THOMASIAN filmmaker Brillante Mendoza’s films tackle the country’s social realities through “pornography of poverty,” Thomasian critic Joselito Zulueta said in the book “Direk: Essays on Filipino Filmmakers.”
“[L]ike most of Mendoza’s movies, the humanity does not come on a silver platter, and the poignancy is characterized by a certain realism that renders the feeling painfully gnawing rather than blissfully comforting,” said Zulueta, UST journalism professor and arts and culture editor of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Zulueta explained that negative reaction to Mendoza’s films was due to his imbalanced exploitation of the characteristics of urban poverty and criminality in the country.
“Mendoza contrasts city and province, day and night, brightness and shadows, in this moral allegory that does not moralize,” he said, citing the director’s 2008 film “Serbis.”
Zulueta, however, labeled Mendoza’s aesthetic and approach as “healing of social conscience” with “powerful iconography.”
Mendoza is a master art director who perfectly blended locale, sociology and psychology, Zulueta added.
“He shot a funeral in a flooded area in Malabon, and the sight of the funeral regatta amid twilight looks like Venice amid the play of lights, a romantic counterpoint to the death and depression around,” Zulueta said.
Mendoza, an advertising arts graduate of the University, started directing independent films tackling social issues in 2005.
Some of Mendoza’s critically acclaimed films are “Thy Womb,” “Ma’ Rosa” and “Kinatay.”
He won the Best Director award in the 62nd Cannes Film Festival for “Kinatay,” a film about a criminology student who takes a job as a syndicate member to earn money for his family.
Edited by Filipino screenwriter Clodualdo Del Mundo Jr., the book “Direk: Essays on Filipino Filmmakers” contains perspectives and analyses of the country’s top writers on filmmakers’ manner of directing films.
Other contributors in the collection include Ronald Baytan, Patrick Campos, Vicente Garcia, Shirley Lua, Gil Quito, Anne Francis Sangil, Agustin Sotto, Nicanor Tiongson, Rolando Tolentino and Noel Vera.
The book was formally launched last Aug. 9 at Silangan Hall of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. H. N.Lavarias
