NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh.

We turn now to look at the film Filipiñana, a dark satire that explores issues including inequality, colonialism, structural violence and patriarchy. The film is set in an upscale golf country club outside Manila. The central character is Isabel, a 17-year-old girl from the rural north of the Philippines. She’s hired to work as a tee girl. She places golf balls on tees for wealthy patrons as they practice their swings on the driving range. This is the film’s trailer.

GOLFER: [translated] You’re new here, aren’t you? How are you finding it?

ISABEL: [played by Jorrybell Agoto] [translated] It’s only my first week, sir.

GOLFER: [translated] What’s your name?

ISABEL: Isabel, sir.

GOLFER: [translated] How old are you?

ISABEL: Seventeen, sir.

GOLFER: [translated] You’re a natural.

GOLFER: Have some water!

TEE GIRL: [translated] The only people allowed on the golf course are golfers and caddies. Are you a golfer?

TEE GIRL: [translated] Some of those balls are worth more than what we make in a day.

ISABEL: [translated] What do they do with the balls?

TEE GIRL: [translated] They sell them back to the golfers. Those balls aren’t the only things they sell to the golfers. You should be careful around the golf course. Most of the golfers are not so nice.

ISABEL: [translated] I just wanted a taste.

Help! Help!

GOLFER: There we go! Made in the U.S.A.!

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was the trailer to the film Filipiñana.

We’re joined now by Rafael Manuel, the film’s director and writer. This is his debut feature film. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Creative Vision. The New Yorker's Richard Brody praised the film as a, quote, “masterwork,” writing that it performs a, quote, “scalpel-sharp dissection of the [luxury tourism] industry, laying bare a mad microcosm of power relations — political, sexual, economic, familial, cultural, even linguistic.” The executive producer of Filipiñana is the acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhangke. Filipiñana is adapted from Manuel's 2020 short film of the same name.

Rafael, welcome to Democracy Now! Thank you so much for joining us, and a huge congratulations on the film! If you could tell us what inspired you to make the film now? You made a short film of the same name several years ago. Did you know you wanted to make it into a feature?

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yeah, first of all, thank you so much for having me here. I feel like it’s such an important program to discuss the themes and the politics of the film.

But yeah, going back to the very beginning, before the short film, I wrote a 30-page treatment for the feature film. I was in film school at the time. And I was quite naive — I think I still am quite naive — and I thought that I could raise the financing I needed for that feature in like six months. I quickly realized that wasn’t the case. And a very experienced producer at the time advised me, very smartly, to just do a proof-of-concept short film first and then build a profile for the feature and properly develop it. And so, it’s been a seven-year journey since doing the short film and getting to where it is now, finally being able to show this film to the world. And yeah, it required a lot of patience, but we really tried to use patience as a virtue in terms of really taking our time to find the right collaborators to bring this to audiences now.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, if you could talk about, you know, who your inspirations were? We’ll get into what the film covers.

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: But just in formal terms —

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — what directors and films most inspired you?

RAFAEL MANUEL: I mean, definitely, if I were to talk, I want to start with Philippine cinema, because this is very much a Filipino film. Obviously, Lav Diaz’s cinema very much influences me. I have the same producers as Lav Diaz.

But for me, I guess the most formative Filipino film that I’ve seen with regards to my artistic practice was Perfumed Nightmare by Kidlat Tahimik. And I remember first watching it and thinking it’s so amazing how playful he was with the cinematic form in the — when he made the film in the '60s and the ’70s, you know? And I'd never seen anything quite like it come out of the Philippines, even up to now. So, that really inspired my form, I mean, just in terms of Philippine cinema.

But if we’re talking about Asian cinema, I really like Tsai Ming-liang. I really like Apichatpong, and of course my mentor Jia Zhangke, who I feel covers a lot of the same themes that I’m very much interested in. In South America, I love Lucrecia Martel. I love Kleber Filho Mendonça. In Europe, I really like Fellini, Jacques Tati, Jean Eustache, Aki Kaurismäki. Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, let’s go to the film, the opening of the film, which is, I think, in a street in the Philippines, where people are collecting water in water containers, but every person can only get one container of water. And then immediately you cut, and there’s this expansive, luxurious golf course which has multiple sprinklers going. And the film is kind of — there are many, many scenes like that which are juxtapositions. Obviously, there’s no commentary on it; it’s just visual. So, if you could talk about some of these, the way that you determined how you would portray inequality?

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yeah, I think that’s a — I love that question. First of all, I really want to talk about why we decided to start that film in those streets of Manila, and then — because the entire film, outside of that, happens entirely on the golf course. And for me, it was really important to start with what the West normally sees from the Philippines, or, like, an image that’s quite, I guess, common for Western audiences to see from the Philippines, because a lot of the cinema that comes out of my country nowadays focuses on this kind of like poverty porn, which is a very comfortable image, I think, for the West to see from the Philippines, you know,? And it’s a sense of a bit of Orientalism on their part, because they’re the ones that — they’re the gatekeepers of the financing for international co-production and a lot of the financing that goes into film production in the Philippines.

And starting off with the drought and, like, the rationing of water, and then juxtaposing it with the abundance of water on the golf course, for me, really sets up this kind of — even something as basic as water is such a symbol for violence in the film, you know? The theme of water, like the image of water and the symbolism of water, constantly repeats in the film in how access to it is a form of — who gets access to it is a form of violence, of structural violence.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And indeed, you know, the entire film, in a sense, is permeated with violence, but in fact there is no visible physical violence. And you said — I read another interview of yours where you said that you wanted to, quote, “reveal how one does not need to be a murderer or rapist to be complicit in violence.” So, if you could elaborate? Actually, on that decision also not to show any violence, and yet your understanding of the violence that kind of saturates the film?

RAFAEL MANUEL: For sure. Yeah, the team and I were very interested in kind of developing a visual-sonic language that would give shape, color, texture, sound to this more invisible structural violence, because I feel like relating it back to what I was talking about a while ago with the kind of cinema that the West kind of, the Global North kind of funds coming from the Global South, which features a very particular kind of violence, which is what you’re talking about, like a lot of acts of murder and rape. I feel like with Western audiences, it’s so easy for them to watch these kinds of films that happen in these ghettos, with these kinds of acts of violence, and feel bad for the characters, but, after, wash their hands and be like, “Well, that’s so sad, but I have nothing to do with that,” whereas I feel like the kind of violence that Filipiñana is interested in depicting — let’s say, the violence of gentrification, for example — is something I feel is more relatable to Western audiences, because this film’s set on a golf course in the Philippines, but it could also be a shopping complex in Dubai or a High Street in London, you know, with this theme of gentrification. Because what is a golf course but the gentrification of land? You know, you’re taking something that’s wild, and you’re manicuring it, and you’re making it safe for human consumption.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yeah, no, absolutely. And your choice of a golf resort was not coincidental. You said, in fact, as you’ve said right now, that you can’t talk about golf courses without talking about class. But you have more of a background. It’s not just a — how do you say? — disinterested interest. Talk about how you were made familiar with golf courses very early on in your life.

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yeah, it’s — ever since I since I was 4 years old, because my family business, my father and my mother’s business, is importing and exporting of golf equipment, so it’s a world that I knew quite well, and it has been kind of forced upon me even since I was 4 years old. And so, yeah, it’s a world that I know very, very well. And it was only when I started to grow older and move more away from my familial setting and from this setting that I began to see more the nuances of how absurd this world was.

And what really interested me, like, as I started going to university and moving away from the Philippines and, like. really thinking about kind of colonialism and class structures is how the golf courses — like, the first golf courses in the Philippines were on American military bases. And so, the whole historicity of a golf course really hides, like, a very violent colonial past. And so, this is what really interested me about the space as a space that I know very intimately.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could — you know, there’s a moment in the film — I mean, just to elaborate on the golf metaphor as one of, you know, absolutely transparent inequality, this is obviously a thirdhand story from Pakistan of a very, very wealthy man, elderly man, who used to play golf every day, obviously, you know, wealthy upper class.

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And he had two servants who worked with him, and he used to make them polish his golf clubs every day. And one day, those two used the golf clubs to murder him. They beat him to death. So, you know, there’s a moment in the film — and, of course, I immediately recalled this story — where there’s a hint that perhaps Isabel will use that golf club, but then she withdraws.

Another thing that was — is very striking about the film is their long pauses, silences, and close-up shots of, you know, facial expressions or scenes. So, if you could explain or give a sense of what you wanted to convey through these silences? And it’s really beautiful, yeah, close-ups of very subtle changes or static expressions, facial expressions.

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yeah. Yeah, I got a very interesting question the other day, as well, which relates to this, on, like, designing silence and, like, sound designing silence. And for me, it really has to do with, I guess, the form kind of matching the themes of the film, in terms of — we were talking about gentrification and the privatization of land, and especially in the Philippines, where, you know, like, let’s say, in Metro Manila, it’s a city of around 20 million people. I mean, that’s just recorded; I’m sure it’s much more. But we only have one public park for the entire city. And so, really, what we were interested in with this designing these silences was really trying to create a space for audiences to be able to practice their autonomy, you know? And also kind of like, because so much of mainstream cinema now kind of like just bombards you with sound and and with narrative, at that —

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And very frequent cuts, in fact.

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yes, exactly.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yeah.

RAFAEL MANUEL: So, really, the form of this film, with the silences, with the minimalist narrative structure, is also a form of resistance to gentrification in that sense. It’s really trying to provide the space for the audience to be able to project themselves onto the film and to explore the film freely.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to ask about another comment that you made in a recent interview about the film, saying that, quote, “The intention behind the pacing of the film is really to capture the Filipino experience of waiting, waiting for something that just never seems to arrive.”

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: It’s like Beckett.

RAFAEL MANUEL: I mean, completely. I think Dr. Palanca, one of the characters of the film, who’s the president of the country club, I take a lot of inspiration from Godot in that sense. You know, he’s like a omnipresent, omnipowerful character that’s just hardly ever there. And yeah.

I guess the pacing of the film was twofold. You’ve mentioned the second reason for it, which, yeah, I talked about before. But also, for me, the first and primary reason is a sensorial reason. It’s also to communicate the heat, that I feel is such an important character of the film and is such a — is such an important presence in the Philippines, because if you’ve ever been in like 50-degree, 50-Celsius-degree heat, you just quickly realize how paralyzing it can be. And so, yeah, for me, that very much informs the pacing of the film, you know? And also, when you think about why political change in the Philippines is so slow to come by, I feel like the heat plays a big part of it, because it paralyzes you, and it’s so hard to act, like even just like personal acts, much less bigger political acts.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And I want to ask you — you know, we have recently seen films depicting, you know, extraordinary inequality, because, obviously, the world over, we’re witnessing increasing levels of inequality. Your film, though, is — you know, contrasts at least with some of the ones that were — you know, became very big — Bong Joon Ho’s, of course, Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, the Swedish film, Ruben Östlund. So, if you could — I mean, first of all, did you — you’ve watched these films, presumably. But the decision you made to make it — those are very, very explicit, whereas yours, it kind of — the entire time, it’s present, but not articulated so clearly. So, it’s kind of — it’s kind of satirical like them, but the form is so different.

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yeah. Yeah, 'cause I feel like, I mean — with those films, I feel like, because — and whether for good or for bad — right? — they're much more conventionally structured in terms of, like, being plot- and narrative-driven films, which makes it, like, I guess, much easier — more accessible for audiences. But I feel like my problem with films that focus primarily on plot and narrative is I feel like because the audience is always constantly looking for the next plot point, they’re always looking ahead, as opposed to being in the moment, whereas what we really tried to do with this film is, like, focus more on, instead of narrative clarity, emotional clarity, ’cause I feel like emotional clarity has the power to stay with the audience and linger. And they may not remember — like, even after watching the film, they may not remember so much what the film is about, but even, like, as long as, like, an image or a sound is imprinted on an audience, I feel like that has the power to stay longer than a story that has been told a thousand times over, images. And also, relating back to audience autonomy, being able — the absence of, like, this narrative-driven plot also really allows them to interpret it and to, I guess, make it their own, which, for me, is very, very important.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Another thing that you do in the film, but again, not explicitly, 'cause the inequality, it seems to me, that you explore is not only economic, but also regional. And, of course, there's a massive overlap there. Isabel, the main character, is played by Jorrybell Agoto, who’s a young actress from the north of the Philippines, and there’s a reference constantly in the film between the dialogues, Tagalog and Ilocano. So, if you could talk about the regional disparities, the way in which you portray the differences in wealth — 

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — between regions, and also linguistic, right?

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ilocano versus Tagalog versus English?

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yeah, English, yeah. I mean, to start off, English is very much a class marker in the Philippines, in that, you know, I mean, a huge portion of the Philippines speaks English, but the way that you speak English, the accent with which you speak English, is the class marker. And for me, the juxtaposition or, like, the use of both Filipino, or Tagalog, and Ilocano, like, speaks to a sort of regionalism that is very present in the Philippines, because we’re a fragmented country. We’re an archipelago. We have 7,000 islands.

And I see a danger in this kind of regionalism, because, for example, Rodrigo Duterte, who was put into power by 70% of the vote, like, you know, not too long ago, the reason why he won such a landslide victory was because it just became the rest of the Philippines versus Manila. And if you look at a lot of the corruption in the Philippines, and taking regionalism to a micro level, to the familial level, a lot of the corruption is justified by the fact that they’re doing it for their families, or they’re doing it for their — whether it’s a nuclear family or like an extended family, you know? Like, they’re just protecting their own, which is a form of regionalism in itself.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: OK, so, you know, as we conclude, I want to cite an author whom you’ve said is one of your favorites, who is Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, and that he talks about two kinds of thought: poetic thought and grammatical and synthetic thought. So, how did this inform your film, these different kinds of thought, and which thought you gave priority to?

RAFAEL MANUEL: Definitely, it’s the first time I’ve been asked this question. I love it.

Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s quite simply relating back to the — to the structure of this film and my resistance to conventional narrative structuring, which I would liken to his use of grammatical thought or proper — use of proper syntax. And for me, I was trying to approach the film more in this poetic thought. And I thought of precolonial structures of form of storytelling, which were more oral, and even sometimes, you know, extended into music. And so, I thought about, along with my script consultant, Franz Rodenkirchen, who also has a background in music like me, it would be quite interesting to instead think — thinking of the structuring of the film in terms of scenes and acts, to think about it in terms more of choruses and interludes and verses. And so, the form, in itself, becomes a kind of resistance to gentrification, and, yeah, championing of poetic thought, which relates back again to emotional clarity versus narrative clarity.

And for me — sorry to ramble on, but the last thing I want to say about that, as well, is because this film deals so much with the theme of inaction, and inactions being — the root of inaction being able to perpetuate a system that we’re unhappy with, for me, music, among all the other art forms, is actually the medium that really goes into my body and, like, makes me move, you know, like whether it’s by dancing or swaying. And so, I really like that as a counterthesis to this inaction that I’m portraying, because what is the — what is the antithesis of inaction but action? And yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, could you tell us about the music? It’s — obviously, it’s very dramatic, and it’s — yeah, you really notice the music in the film. So, what is that Filipino music, you know, for people, global audiences?

RAFAEL MANUEL: If you’re asking about the relevance of “Manang Biday,” which is an Ilocano folksong, and which I think is a very important narrative element, because Isabel forgets the lyrics, and it’s only in the end of the film that you discover the lyrics of the film. It’s a song of courtship. It starts off as a song of courtship, which mirrors Isabel’s first infatuation with Dr. Palanca. But then, if you look at the lyrics as they go on, they get much darker and much more violent, which I think mirrors also very much her character arc.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Finally, last question: “Like Isabel in the film” — you’ve said, “Like Isabel in the film, I hope people are reminded that no matter how small, even the tiniest of actions have the power to create something new.”

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yes, no, I really like that, this notion, because, for me, it’s a very optimistic notion, and I really think that I’m a — even though I’m a short-term pessimist, I’m a long-term optimist. And yeah, with that, I’m really influenced by the thoughts of Hannah Arendt in terms of how she describes freedom and freedom as action, and action as the means of breaking a cycle. And yeah, without giving away the ending of the film, because all throughout the film Isabel’s acts are quite small, and because the world is so quiet, this is really much by design, because even her small actions, because the world is so quiet, because it’s so restrained, like, for me, her playfulness and her small actions in themselves are already a form of resistance.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Fantastic.

RAFAEL MANUEL: Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Thank you so much, Rafael. Rafael Manuel, director and writer of the film Filipiñana, widely acclaimed and opening in New York City on Friday at Film Forum.