilitate the metropolis through an online suggestion box spearheaded by street artist Mark Salvatus.

“I’ve lived in the city most of my life,” Salvatus said. “I have experienced the chaos of Metro Manila, and as an artist, I want to improve city life.”

Salvatus, a UST Fine Arts alumni, launched last February the Neo-Urban Planner, as part of his residency at the Green Papaya Art Projects, an artist-run space in Kamuning, Quezon City.

Salvatus started his Neo-Urban Planner endeavor through his blogspot account, where he posted a blog entry asking readers what they would like to change the most in their environment.

The artist said he posted questions such as, ‘If you were Bayani Fernando as the head of the MMDA, what do you want to change about our city?”

Philippine TV recycles the recycled

STARVED for creative ideas – and ideas that work (read: make money), Philippine television has not only recycled old materials, it has also recycled the recycled. Now there’s a new trend: remake of remakes.

Hole in the Wall can make people laugh, but this is still another nail in the coffin of GMA 7 where, it seems, originality is a corpse.

GMA7’s late-afternoon treat provides audiences with excitement and hard laughs through an unusual yet amusing concept for a television game show that had originally come from Japan but which was later ripped off for the US and Indian TV screens.

The poet of small things

TELLING a story vividly is one thing, and writing in verses is another. Yet once in a while, a person comes along who manages to weave both into his writing, and seems to make it look effortless.

In his debut collection, Chiaroscuro (UST Publishing House, 2008), poet Joel Toledo takes his readers on a tour of life—from the forces of nature to the complexities of human existence. The collection’s second and third sections, “What Little I Know of Luminosity” and “Literature and Other Poems,” won him first and second prizes in the Palanca awards for Poetry in English in 2005 and 2004, respectively. He also won second prize in the 2006 Bridport Prize, a British award.

Unesco’s landscapes of heritage

THE RECENT US Embassy-organized photo exhibit of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) World Heritage Sites, by renowned landscape photographer Tom Till, at the SM Mall of Asia gave the public a visually colorful and educational tour of natural and manmade landmarks around the world.

Unesco World Heritage sites are places that have been deemed as having outstanding universal value. These are classified as either a cultural site (man-made places that may showcase human genius or an example of human settlements that have withstood time) or a natural site (natural wonders that represent ongoing ecological or biological processes in nature).

Pictures of some 20 world heritage sites from various countries were shown in the exhibit, all of which were taken through a 4x5 or large camera format. Each photo showed each landscape’s uniqueness. The subtext of the exhibit is the need to protect and conserve the landmarks.

An artistic homecoming

THE YOUNG Thomasian art group Daloy Kulay paid tribute to their alma mater in a homecoming exhibit titled “Looking Back” at the UST Museum last March 25 to April 18.

Employing different mediums from oil to fiberglass and textile-infused mixed media, the works tackled such themes as the pursuit of the inner self, the miracle of the mundane and the powers of the heart.

Painting cum laude Michelle Lim showed teaser images of a woman’s story. “When I was Small, the Woman Said” shows a woman’s feet in a pair of sandals on a carpet of grass. The title and the painting spell irony —the sandals being too large for the woman’s feet with the sides bulging slightly, suggestive of the woman’s past.

Nurturing future directors

Aspiring filmmakers from UST and other schools learned the ropes of independent filmmaking in the first UST Cinevita Film Workshop hosted by the Varsitarian and facilitated by Thomasian filmmaker Jim Libiran.

The workshop, held for two weekends of April, “is for free, but you have to pay through sweat and blood,” Libiran said.

Libiran was the director of the film Tribu, which won the grand prize in the Cinemalaya Film Festival in 2007 and the Best Youth Film in the 2008 Paris Cinematheque.

Helping Libiran train the participants in the rigors of indie filmmaking were film producer Dodge Dillague; Ralston Jover, ABC-5 creative director and the writer of Kubrador, 2008 Gawad Urian Best Picture; and Paolo Villaluna, writer-director of the acclaimed film Selda.

The workshop took participants through various aspects of film making. It also disabused from their minds certain misconceptions about film making.

Cinema of brilliance

For its third year, Cinevita, the Varsitarian’s festival of films that celebrate “meaningful expressions of life,” paid tribute to the cinema of Brillante Mendoza with a festival of his key oeuvre, including Serbis, the first Filipino film to break into the the Cannes Film Festival in more than a quarter of a century, last February 26 and 27 at the Thomas Aquinas Research Complex Auditorium.

‘FYU-JON’ of hospitality and design

THE COLLEGE of Tourism and Hospitality Management (CTHM) and the College of Fine Arts and Design (CFAD) melded aesthetics and hospitality in the exhibit “Fyu-Jon: A Fusion Festival of Food, Arts and Businesses.”

Held last March 3 to 5 at the Plaza Mayor of UST, the event was a collaboration of third- and fourth-year students of CTHM, as well as Interior Design students from CFAD.

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