Lifeguard Column by Nicolo F. Bernardo
NOT SINCE Ishmael Bernal’s Hinugot Sa Langit (1985) and Bernard Nathanson’s Silent Scream (1984) have Filipino viewers come across films that belly out the subject of abortion. It’s an issue left behind the scenes; obscured just like life in the womb.
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Now, stories of pregnancy crises and the unborn are coming to life, even taking center stage, in film festivals from Toronto to Cannes to Cinemalaya. This trend, which is still in gestation, needs our support and imitation whenever we can have our own film exhibitions.
Coming to select theatres is Mexican director Alejandro Monteverde’s Bella, a story of a man who helps a woman bear her life and her baby. The film won the 2006 Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice Award, beating Babel and The Last King of Scotland.
The heart-warming movie, whose title rings a bell on the comedy-drama La Vita E Bella, opens up its theme on unplanned pregnancy and life’s surprises with the line, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
Mexican soap opera star Eduardo Verstegui plays Jose, the Latino athlete-turned-chef who meets Nina (Emmy Award Best Supporting Actress Tammy Blanchard), the single, New Yorker waitress who loses her job and gets pregnant. Nina thinks abortion is better for her and her baby, until she fells for Jose and they discover their capacity to love in the face of the unexpected.
Bella contrasts the family-oriented culture of Latinos (much like Filipinos) with a fast-track individualist lifestyle, and which of these offers more of life and real happiness. The true-to-life movie echoes debates in Mexico as the country’s socialist leaders recently voted for legal abortion vis-à-vis what perhaps most Mexicans (and the North American festival voters) really believe.
“I think the people want to see the best of the human condition…It’s a sign of the times,” producer Leo Severino told reporters of the Toronto festival on why the movie gained the most votes.
As for its 60th anniversary, the Cannes Film Festival last May also carried to term a full-length film on abortion with its long “harrowing” images of the aborted baby and the abortion operation. Cannes awarded the top prize, Palm d’Or, to 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (4 Luni, 3 Saptamini si 2 Zile) by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu. The movie’s graphical scenes, in a very artistic manner, deliver a message on the mother’s loss, uncensored and uncut.
There the pregnant Gabita, with her friend Otilia, obtains an illegal abortion during the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. Viewers face the lingering image of the aborted baby in the bathtub and the brutal abortionist who demands sex for a pay.
During the movie’s press conference, Mungiu cleared that his film is not about the issue of backstreet abortion or of “getting caught,” but women taking time to reconsider abortion’s consequences and for governments to be supportive of pregnant women.
France seems to have responded well, granting a National Education Prize government funding for the film’s DVD release, especially for school exhibitions on the topic of teenage pregnancy.
Meanwhile, the screening of Still Life, an official selection to the Cinemalaya film festival on July 20 to 29, impressed a Cannes juror who wants the movie to exhibit and compete in France.
This directorial debut of Katrina Flores, head writer of Star Cinema’s award-winning soap opera Kay Tagal Kitang Hinintay, revolves on an artist’s resignation from life until he meets a girl who once attempted abortion.
James Masino (stage actor Ron Capinding), suffers a paralyzing disease that slowly disables him from continuing his craft. He goes into a private island rest house where he can paint his last masterpiece and end his life. But James happens to share his “final vacation” with the cheerful young girl Emma (GMA-7’s Glaiza de Castro). As James opens up his anxieties, Emma in turn reveals her broken past as a pregnant teenager from a poor, dysfunctional family. She tells James how she eventually learned to let life be; that life itself is not subject to choice as no one can know of the real stakes—the possibilities life may offer. Instead, advises Emma, we should labor conceiving meaning in life as a painter does to his empty canvass.
“I wish to offer hope with this life-affirmative movie,” Flores told this writer. “I thought of the theme after I took a break from work on where the film was shot (Quezon). There I asked myself, if the things that mean most to me were to be lost, would life still be worth living? And I realized that with all our possible losses there is still life, it endures for us to always find a new reason, a new passion.”
Cinemalaya likewise featured Solita Garcia’s Tagapaglitas, a short film on an abortionist who suffers karma. The movie got the UP Film Institute’s Best Thesis Award for 2006-2007. Garcia’s assistant director Mark dela Cruz also made a similar short Garapon, a split-screen installation about “the insanity of choice,” which bagged the first prize in experimental category of the 2004 UP Film and Video Festival.
These films, expecting nativity in more film festivals and multiplications of their kind, are finally aborting a silence where lives are at stake. The real picture from both sides of the debate, from the light to the grim, from the mother and the child, rolls a strong ethic of life from where we held our very first theater seats—back to the womb.
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