MAKING THE IMPLAUSIBLE plausible.
As long as one is gifted at defying tradition, rule, logic etc. logically, why not?
That’s the wonder of cinema no matter the era.
That director Shirin Dalisay (Nour Hooshmand) has given birth to a movie projector that pours out black and white images from its reddish mouth at the end of the film is possible?
CINEMALAYA ENTRY
It’s an intriguing denouement in Sari Dalena’s “Cinemartyrs,” one of the entries to the 2025 Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival.
“Cinemartyrs,” a foray into the recreation in film of massacres in Philippine history, isn’t only an allegory; or a symbol; or as the young filmmaker Dalisay would describe as a “poetic documentary” (in her sort of defense as a proponent for a grant from an art and culture agency), it is an amalgam of modern screen approaches if not partly an avant-garde piece.
It is a creative doc as well in its entirety of the many unknown heroes, reel or real, who haven’t been given enough care, much less recognition, not only by the citizens (read: moviegoers) but by the Philippine movie industry itself.
WOMEN AS MARTYRS
Too, it is a tribute to Filipino woman-directors of yore (martyrs in their own way) like two of the pre-war film pioneering artists Carmen Concha and Consuelo P. Osorio and post-war lady helmer Susana C. de Guzman.
In a triptych panel interview simultaneously conducted by Prof. Lena (Raquel Villavicencio, who also portrayed and was made up as the three ladies), Concha confessed that she sacrificed her directing career with only one movie titled “Dream” because she married early.
De Guzman said she got her break in directing for LVN Pictures when she agreed to direct Tony Arnaldo (a matinee idol during the time) who became her husband.
Osorio and de Guzman disclosed that they were trusted by their actresses more than their male counterparts who would probably court these screen goddesses.
POETIC LICENSE
Incidentally, luckily, interestingly, Dalena got an exclusive voice material of Susana as interviewed by the late film archivist Teddy Co who had preserved an authentic tape conversation artefact that lends veracity and depth to the homage.
In Dalisay giving birth to a gadget is more than “poetic license” for Dalena knows how to put her art where her mouth is. They both are iconoclast. They know the meaning of innovation, common sense and finetuning.
In so many scenes, the feminism in them suffices like unofficially assigning on-the-spot the assistant director understudy to a local named Medsfar (Bong Cabrera), an interpreter, because Dalisay is informed that in the Islamic community of the Tausug, a woman isn’t allowed to command anyone, for one.
What is more engrossing in “Cinemartyrs” is the employ of historical facts, presented in an engaging manner like the Philippine-American war where the Filipino patriots fought with fortitude only to be massacred by the fully-armed Americans.
HEROISM EXEMPLIFIED
However, defeated, the heroic deeds of the revolutionaries are exemplified if only and above as Philippine cinema martyrs.
Another forgotten war where Filipinos battled was the Bud Dajo mayhem in Jolo on March 5, 1906 where thousands of Muslims, male and female, young and old, were slaughtered mercilessly by American soldiers.
Dalena doesn’t run out of artistic devices to interpret Philippine history—animation, dance, film within a film etc.
Even the howling ghosts of murdered Filipinos received from audio sets of soundmen aren’t deus ex machina but a foreshadowing of supernatural elements to wreak havoc.
The use of different types of cameras, if only to limit the setting of the narrative, is apparently a conscious play of Rashomon effects or simply to illustrate the fast-changing modes of film tech.