A short excerpt from the booklet essay by Antoine Thirion.


Raya Martin is 21 years old when he shoots A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or the Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos, 2005), the first film in a series on the different phases of colonization of the Philippines. A de facto trilogy because the history of the archipelago has known primarily three settlers: Spain until the end of the nineteenth century, the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, Japan during the Second World War. This trilogy has earned Raya Martin early international fame from critics shocked at discovering a young man who bears on his young shoulders such a heavy national burden, bearing mourning and hope, elucidating his countries resolve to address its past and determine a future.

Independencia (2009) is the second part of this ambitious project. When Martin presents it at Cannes where it has been selected in the Un Certain Regard strand, he is twenty-five years old. The story, the era, the shape is different, but they come from the same concept: not to limit itself to narrating the resistance of the Filipino individual, but exhuming at the same time the cinematic style of the period described. With the exception of a long digital prologue, A Short Story About the Indio Nacional imitates the sights and mise-en-scène of the original Lumière films (the film is set in 1890 – the same year cinema was born), and introduces them with standard descriptive inter-titles reminiscent of the inventory procedures and accumulation of exotic sights of these original ethnographic films, which brought the multiplicity and the strangeness of found realities to the world of the white man. Independencia adopts the artifices of early Hollywood, an exotic style  using a single studio constantly reconfigured for interiors and exteriors, filled with jungles and rivers, fake plants, animals and painted backgrounds. Raya Martin has just turned thirty.

One of the concepts of this trilogy is based on a parallel between the history of the Philippine struggle and that of the cinema itself. We know of course that early cinema was used both as an instrument of knowledge and as a civilizing tool. It was born alongside the growing field of ethnology, based on the idea that early societies showed anterior forms of what the Western civilization later achieved, or even remained untouched by history. The intuition that the oppression and resistance of the Philippine archipelago has something to do with the advent and evolution of cinema returns to challenge the submission of the Philippines to Western history. A Short Film About the Indio Nacional tells the story of the lead-up to the Philippine Revolution of 1896-98, led by the Katipunan revolutionaries. It is designed to appear as a contemporary of films like La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon, 1895).

Evoking the exotic tendencies of classic era of Hollywood, Independencia is the story, tightened to seventy-four minutes, of nearly two decades of life in a jungle reproduced in studio. As Michael Guarnieri recently pointed out, the Philippine jungles were in the second half of the century the set of many Roger Corman productions. Indeed, Corman pioneered the use of cheap foreign location shooting in places like the Philippines to reduce costs. Today, for an independent Filipino filmmaker, choosing to shoot a jungle in a studio makes no economic sense; Filipino filmmakers have easy access to real jungles (as seen, for example, in the cinema of Lav Diaz), so choosing to shoot in a studio is a significant choice: not only that, it is part of a bold aesthetic attempt to accept "the challenge of confronting with, and working within the existing economic and power structures, to see if they can be used for something else other than producing entertainment to be sold to a mass audience for profit."

Martin parodies the form, not in a way intended to ridicule Hollywood cinema, but to reinvest them to subvert the power at their source. Here there is no hate without love and no love without hatred: the critical project is not contradictory to the poetic power of cinema.

Antoine Thirion's complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the DVD release.