Actualités

By Purple Romero

Manufacturing misery as one of mainstream media’s mortal sins is purveyed creatively with organic elan in “The Slums,” winner of the Heart On Award at the Busan International Kids and Youth Film Festival 2020. The mockumentary, directed by rising Filipino filmmaker Jan Andrei Cobey, goes for the jugular, as it eviscerates the media for its messianic complex and consequent propensity to depict the urban poor as people devoid of dignity.

“The Slums” centers on the Dela Cruz family, whose plight becomes the subject of a documentary film shot in the aftermath of a fire that razed part of a shantytown in Tondo, Manila. Cameras follow them as they move inside and outside their home, their interactions with different family members as well as their individual lives captured on film.

The movie introduces us to the dynamics of a family who is very much aware of the precarity...

Even though rebelling against regimes or hierarchies which have proven to be unjust is a fact of our lives as history has shown time and time again, these systems will prevail, albeit with slight changes in their design. Developments such as globalization and the current pandemic confirm these hierarchies; in fact, one might say, they help emphasizing them even further, which, again, is not a conspiracy, but a mere fact. While those depending on the system to provide food and shelter have to deal with the pandemic, those who can afford it stay in their safe bubbles, whose rules mirror those on the outside, just less subtle, perhaps. In his short feature “Filipiñana”, Rafal Manuel explores the lives and rules in such a “safe bubble”, the country club of more affluent parts of Filipino society, and thereby exposes the unjust mechanisms within said hierarchies and how they help marginalize people.