ON August 6, 2021, the nation’s leading film festival, the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, reels off like last year’s online edition because of the prevailing health crisis brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite the emergency, Cinemalaya has maintained its vision and mission to serve the movie-going public the best in information and entertainment a film can offer albeit only short films in the exhibition.
Unlike in the 2020 Cinemalaya where there were only 10 official short features, the 17th edition will have 13 official entries in competition because the selection committee saw the exceptional qualities of the submissions, according to Jose Javier Reyes, the Cinemalaya Monitoring Head. “There were more than 200 entries but we trimmed them down to only 13,” said Joey.
The bests of the best among the 2021 crop of Cinemalaya shorts are “An Sadit na Planet (The Little Planet)” by Arjanmar H. Rebeta; “Ang mga Nawawalang Pag-asa at Panlasa (The Lost Hopes and Flavors)” by Kevin Jay Ayson; “Ang Pagdadalaga ni Lola Mayumi” by Shiri de Leon; “Ate O.G.” by Kevin Mayuga; “Beauty Queen” by Myra Aquino; “Crossing” by Marc Misa; “Kawatan sa Salog (A Toy in the River)” by Alphie Velasco; “Kids on Fire” by Kyle Nieva; “Looking for Rafflesias and Other Fleeting Things” by James Fajardo; “Maski Papano (I Mask Go On)” by Che Tagyamon and Glenn Barit; “Namnama eng Lolang (Grandmother’s Hope)” by Jonnie Lyn P. Dasalla; “Out of Body” by Enrico Poe and “The Dust in your Place” by David Olson.
Meanwhile, Visayan artist, CCP Vice-President, and Cinemalaya Festival Director Chris Millado intimated that last year’s overall earnings hit P2 million-plus and he was happy about it.
“We just targeted two million pesos last year but our expectation went beyond that. We gathered more than two million,” he beamed with pride.
This year, Cinemalaya hasn’t set its goal of target sales although I sent in a question on the chatbox during the presscon of how much are they aiming.
Chris said they want to generate more revenues. It was affirmed by Gemma, saying that a month-long schedule of film screenings has more chances of generating funds. Millado invited all film enthusiasts not only in the Philippines—Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao—but from all over the world as well to log on to Cinemalaya online screening.
The 17th Cinemalaya has many exciting components aside from digital showing of short films in competition. It has reruns of award-winning films in the past editions, screening of world cinema, launching of the book “Riding the Waves”, a collection of essays and photographs with stories on the 15 years of Cinemalaya, an ongoing Ricky Lee Scriptwriting Workshop online, an incoming film lab on planning, production, marketing, promotion, booking of films and webinar on audio-visual productions on the various aspect to be spearheaded by filmmaker Jose Javier Reyes.
Cinemalaya 2021 runs until September 5, 2021.