The Philippines' Oscar film is sold out in Houston tonight. Saturday still has seats.
Filipiñana, the film the Philippines sent to the Oscars, sold out Friday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Saturday at 2 p.m. still has seats, at $9.
The Goldscene Desk
Friday night at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is sold out. The film is Filipiñana, the one the Philippines sent to the Oscars, and Saturday at 2 p.m. still has seats.
Isabel is 17, from the rural north, and new at a country club outside Manila. Her job is to sit low in the bay and set the ball so the man above her can swing. Jorrybell Agoto plays her in Rafael Manuel's first feature.
The man she keeps looking for is the club president, Dr. Palanca, played by Teroy Guzman.
Manuel already told this story once. The 2020 short, with Agoto in the same part, won the Silver Bear jury prize for short film at the Berlinale.
He has said the first golf courses in the Philippines were on American military bases, and that after the Americans left, the ruling elite took the clubs and made them their own. The film is one day on a course like that.
The title is his play on Americana, and the ñ is there for the Spanish years. Filipiniana is also the everyday word for clothes, books, and objects that read as Filipino.
A golf course is an odd thing to file there. He went ahead and did it.
The Film Academy of the Philippines chose the film on Sept. 13. Jerrold Tarog's Quezon was one of the other seven, with Jericho Rosales as the Commonwealth president. Tarog made Heneral Luna.
Bianca Balbuena, a producer on Filipiñana, said they wanted different voices, and new ways of telling the story.
The Philippines has been sending films in this category since 1956, and it has never been nominated. The Academy's shortlist of 15 is due Dec. 15.
South Korea's entry, Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love, is in a few theaters this weekend too.
Filipiñana already opened in the U.S., at Film Forum in New York on Aug. 28. That one screen did $26,546 over the weekend. The run has thinned out since. Houston's date is a museum screening, for Filipino American History Month.
Saturday is in the Lynn Wyatt Theater, in the Kinder Building. Use the 5500 Main Street entrance. Parking is in the Kinder Garage.
The film runs 100 minutes, in Filipino, English, and Ilokano, the language of the northern provinces, with English subtitles. A conversation follows, so the museum lists the showing as 2 to 4 p.m. Tickets are $9, and $7 for members, students with an ID, and seniors 65 and older. Doors open 30 minutes before, and there is no late entry.
Cybil Joy Pallugna-Saenz moderates the talk. She is board president of the Filipino American National Historical Society's Houston chapter. With her are local filmmakers Erin Kristelle Bernardo and Cal Mascardo.
Our take: if you are in Houston, go Saturday. You are there for Isabel, and for the talk after with people who live in the city. It is $9.
