Kristine Kintana

Hong Sang-Soo’s Lost in the Mountains (South Korea, 32min) the visitor is the supremely self-centred Mi-Sook, who drives to Jeonju on impulse to see her classmate Jin-Young – only to discover that her friend is having an affair with their married professor, who Mi-Sook once dated herself. The level of social embarrassment goes off the scale. In Naomi Kawase’s Koma (Japan, 34min), Kang Jun-Il travels to a village in rural Japan to honour his grandfather’s dying wish by returning a Buddhist scroll to its ancestral home. Amid ancient superstitions, a new relationship forms. And in Lav Diaz’ Butterflies Have No Memories (Philippines, 42min) ‘homecoming queen’ Carol returns to the economically depressed former mining town she came from – and becomes the target of an absurd kidnapping plot hatched by resentful locals. Serving as his own writer, cameraman and editor, Diaz casts the film entirely from members of his crew and delivers a well-seasoned mix of social realism and fantasy. —bfi

Man is good and man is evil; man’s complex nature and existence has always been defined by these two opposite sides. In a remote island in the Philippines, the inhabitants of a once-prosperous town have been struggling since a giant Canadian gold mining company was forced to close down. While the company’s departure carried an important victory for people who fought for its closure because of environmental concerns, it also made a lot of people bitter, angry and desperate. It was an economic debacle for them. And they perpetually long for the return of the company. In these desperate times, Ferding, Santos and Willy drown their frustrations by endless drinking of alcohol. The visit of a young Canadian woman who was born in the mining village changed everything.

The Philippines, 1972. Mysterious things are happening in a remote barrio. Wails are heard from the forest, cows are hacked to death, a man is found bleeding to death at the crossroad and houses are burned. Ferdinand E. Marcos announces Proclamation No. 1081 putting the entire country under Martial Law.

An itinerant tattoo artist joins a talent reality show for lesbians in the hopes of winning the prize money that will enable her to get artificially inseminated and achieve her lifelong dream of becoming a mother.

A man is wrongly jailed for murder while the real killer roams free. The murderer is an intellectual frustrated with his country’s never-ending cycle of betrayal and apathy. The convict is a simple man who finds life in prison more tolerable, when something mysterious and strange starts happening to him.

Florentina Hubaldo keeps repeating her story, orally, akin to a mantra, a meditation and a prayer; her way of remembering; her means of maintaining hope for survival and redemption; fighting with what’s left of her memory. She lives and exist in a place and a condition where history, her story, is being systematically being obliterated. Two gold hunters endlessly dig the ground with their shovels and hoes for the proverbial treasure that will emancipate them. A father sadly waits for the death of her fragile daughter.

The directors want to shoot a film about a man known as the son of god. But what starts out as a practical joke, extends to become a curious portrait of what could either be a petty fraud or the world’s most secret miracle. A film crew tracks his bizarre pilgrimage as magic and religion, faith and doubt, real and unreal blur and melt to the point that one of the director becomes one of the characters. The film traverses all descriptions, before ending as both an affirmation of faith for the faithless and a criticism of faith for the overly faithful.

Andres Bonifacio y de Castro is considered to be one of the most influential proponents in the struggle against Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines during the late nineteenth century. Bonifacio’s widow is searching for her husband’s missing dead body; as she and her followers stumble deeper into the jungle, they become entangled in the dense thicket of their own guilt and responsibility. The Spanish governor tries to play off the various rebel factions and their utopian visions against each other. At the same time, a badly wounded companion of Bonifacio reflects upon the victims a revolution inevitably creates. Mythology, facts and a vibrant sense of history merge.

Kints and Charles have been together for almost a decade. One day, Kints wakes up and discovers that her lover has changed, literally. Although troubled at first, she eventually understands that what happened is a natural phenomenon. Through this, she is reminded that people change all the time and love can change people.

Fiction and reality blur when Leonor, a retired filmmaker, falls into a coma after a television lands on her head, compelling her to become the action hero of her unfinished screenplay.

A silent film by Jet Leyco.