Complainant

The Meldy Movie

A feature length autobiographical film showcasing the life story of Melody Contreras-Williams, famed Lyric Video Creator, Artist, and DJ.

Highlights

2017 · ★ 5.5

Lights flicker & fade as focus shifts from artificial to natural light, ending on a second artificial light speeding through the blackened miasma of the night sky.

Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song

2010 · ★ 6.5

Sarah is a debt collector who lives among the inhabitants of the village of Guimbal on the island of Panay. She wants to find the young man who appeared to her in a dream and goes to the island of Negros. Here, as she interacts with the inhabitants, Sarah continues her search, gathering memories of life and war, dreams, myths, legends, songs and stories that she takes part in and at times revolve around her. She is the daughter of an ancient mermaid, a revolutionary, a primordial element, a virgin who was kidnapped and hidden away from the sunlight. “The film is a retelling of fragments of the American occupation. Dialogue, shot in the Hiligaynon language, is not translated but used as a tonal guide and a tool for narration. Using unscripted scenes shot where the main character was asked to merely interact with the villagers, I discard dialogue and draw meaning from peoples’ faces, voices, and actions, weaving an entirely different story through the use of subtitles and inter-titles.”

Mapang-akit

2011

"Mapang-akit" is an offshoot of a documentary project made with an Icelandic filmmaker and uses the outtakes from the Hudas Hudas festival in Antique, where a community bonds over a large effigy of Judas Iscariot during Holy Week. Amidst it is a found story of a man who returns home to his death after pursuing a woman in a neighboring village.

Colossal

2012 · ★ 7.3

Colossal explores the complexities of grief and the process of grieving as understood through the myth of a Man as he ventures through shifting landscapes ruminating.

Taglish

2012

At first, there was Tagalog, Gym Lumbera’s short and, to his mind, unfinished narrative about the infidelity that comes between a husband and wife in their twilight years, shot on film and reflecting his own real-life infidelity.. And then there was a storm, a real storm and not a metaphorical one, that flooded his house and submerged, and subsequently damaged, the only copy of Tagalog. This damaged version, entitled English, became the missing piece that completed the film. The new work is named after Taglish, the bastard hybrid, some say corruption, of Tagalog and English, and has become a meditation on love and language and the ways in which we betray and destroy them.

Todo Todo Teros

2006 · ★ 5.2

Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.

Out of the Law

2017 · ★ 5.5

Beyond all human restraint lies one's lugubrious layers of paint.

Biljana Returned from London

1976

A man’s female friend who just came back from London spends time on the river shore.

Mystery Hole//Boring Soul

2017 · ★ 5.5

Time plods along in spattered irregularities as anger and depression coalesce in confusing amalgamations.

Maybe That's Enough

2017 · ★ 5.5

Platitudes begin at peaks then rapidly descend and dismantle in order to ascend more acutely until they repeatedly and successively overwhelm.

Pollice Verso Reverso

2017 · ★ 5.5

A 'reversal' of Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1872 painting Pollice Verso.