Almost a year ago, I was invited by my friend, Adrian Mendizabal, who was overseeing that year’s Gawad Alternatibo congress, to sit in one of the panels for Film Criticism with three other participants to say something about the “Role of Local Film Criticism and Cinephilia in the Critical Reception of Gawad Alternatibo and in cultivating the Local Discourse on Alternative Cinema.” Below is the copyedited version of the 10-minute speech I made which addresses Gawad Alternatibo, film criticism, and cinephila as one who has been on both sides of participating and deliberating the works.
A brief note though, since Gawad Alternatibo is still riding on Cinemalaya’s calendar, it also got caught up in the bullshit it is now being malls-exclusive festival this year. It sucks to be a participant and a fan in this setting.
Good afternoon, I apologize in advance but I’ll go over time a bit.
I would like to clear up something first. Let us not fool ourselves: Gawad Alternatibo was never a venue for Cinephiles. It was never a venue for film critics either. It is easy to confuse and idealize things if we are not looking into their history. At least from what I have witnessed from the past ten years on both sides of being a participant and jury, Gawad Alternatibo is, for the most part, a venue for interested parties. Most especially in the normalization of digital filmmaking, Gawad Alternatibo became a venue for the young, the old, the student, the amateur, the unprofessional, and the troublemakers who, one day, have decided to make a video either as part of their obligation or just a whim. Well, occasionally, the big boys also show up and submit: I remember going up against Roxlee’s Manila Scream back in 2016. It’s a venue for the too-serious as much as it is for the half-serious. And everybody’s given screen time! Regardless of their commitment to their work.
In the years I’ve been participating in Gawad Alternatibo – prior to 2019 – the programming has always been lazy but interesting: the screenings are in alphabetical order so, you’d know when exactly your film is screening. Gawad Alternatibo in the digital age, prior to 2019, is tiring as much as it is exciting: they never select nor curate. None of these “competing” and “non-competing” bullshit. The Gawad Alternatibo team will just screen everything and it’s a wild zone. As an audience, you’ll never know what you’re going to see. There’s a spirit of randomness and excitement that is very rare in other venues where so-called “cinephiles” go – weirdly enough, coming from a lineup screened in alphabetical order… So there was a value of discovery – a long-forgotten cinephiliac attitude that was formerly represented by Gawad Alternatibo.
Gawad Alternatibo meant a lot for us amateurs: a celebration of our work, an occasion to let other people in the audience know – who are more likely the filmmakers on the same block as you – what you are capable of. No film critics can ever take the kind of wildness Gawad Alternatibo was before 2019 seriously for what it was. Jonell Estillore tried sitting and reviewing Gawad Alternatibo screenings before but you know he was never an insightful being.
Of course, in the sea of submissions, some are forgotten or overlooked. The Jury members – as the most interested party – favor some styles or people or origins and if you’re an unaffiliated nobody from nowhere like I was ten years ago, you will go unnoticed. Here I will disclose as a point of self-criticism: in 2019, I was invited by Gawad Alternatibo to sit in the Jury for the Experimental category with two other people. The goal was different than the past years: it was not just for us to select winners, but also to come up with an “official selection”. So, what will be the case now? We did our work, and I’m grateful for the honorarium, but my fear comes to fruition: more films get overlooked, while a sizable amount of films get screened, I fear for how many others were not screened, especially in the short narrative feature category. There was a suggestion for us to mount special sections for the non-competing films, so at least, for us in the Experimental category we were able to screen everybody, but it wasn’t the same anymore.
The sense of discovery – the only cinephiliac value one can get from Gawad Alternatibo – is no more.
I know that the CCP’s Film, Broadcast, and New Media division have logistical and other challenges, which adds to the point of how much the degeneration of the experience of participating in Gawad Alternatibo is deeper than it seems. If you’ve noticed how, in the past years, Gawad Alternatibo does not have an independent existence from Cinemalaya anymore. Less of a co-optation, it seems to me like a pragmatic jump. It’s cheaper and beneficial to mount both events in one for the CCP. Cinemalaya will get the prestige of mounting the longest-running film festival in Asia as its sub-section, while Gawad Alternatibo will get the resources from Cinemalaya. But then again, so much for the festival championing “independence.”
Speaking of alternatives and independence, let me go back to Gawad Alternatibo before 2019: what sets apart Gawad Alternatibo again, is that, unlike other festivals, they never discriminate and it is what I can describe as… a week-long jam for budding and even so-called “established” filmmakers. There was an awkward atmosphere outside of the Manuel Conde Theater where you could see other filmmakers hanging around being quiet which was a lost opportunity that should have been harnessed. Maybe if Gawad Alternatibo became more aware of what it is – a venue for filmmakers starting and testing out things – and we followed through more with developing that venue where filmmakers can talk to each other, maybe we could have developed a different cinephilia. A different kind of criticism. Or a real alternative cinema: unlike the industrial and “artistic” concerns of the “mainstream” and the “indie” respectively, maybe Gawad Alternatibo, in the future, can develop like a scientific community where practitioners review and critique other practitioners’ work for further development before ever facing the greater public.
Alternative cinema is not a question of what, but of when: we must ask ourselves, when are we doing things differently and when are we doing more of the same?
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